The Cloverdale Legion has always been good at publicizing its activities over its 90-year history, and one of its most effective ambassadors over the years was the late Neville C. Curtis.
Interestingly enough, he was not a veteran. He could have enlisted for service in the First World War, but was unable to because he had suffered from rheumatic fever as a child, and his heart was considered too weak.
Neville Curtis was born in Manchester, England on Dec. 10, 1892 and moved to Canada with his family in 1911, first settling in Calgary. He worked for Canadian Pacific Railway there, and later the Winnipeg Oil Company.
His father moved to Cloverdale in the early 1920s and opened a grocery and feed store. Neville followed him out to the west coast and took over the store in 1924. He operated it until 1933 when he sold it to B & K Economy Stores of Vancouver. He managed the store, which later became Shop-Easy, until 1956.
He began writing and reporting as a sideline in 1944, and over the years contributed to The Vancouver Sun, The White Rock Sun, The Surrey Leader, The Columbian, The Province and The Langley Advance.
He began writing a column in The Surrey Leader during the Second World War, entitled Land, Sea and Air, and this became the column Oyez, about Legion activities in Cloverdale and at other Legion branches in the Surrey area.
He continued to write this column on a regular basis until his death on May 16, 1969.
His daughter, Isobel Speer, who now lives in Quesnel, has many memories of her father’s writing and photography.
“He would go to a Legion meeting, and then when he got home, he would get on the phone to rehash the meeting and make sure he would get it right in the column,” she says.
He was a great supporter of Legions. Isobel remembers a trip she took with her parents to Oregon, and her father made sure to drop into numerous American Legion branches while they were there. He visited with American Legion members he’d met in Cloverdale, and then wrote about it.
“He always had the Legion foremost in his mind,” she says.
While he was unable to join the armed forces because of his heart condition, he did serve his country as an air raid warden in Cloverdale during the Second World War. After the war with Japan began, there were a lot of fears about Japanese attacks on the west coast. In fact, there was an attack by Japan on the isolated coastal light station at Estevan Point off Vancouver Island, and some Japanese fire balloons reached B.C., but the federal government feared other attacks.
People had to keep their blinds and curtains shut tight so that there was no light showing, and outdoor lighting was kept to an absolute minimum. Air raid wardens were empowered to check to see that people were following the rules.
Isobel has many memories of her father’s reports for the daily newspapers in Vancouver and New Westminster. He would write his stories in an upstairs room in his home on 182 Street in Cloverdale. The home was recently torn down, and was the subject of a number of stories in The Reporter last year.
“He had to get them written to send them on the midnight Pacific Stages bus to Vancouver, so he would go down to Number 10 Highway and wait for the bus to send his copy in.”
He also was an accomplished photographer. He took many photos of the fire which destroyed the Legion building on Aug. 7, 1956, and many of his photos are now in the Surrey Archives.
“Dad was very good at whatever he put his mind to,” she recalls. “He made his own darkroom in our house in the basement. He typed his stories in a room on the top storey, so he rigged up a bell to alert him when he had to go to the darkroom. He had a bad heart but he would run up and down the stairs.”
“I used to go help him in the darkroom. He was very creative with his photography. He built his own enlarger.”
He used a 35 mm Pentax camera, she remembers, which was more portable than some of the larger press cameras used by newspaper photographers.
Neville Curtis was the most prominent Legion columnist over the years, but there were others as well. Pat Webb wrote a column on the Legion for The Surrey Leader in the 1970s and 1980s, and since that time, numerous Legion members have always worked hard to keep residents up to date with the happenings at the Cloverdale Legion.