"What the hell. I wasn't born to be Tyrone Power." -- Barry Broadfoot

QUICK REFERENCE ENTRY:

Studs Terkel is generally credited as the pioneer of oral history in the United States; his equivalent in Canada is Barry Broadfoot, whose best-known history remains Ten Lost Years, 1929-1939 (1973), a collection of stories from survivors of the Great Depression. "It flew off the shelves,"; recalls editor Douglas Gibson, "to an extent that its success provoked articles wondering how on earth a book by an unknown author, about the Great Depression, for God's sake, could have such a success. I have an answer. Many of the stories are so good you will never forget them. The book is still in print forty years after it appeared. The hardcover edition sold more than 200,000 copies, and the paperback has sold much more than that.";

Born in 1926 in Winnipeg, Barry Broadfoot worked for a year on the Winnipeg Tribune before serving in the infantry for 1944-1945. After graduating from the University of Manitoba in 1949, he worked primarily as a journalist with the Vancouver Sun for 29 years. He said he originally came to the West Coast as the result of "wanderlust and the refusal to endure another bloody winter.";

While at the Vancouver Sun he published Stanley Park, An Island in the City (1972), with photos by Vancouver Sun photographer Ralph Bower. "He seemed to me straight out of The Front Page,"; recalls Gibson, who first met Broadfoot in the late 1960s, "a feet-up-on-the-desk, yell-across-the-noisy-newsroom sort of guy who almost certainly had a bottle stashed away within easy reach. He belonged to that generation of men who had made it through the war and, what the hell, were going to smoke and drink and swear at the boss and have fun.";

Broadfoot once described himself as the world's greatest listener. "Although oral history has been my financial rod and staff for twenty years,"; he wrote in 1991, "I have never been comfortable with the phrase. I prefer the term living memories, used by historian Peter Stursberg.";

Broadfoot's gruff style seemed anachronistic by the 1990s. Along with the likes of white male literary pioneers such as Eric Nicol, Robert Harlow, Norman Newton and Paul St. Pierre, he was cast adrift in a new age of B.C. literature in which new authors, comfortable with self-marketing and the internet, expect the world to take serious notice of their first books. Broadfoot did it the long, hard way, talking to people and reflecting their deepest concerns.

Like most other B.C. authors, Broadfoot lacks his own entry in the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature and the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. He once said, "The academic historians resent what I do because they say it isn't history and somehow I'm taking away from the pool of money that might go toward history books. But the people I talk to have no vested interests, beyond the desire to tell their stories as honestly as they could. Precious memories are our heritage.";

Barry Broadfoot is also remembered for Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame (1977) about the internment of Japanese Canadians. Broadfoot's other works are Six War Years (1975), The Pioneer Years (1976), The Veterans' Years (1985), The Immigrant Years (1986), Next Year Country (1988) and Ordinary Russians (1989). "History is the lies you believe,"; he once told the Globe & Mail. "It's being rewritten all the time because generals, industrialists and academic historians all serve different interests.";


FULL ENTRY:

Barry Broadfoot was the pioneer of 'oral history' in Canada. In 1991, he wrote, "Although oral history has been my financial rod and staff for 20 years, I have never been comfortable with the phrase. I prefer the term living memories used by historian Peter Stursberg." Broadfoot's best-known oral history remains Ten Lost Years (1973), a collection of stories from survivors of the Great Depression. He is also remembered for Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame (1977) about the internment of Japanese Canadians. Broadfoot's other works are Six War Years (1975), The Pioneer Years (1976), The Veterans' Years (1985), The Immigrant Years (1986), Next Year Country (1988) and Ordinary Russians (1989). "History is the lies you believe," he once told the Globe & Mail's Liam Lacey. "It's being rewritten all the time because generals, industrialists and academic historians all serve different interests."

Broadfoot was born on January 21, 1926 in Winnipeg. He worked for a year on The Winnipeg Tribune before enlisting in the infantry, 1944-45. Under the auspices of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he attended the University of Manitoba where he edited the university student newspaper, the Manitoban. After graduating from the University of Manitoba in 1949, he worked primarily as a journalist with the Vancouver Sun for 29 years. He says he originally came to the West Coast due to "wanderlust and the refusal to endure another bloody winter." While at The Vancouver Sun he published his first book, Stanley Park, An Island in the City (1972), with photos by Sun photographer Ralph Bower. Broadfoot left The Sun to travel across Canada, interviewing for Ten Lost Years. The landmark volume of 'living memories', as he preferred to call his interviews, has been the subject for two films and many stage productions.

Broadfoot's name is absent from the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature and the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. "The academic historians resent what I do because they say it isn't history and somehow I'm taking away from the pool of money that might go toward history books. But the people I talk to have no vested interests, beyond the desire to tell their stories as honestly as they could. Precious memories and our heritage." For his final book, he travelled 12,000 miles in the Soviet Union to publish Ordinary Russians. "I kept to the backroads. In places like Georgia I'd go off the main highway and the blacktop would be so full of potholes cars couldn't use it. So the peasants had gravelled in the ditch and were using the ditch as the road."

Broadfoot vowed to quit writing in 1989 but he later wrote a book on logging and collected materials for a project called Broadfoot's B.C., based on his experiences since he came to B.C. as a newspaperman in 1949. "It's about people I've met in every village, every pub, every isolated corner," he says. "It's like taking a 1,000 tons of country rock and refining it down into what I've learned about British Columbia and British Columbians." This project was never completed. "I've been trying to understand the B.C. psyche. I've found that mountains seem to influence people. They come off the prairies and the mountains hit them like a sledgehammer blow. In a crazy way it molds an independent, ever-westering character, the British Columbian."

Broadfoot received the Order of Canada in 1988. With his wife Anne Cornelia, he had two children, Ross and Susan. In 1989, he told Peter Wilson, "I've had it. There's too many books. There's too many authors chasing too few dollars... Eighty per cent of our dollar value is put into American and British books and then when consider that 20 per cent functional illiteracy thing, and then take French Canada away, take 90 per cent of the Maritimes away, take every farmer who never sees a bookstore away, take all of Newfoundland away, take all the people who live in North Canada away and you've got about 18,000 WASPs and we're trying to sell 2,700 books a year to them. The whole thing's insane."

Barry Broadfoot retired to Nanaimo. In 1991 he donated his literary papers to the University of Manitoba Library. In 1996 Barry Broadfoot received an honorary Doctorate of Laws from the University of Manitoba. In 1997, he received the third Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award for an Outstanding Literary Career in British Columbia. In 1998 he suffered a stroke and, afflicted with a failing memory at age 74, described himself as Dead Man Walking. He died in December of 2003.


Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame: The Story of the Japanese Canadians in World War II

BOOKS:

Stanley Park, An Island in the City (November House, 1972), with photos by Sun photographer Ralph Bower
Ten Lost Years (Doubleday, 1973)
Six War Years (Doubleday, 1974)
The Pioneer Years 1895-1914 (Doubleday, 1976)
Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame (Doubleday, 1977)
My Own Years (Doubleday, 1983)
The Veterans' Years (Douglas & McIntyre, 1985)
Next Year Country (McClelland & Stewart, 1988)
Ordinary Russians (McClelland & Stewart, 1989)

[BCBW 2010]