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Video of Chilliwack from 1950s a walk down memory lane

B.C. historian asks viewers to help identify landmarks, time frame of home movie

A B.C. archivist with a love for history has posted a glimpse of life in Chilliwack from the 1950s on his YouTube channel.

The two-minute clip shows downtown life in its glorious heyday, showing now-gone landmarks such as The Empress hotel and the Paramount Theatre.

At one point, a girl cycles through what is now Five Corners, smiling at the camera. In other scenes, beautiful classic cars make their way down Wellington, passing by old storefronts.

The video is just one of many by the BC History YouTube channel creator, Bernard von Schulmann. In another video, he explains why he created the channel.

“I have a love for B.C. History and want to use this channel to try and collect bits and pieces of film and video together about that history,” he said. “This started some time back when I started to stumble on old films and home movies related to B.C. Some of them were in rather odd locations or were only one small part of a larger film. Many sources have unwieldy unedited raw film online. I started to clean some of them up. A lot of sources were also not easy to share with people.”

As his collection grew, von Schulmann realized a YouTube channel would be a perfect venue.

“I try not to change a lot,” he says. “I have been taking raw footage I am finding and cutting into smaller subject segments.”

He said he does not claim copyright of the material, but does link to original source material when he has it.

For the Chilliwack video, he is asking viewers to help by going down memory lane to identify landmarks and fill in the history blanks, as he’s not familiar with that era for Chilliwack.

Other videos on his channel , called BC History, include scenes of Victoria from 1932, the opening of the Lions Gate Bridge, nostalgic Canadian Government films, a 1976 Vancouver Tourism film, Expo ‘86 commercials, a 1958 newsreel on salmon fishing, and even a handful from the 1920s featuring Coast Salish First Nations and Nuu-Cha-Nulth cedar weaving.



Jessica Peters

About the Author: Jessica Peters

I began my career in 1999, covering communities across the Fraser Valley ever since.
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