Media Interviews and Reviews A review by Patrick Nagle Vancouver Sun, Saturday May 1, 2004 FROM EAST-SIDE SHACK TO THE HALLS OF JUSTICE Former judge Wallace Craig recounts his life and times Let us now praise famous men. The subtitle of retired Justice Wallace Gilby Craig’s memoir says it all. He writes about the life and times of a judge working around skid-road Vancouver.  The key is in the phrase “skid road,” the proper historical name for what is now regarded as the Downtown Eastside. The selection of the title and the consistent use of the term in the self-published book’s text identifies a stickler for detail with a long and certain memory of how things used to be.  It was never “Skid Row.” That phrase gets far too much play in modern Vancouver writing. Skid Row is in Seattle and is wrongly indexed in the 1981 edition of the Canadian Press guide to punctuation and spelling. The Vancouver place got its start a century ago as the bush track down which logs were skidded to the Burrard Inlet waterfront. Police cells and courts resided in the same area, dating almost to the city’s founding. From its earliest days, the rough and tumble of the harbour produced a steady custom for the pointy end of the law: crime and punishment, law and order. But this book was not written by a centenarian. Judge Craig was born in 1931 in a real shack on Clarendon Street in what is now Fraserview. His stories of a childhood spent in that long-gone neighbourhood are priceless for anyone who has even the vaguest memory of what it was like to ride a streetcar to Stanley Park to take free Vancouver Sun swimming lessons at the Lumberman’s Arch pool.  The Craig family – three active sons of English immigrant parents –apparently thrived on fresh air and the food their mother cooked on a stove fired by wood they split from a swamp at the bottom of their yard. “Ever since my youngest days I have enjoyed rainy weather, when the wind is up and the sky is grey.” he writes. The Craigs’ father was a skilled builder who couldn’t get trades work at the start of the Depression. Eventually he got a permanent job with the post office, financing the self-construction of a proper house that withstood everything but the demolition and monster-house construction frenzy of the 1970s. “Our shack was somewhat deluxe.” Craig remembers, “my father having closed in the porch so that he and my mother could use it as a bedroom and get some peace away from the rest of us.” The development of Fraserview golf course in 1935 preserves the only original, natural bush habitat left in the area, he writes. In the 1930s and ‘40s there was no premonition of Vancouver changes to come – just a steady progression through Sir James Douglas school to John Oliver high by a top-ranked student. During this period there was also his essential introduction to the wage economy as a paperboy and than a circulation-shack manager for the Vancouver Province. At this stage of the story, a realization begins to dawn that the young Craig had far better than average motivation. By 1950, with a year of University of B.C. Arts behind him, he started working nights and weekends at the nearby plywood mills on the Fraser River. Craig is correct to note that “I wasn’t the only one to work while going to school.” But it’s very difficult to believe that his successful progress to a law degree could be achieved the same way today, with tuition costs and student debts sometimes running into the high tens of thousands of dollars annually. Just as Vancouver, the city of Craig’s memory, starts changing, so does his story. In 1955 he was called to the bar and hung out his shingle to begin practice in what he describes with pride, many times, as his independence from the large-law-firm culture that now dominates his profession. There are many insightful passages in this section of the book, including anecdotes about the problems any young lawyer can get into when ill prepared to face an irascible judge. He also discloses an enduring passion for handball, a truly old-fashioned sport when compared with today’s popular court games, squash and tennis. Indeed, his connection to handball got him involved in part of the complicated series of transactions leading to the Capozzi brothers taking over the Elks Club at Hornby and Dunsmuir in the late 1960s. When the Capozzis moved in and built a successful health-club membership of Howe Street brokers, the handball crowd moved out on to the roof of a new office building where Craig also took premises for his flourishing law practice. “I now found myself in a blissful state,” he writes. “I could practice law and play handball in the same building.” During this period, his practice was commercial law and public stock incorporation deals. He watched the growth of the financial district into shiny corporate towers and away from the Howe Street rounders and other characters who were his early clientele. Most surprisingly, he made a handshake deal that wouldn’t bear scrutiny today. In 1972 he was asked by then magistrate Gordon Johnson to join the Vancouver criminal court bench. Craig only writes that he asked for, and got, a three-year delay in taking the appointment he finally accepted in March 1975. In following Craig’s narrative, there can be no doubt this was a life-changing experience. He was now entered, willy-nilly, into one of the most chaotic and disruptive forums in all of Canadian jurisprudence. Not to put too fine a point on it, virtually everyone associated with the Vancouver police court in the 1970s called it “the zoo.” The cases Justice Craig adjudicated – coupled with a long friendship with a fellow judge the late Les Bewley – give the author an honest foundation to build his case against what he describes as a dreadful crisis on Skid Road.” Overworked police, understaffed courts and dilatory politics have surrendered a once-vibrant part of Vancouver to a lawless and destitute colony of drug users and their scofflaw pushers, he reports. His proposed solution has yet to be undertaken, although, as he notes, the situation has been studied since at least 1954, the year before he was called to the bar. Craig’s method of cleaning up the situation would be as debatable as any of his judgments and definitely is not under active consideration by any level of government. Start spending large amounts of federal money on infrastructure right now, he advises, and follow it up with tougher courts assessing punitive sentences against drug dealers and importers. His personal bill of indictment against today’s skid road stands as a dedicated man’s reproof of a system that has failed all Vancouverites, rich and poor. Using the current tragic story of the missing Downtown Eastside women as his text, Craig writes: “That successive mayors and council members of Vancouver, and chiefs of police would allow such a malevolent vortex as is our anarchic skid road to swallow up the most defenseless of women verges on malfeasance.” Patrick Nagle has been a reporter for more than 45 years. He also serves as a volunteer lay bencher with the Law Society of B.C.