Twenty-six people owe their lives to Joe Fortes. Officially, at least, that's the number of lives he saved from a watery end during his tenure as a lifeguard on English Bay. He also saved the eventual mayor's sister-in-law and nephew from the Great Vancouver Fire of 1885, and the number could climb still higher given the generations of boys and girls he taught to swim.
The shoreline he patrolled in the West End is known as First Beach but in my opinion should take the name Fortes Beach for this iconic strongman, sailor, barman and pioneer. (I would love to see the park board indulge its habit of naming public spaces and drop the numerical for the eponymous at this downtown beach.)
Historians Lisa Anne Smith and Barbara Rogers speak highly of the man in a new biography Our Friend Joe: The Joe Fortes Story. They bolster the well-published historical record with an insightful interview with a close family friend but don't offer substantial analysis or draw any conclusions about the Vancouver legend.
The book is a quick, heart-warming read that develops a clear picture of Fortes as a public man and credits him with helping shape the city during its infancy and fostering its recreational fervour.
Vancouver's first official swimming instructor, its original lifeguard and a specially appointed police constable who was pictured on turn-of-the-century postcards of First Beach, Fortes was a well known figure who nonetheless lived privately on the margins as a black, barely literate, working class Catholic man, a patriotic British subject with a Trinidadian accent who bonded with the city's children but never seemed to integrate with their parents.
By many accounts he was respected and had the ear of politicians and business elites but kept a small social circle that included Hiram and Martha Scurry, an African-American family that ran a barbershop and then a boarding house on Abbott Street. He regularly had to advocate his tenure be continued and bartered for his $80 monthly salary through the summer. (He worked around the clock, seven days a week for what comes to roughly $2,000 in today's dollars.)
When he died in 1922, thousands attended his wake and the city held a civic funeral, a rare occasion for an unelected public servant. Schools observed a minute of silence, a touching gesture to recognize Fortes' thousands of hours teaching children to swim, including the nurse who tended him at his deathbed. "Kick yo feet, chile," was his instruction many remember.
Fortes was an untrained police officer unfamiliar with law enforcement who, like many Canadians of the time, displayed a distrust of Chinese residents. He spanked children who misbehaved. But chief among his accomplishments was popularizing the sandy shoreline of First Beach. When Fortes arrived aboard a merchant vessel in 1886 the city was still known as Granville and the downtown was a swampy few blocks along present-day Water Street. Outside the Musqueam and Squamish nations who frequented the bay for thousands of years, First Beach was unknown to most Vancouverites. That is until Fortes rowed onto its shores in the early 1890s and declared it "the very place for a boy's swimming beach," according to the biography's authors.
"A rough trail let through the still largely virgin West End forest, thick with salal and salmonberry," until Fortes petitioned the mayor to open access through the wooded marsh and ease passage. Roads, houses and tram lines appeared as the neighbourhood grew and Fortes lived the rest of his days on the beach in a wood cabin at the foot of Bidwell.
See what I mean: he gave his time, skill, intelligence and heart to the place that should be named Fortes Beach.
The authors will speak at 1 p.m. June 30 at the Roedde House Museum (1415 Barclay St.). Some proceeds from the book support the Lifesaving Society of Canada.
