Review.
Traces the history from its first years to the first two decades of the twentieth century and illustrates how the nature and shape of Vancouver today was, to a large part, determined by those early years.
Norbert was born in 1925, the last of six children in Stellarton, Nova Scotia. Encouraged by his high school teachers to go to college he and his best friend applied to Acadia University and were accepted. He received his BSC in Chemistry in 1946 and went to work for the CNR in Montreal. He also was accepted to Dalhousie medical school but after discovering that science was not for him, he returned to Acadia for a degree in History, an MA at Brown University, and a PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle. His first teaching appointment was at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. At a History Convention in Seattle in 1960 he met Dean Soward who was looking for a U.S. Historian. Norb, being a Canadian, was delighted to return to Canada and teach at U.B.C. where he stayed until his retirement in 1990. His book Distant Neighbors, a comparative study of Seattle and Vancouver, was published in 1987.
Norbert died on April 1, 2015 in Salmon Arm. Obituary, Vancouver Sun, April 10, 2015.
