Then & Now is a weekly feature brought to you by the Langley Advance Times, in partnership with the LangleyCentennial Museum & Archives.
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LOOKING BACK IN LANGLEY’S HISTORY BOOKS:
Did you know that during this week in Langley history…
Eighty Years Ago
March 9, 1939
Athletic Hall was closed for two weeks while a new floor was laid, in preparation for an upcoming Jaycee dance.
Teachers asked the school board to have their pay cheques ready “on time.” The board claimed cheques were not due until the 15th of each month, and not on the first, as teachers maintained. In any case, a spokesman for the board declared, any teacher who didn’t like the current system was welcome to resign.
Seventy Years Ago
March 10, 1949
Municipal council called for cuts in the school board budget. Per pupil costs had risen from $50.59 to $140.94 in six years. A new exemption on school taxes was expected to raise the mill rate from 22 in 1948 to 35 in 1949. “This is impossible,” declared finance chairman Councillor George Brooks. “This must stop.”
Sixty Years Ago
March 5, 1959
The Fort Langley Board of Trade wanted to keep flag stop privileges on the CNR mainline at West Langley and Glen Valley. The CNR, claiming that it had done practically no business at all for three years at the two stops, asked council for permission to discontinue their services there.
Langley district Parent Teachers Association supported Langley City’s bid for an ice arena as part of a community centre.
Fifty Years Ago
March 6, 1969
Trinity Junior College hoped to build a $300,000 auditorium on its Butler Road campus, to replace the barns which were being used as gymnasium facilities.
Local citizens protested the provincial mines and resources ministry’s approval of BC Hydro’s plans for a rail link between the CNR tracks near Fort Langley and the existing BC Hydro line at Sperling. The link would run through the Grovesnore-Laing development property east of Livingstone (232nd Street).
A major expansion of the Salvation Army’s House of Concord property on Carvolth Road (200th Street) was made possible by a quarter-million-dollar government grant.
Forty Years Ago
March 7, 1979
Fire gutted the hall of St. Andrew’s Anglican Church at 206th Street and Fraser Highway. The chancel area of the main structure was also severely damaged.
Thirty Years Ago
March 8, 1989
Langley school board voted to lock out striking teachers who had begun a rotating strike that shut down Langley Secondary School and its five feeder elementaries. Music students said they felt “used and exploited” because the strike was robbing them of scholarship opportunities at the New Westminster Jazz Festival. But the strike was credited with possibly having saved lives, after a large tree limb fell in an area of the Murrayville Elementary schoolyard which was empty of students only because of the job action.
Two Langley people were among a group arrested in Vancovuer for violating a Supreme Court ruling forbidding a blockade of the Everywoman’s Health Centre.
Twenty Years Ago
March 9, 1999
Some religious members of the Otter Co-op expressed concern over the decision, after 76 years, to open the retail centre for Sunday shopping.
Langley Township signed on two top administrators within a few days of each other: municipal clerk Alberto De Feo, and engineering director David Erickson.
The Ministry of Education announced that per pupil funding would increase $5,849 to $5,992.
