Author Reading in Campbell River

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Wednesday, March 11th, 2015
6:30 PM to 8:00 PM

Meet award-winning BC book publisher Howard White at a special event hosted by Coho Books.

Howard White will be talking about and reading from his father’s two memoirs, That Went by Fast: My First Hundred Years and Milk Spills and One-Log Loads: Memories of a Pioneer Truck Driver (both $32.95, Harbour Publishing).

 That Went by Fast and Milk Spills and One-Log Loads, written by centenarian Frank White, sift through White's many adventures. Born at the start of the First World War and maturing during the Great Depression, Frank White worked variously as a pioneer truck logger, camp owner, boat builder, home builder, excavating contractor, garage mechanic and waterworks operator, among other things. Then in later life he married the sophisticated and well-connected New Yorker writer Edith Iglauer and started a totally different way of life consisting of opera, celebrity dinners and world travel. His ironic observations on the differences between the two worlds make for fascinating and frequently hilarious reading.

 Included in the books are stories about what it was like growing up in Abbotsford in the 1920s and trucking bulk milk and bootleg spuds in the Fraser Valley in the 1930s. There are also hair-raising accounts about operating the first rickety trucks in the logging industry—when motors were small and the trees were so gigantic often one log was all a truck could carry—and what it was like dealing with some of lowlife “log pirates” he met while he was the boss of a Green Bay logging camp.

 Howard White is the publisher of Harbour Publishing and Douglas & McIntyre, both prominent BC publishing companies. He started editing the Raincoast Chronicles series in the early 1970s and his own books include A Hard Man to Beat, Spilsbury's Coast, The Accidental Airline, Writing in the Rain and The Sunshine Coast. White has been awarded the Order of BC, the Order of Canada, the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and the Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award.

 After the reading, White can also answer questions about memoir writing and the publishing industry in BC. For more information about the event, email [email protected] or phone (250) 287-2336.