Part Two of 'Another Soldier Who Came Home Alive'.
Graham Stark didn't remember World war One. It ended in 1918 and he wasn't born until 1925. Yet he never forgot World War Two. He marched across France, Belgium and Holland, killing and shooting Germans, and being shot at. At war's end in 1945 he had moved slightly up the army ranks from private to sergeant. Yet most importantly he came home alive. He saw many of his fellow soldiers fall in battle and die.
Of course Canadian casualties in the Second World War were dwarfed by those of other countries. "Over 27 million people died in the Soviet Union fighting Nazi Germany," one military historian said. And the Japanese armed forces killed somewhere between 10 and 15 million Chinese in the 1930's and 1940's. "My wife hates the Japanese," one transplanted American said about his Chinese-born wife. "They did terrible things in China during World War Two."
Anyway Graham Stark came home to British Columbia in 1945. He was only 20 and had to find a job, which he did. He ended up working for a B.C.-based lumber company. This son in a family of 11 children got lucky. By the late 1940's, the B.C. forest industry was on a roll. In 1947 a new B.C. forest act granted what later became Tree Farm licenses to lumber companies. These leases, forest industry Ken Drushka asserts, "constituted the bestowal of an immense windfall capital gain on the recipient at no cost."
As a wave of prosperity rolled across postwar Canada, millions of new and old Canadians flocked to suburbia. They moved into new homes and the need for wood to build these new houses seemed endless. B.C. forest firms thrived. Graham Stark spent a large part of his adult life, working for big B.C. lumber companies. He travelled throughout east Asia and spent some time in Singapore and Indonesia.
In Indonesia in 1965, a military coup led by General Suharto overthrew the left leaning government of president Sukarno. Suharto's troops wiped out over half a million communists. Suharto had thus made Indonesia safe for capitalism and Suharto and his family became very rich.
Canadian, American and Japanese lumber firms poured money into Indonesia and other tropical lands. Woods like radiate pine and eucalyptus trees were planted on islands that were cleared of all native vegetation. "The forest industry is no longer the preserve of the north of the world," forestry expert Patricia Marchak pointed out in the 1990's. In tropical and southern forests, trees like the eucalyptus and radiate pines,can be grown much faster and grown more quickly than say cedars in British Columbia.
New technologies came on stream to process these trees and investment flowed south. "North American forests are in decline," Marchak pointed out. A good company man, Stark didn't question these changes. What was good for the company he worked for, was good for him. He accepted the free enterprise system. As for his politics, he joined and remained a federal Liberal supporter for most of his life. He met his wife Lillian Waterland in the Liberal party. They had a son also called Graham who acquired a massive knowledge of world politics.
Stark senior had little time for the Conservative Party of Canada. "It's too much King and British Empire stuff for me," he said. He also kept clear of the New Democratic Party ands its predecessor the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation or the C.C.F. "It has little time for our armed forces and I wouldn't vote for it," he said. he was overjoyed when his friend, (later Senator) Ray Perrault won a seat as a federal Liberal Member of Parliament in Burnaby in the Trudeaumania year of 1968. Perrault edged out not only the Conservative contender but also the leader of the N.D.P., namely Tommy Douglas. Douglas, now a left wing icon, had led Saskatchewan for many years and had paved the way for Medicare.
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