Chapter Eight - Part Two.
From the first day I saw my co-op apartment I was overjoyed. Yet not all people who moved in to Eight Oaks Co-op were happy to live here. "This is a zoo," said one wealthy woman after she and her husband settled in to a one-bedroom apartment. Soon after this, the couple left. Another resident, a single parent, called her place " A postage stamp." Like other mothers with children, she felt crowded. A few years later,she and her new partner bought a house and they were gone. Marilyn and Don Pollard, my original upstairs neighbours now live in the Kootenays. Fred and Judy Roman, two very active co-op members left to buy a house in east end Vancouver.
The problem with Eight Oaks Co-op was that many of the apartments were very small. The old style apartments around us on Cambie street were bigger than our suites. We had a huge lawn that was our front yard. Yet our apartments were for the most part not big enough for growing families.
In the next 34 years dozens of people moved in to our co-op and dozens of people left. Disputes and feuds erupted and then died down." Democracy is sometimes a messy business," one history lecturer told me. And in our co-op though there was a lot of democracy, many people tired of it. Part of our governing board resigned when we had to re-build huge parts of the co-op in 2004. After 1995 I moved into the background and just did my assigned tasks. In fact I made this move at about the same time that I left political parties and the antipoverty movement.
Moving into Eight Oaks Co-op was a great thing for me. It came with an added bonus and that was my first next door neighbour. Howard Ambrose was a one-legged native of Moose Jaw Saskatchewan.In his journeys across Canada, Howard had fathered two sons and divorced one wife. He'd also developed a wonderful gift for drawing and painting landscapes. An unfinished painting of a house sat on a table in his living room. Howard turned me onto drawing and painting which I'm still doing to-day.
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