Kamloops is our kind of town, warts and all

When Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley died in 1976, the great Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mike Royko wrote that, “He wasn’t graceful, suave, witty, or smooth. But, then, this is not Paris or San Francisco. He was raucous, sentimental, hot-tempered, practical, simple, devious, big and powerful. This is, after all, Chicago.”

Newfoundland-born author Wayne Johnston, in his best-selling book The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, describes St. John’s at length through one of his characters. In a fictional letter to her friend Joey Smallwood in 1949, Sheilagh Fielding writes: “How different it used to be, Smallwood, this city, yours and mine…. Goats wandered about at will the way cats in cities do today…. What I miss most are the horses. The sound of the city changed gradually as the horses were replaced by cars and the streets were paved….”

Molly Ivins, writing in the Dallas Times-Herald, described Lubbock this way: “Good Lord, Lubbock, Texas. Well, about 88.3 percent of the world there is sky, and if you are used to that, it feels like freedom and everywhere else feels like jail…. It is extremely difficult to develop either pretensions or affectations in Lubbok. Without getting laughed out of town.”

Renowned urban planning activist Jane Jacobs told the Globe and Mail in 1949 that, “As a relatively recent transplant from New York, I am frequently asked whether I find Toronto sufficiently exciting. I find it almost too exciting. The suspense is scary. Here is the most hopeful and healthy city in North America, still unmangled, still with options.” She was grateful, she said, to be enjoying Toronto “before its destruction.”

Writers love to write about their cities. For the most part, it’s a labour of love. The best ones love the gutters and back alleys and street people as much as the lawns and the symphonies.

Wednesday morning, I drove past the art gallery, the hockey arena, the university — all signs of our refined Kamloops lifestyle — and up to the Broadcast Centre on Columbia to talk on radio about the Kamloops Project.

A stripper was entertaining a couple of the jocks in one of the studios (I neglected to ask for her business card).

This is Kamloops, where ballerinas perform in a theatre at a high school while strippers dance in a studio at a local radio station. Where drivers speed up instead of stopping for red lights; sports writers can be banned from hockey games for criticizing the local team.

We have a beautiful park on the river, just over the hill from where a giant open-pit mine might soon serenade the residents of Aberdeen with daily renditions of the 1812 Overture.

Kamloops is a little bit cowboy chaps with a dash of yoga pants, a place in which big American 4X4s share the road with trendy Japanese sedans.

But it’s a kind town, and getting more beautiful as it ages.

Wednesday was Leap Day. It was also the day in which Kamloopsians took pictures of themselves and their city and posted them on the Kamloops Project website, which should be ready to look at later today.

They took pictures of all kinds of things, but they show we have one thing in common with all those other places – we’re proud of our town. It might be a little raucous and hot-tempered at times, but it’s a pretty good place to be.