Current Entries

Frank White

(a salute) Let me begin in the future, where the story of Frank’s White’s literary years begins in a story about an outboard motor that quits and then Frank gets it going again with a piece of string, a story scheduled to appear in a prestigious literary magazine in the summer of 2004 and in which Frank is revealed as a man who never goes out without a piece of string in his pocket. Working back from that point we catch a literary glimpse of Frank in the summer of 2003 in a story about a box of frozen croissant dough that puts the author in mind of the unfortunate dog Freckles who many years earlier had devoured a bowl of rising bread dough when the author of the story was a child and highly impressionable. Croissant of course is a French word beloved of literary persons, and in the end of that story we are assured that Frank is a man whose big blue eyes get a faraway look in them whenever he hears the word croissant pronounced aloud in any language. Looking deeper into the past we find Frank fearlessly or recklessly installing a literary bathtub on a front porch in Garden Bay, and then fearlessly or recklessly recommending that the faucets be covered in gold plating. This expansive aspect of Frank White’s literary self found earlier expression at the Sylvia Hotel in Vancouver where from the eighth floor during a snow storm recorded for posterity by Edith Iglauer, a writer from New York, Frank was heard to say that he felt detached from the world, as if, and I quote: “as if I’m looking down from heaven.” This heavenly connection is continued in that story, which concludes with Frank and Edith praying rather unpiously for more snow to fall equally into the city and the country and to keep on falling until they have sated themselves with fine wine and steamed mussels and pastries and tea in the afternoon. Deep in the past Frank White emerges in a unsigned Genesis story called “Where Does Publishing Come From,” published in the fifth number of the prestigious literary magazine mentioned earlier in this account, and in which we learn that Frank helped his son Howard get into publishing in the early seventies when he hauled an old Mann printing press on a flatbed truck up the coast from Vancouver. The printing press weighed five tons and the freight elevator in the building it was in was rated for a ton and a half, so when the elevator operator refused to take it down, Frank persuaded Howard to run the elevator instead, because at that time, or so the story goes, Howard didn’t weigh as much as Frank. When they got to Madeira Park there was no way to lower the press off the truck, so Frank cranked up the backhoe and dug a ditch four feet deep from the road back to the double doors of the big shed where the publishing was going to happen. Then he backed the truck in along the ditch and they winched the press straight off the flatbed into the shed, where, rumour has it, it still sits today. Filling in the ditch took no time at all and that is the answer to the question of where publishing comes from.

Frank White celebrated his ninetieth birthday in May, 2004, at Madeira Park, B.C. Harbour Publishing, which is owned by Howard and Mary White, was founded in 1974 and continues to thrive.