Each week we feature Valley history taken from our back issues.
Five years ago this week in the Comox Valley Record:
It might have been called a public forum on school closures in the Comox zone, but a meeting of School District 71 had more participants wanting to talk about the new kindergarten-through-Grade 8 configuration.
“I would like to see it scrapped,” said a man regarding the configuration. “The middle school model has the tools they need, gerry-rigged schools will not.”
Ten years ago this week in the Comox Valley Record:
Yippee, yahoo, it was Round-Up time in the Comox Valley to help support the Kidney Foundation of Canada. On Oct. 2 and 3 a western style ‘jail’ was to be set up in the Driftwood Mall and all those bosses who may have forgot an employee’s birthday or maybe didn’t wash that coffee cup had better beware as a simple little phone call could mean your ‘arrest.’ Event co-ordinator Barbara Dennis explains “a posse of sheriffs and their deputies will ‘arrest’ bosses and top guns at their place of business, based on a crime provided by the office staff or work colleagues.
The bosses are brought to the mock county jail where a judge always finds them guilty.” The guilty verdict gets the offender one hour jail time.
Fifteen years ago this week in the Comox Valley Record:
A Courtenay resident was $1 million richer after drawing all six numbers in Saturday’s BC/49 Lottery. No one had stepped forward to claim the money, although the senior communications officer for B.C. Lottery Corporation, Elizabeth Bruce, confirmed that a ticket sold in Courtenay won the top prize. This was the second big prize to go to someone in the Comox Valley in recent weeks. “It seems like a lucky area,” says Bruce.
Twenty years ago this week in the Comox Valley Record:
Stabbed outside a pub, a local man was arrested for impaired driving after he drove himself to the hospital. Brian Peter Derksen saw a man pushing a woman around outside a Courtenay pub at closing time. Derksen intervened on the woman’s behalf and her assailant smashed a beer bottle on the back of Derksen’s hand, causing extensive bleeding. The accused suspected he was too impaired to drive, but lacking other options, did so anyway. Derksen originally pleaded guilty to the impaired charge, but the plea was refused and he was later found not guilty.
Twenty-five years ago this week in the Comox Valley Record:
With signs saying “Porn is the Theory, Rape is the Practice” and “Women Unite and Take Back the Night”, about 30 people, mostly women and children, walked silently through the streets of Courtenay on a Friday evening.
The women were participating in the Comox Valley version of a nationwide Take Back the Night protest march. “Not all of us have been brutally raped in a back alley,” said women’s centre co-ordinator Heather MacNeill, “but all of us, because we are women, live with that fear.”
