Nick Marino, East Side Story

I've been living in 1980s Vancouver for most of the last two weeks, at least while I haven't been distracted by All The Things (the Trusk/Mump slapfest, Ukraine's destruction by drone of Russian bombers, goddamn "AI," etc), and I have to tell you that you'd be a happier person if you spent some time there, too.

Part of this is down to Mark Leiren-Young's very funny memoir Free Magic Secrets Revealed (soon to be reviewed on the blog here, but it's about ... no, there is too much), but mostly I blame and thank Nick Marino for his often funny, often poignant, always chatty East Side Story: Growing Up at the PNE.

As I said about another book recently, there's nothing complicated about East Side Story, and absolutely I mean that as a compliment. In East Side Story, Nick Marino does a great job of telling the stories and staying out of their way, except to the precise extent to which it's his story to tell.

Basically, Marino started working at the PNE in 1980, when he was 12, and the book represents as much context as possible to make sense of what it was like to be there in the 1980s as a teenager. Part of that's political, historic, and cultural, but much of it's personal, too.

Marino grew up in the neighbourhood around the PNE, a fourth-generation Italian-Canadian in a big family and a tight community, so we join his family, go with him to high school, obsess over girls, and joust in ways predictable and un- with other guys of the time. This is an intensely 1980s memoir, with a story to justify every "don't f#ck with Gen X because" meme you can think of, but it's also a terrific introduction to the PNE and its cultural significance to this province.

You laugh AND learn with East Side Story, is my point.

On the laughing side, I kept running into stories that begged to be read aloud. To my family's regret, I couldn't help reading several to them, but you'll need to find those yourselves because I'm not giving them away. My wife, though, agreed that the story about a police car full of drunken Catholic girls is nothing less than a classic 1980s teen story: it makes perfect sense to those of us who were that age at the time, and it's virtually unimaginable to The Youngs.

(It also reminded me of getting taken in a cop car at 14 in 1984, without being searched, back to my boarding school with a litre of mixed gin and vodka under my coat. As the night's non-drinker, I'd been carrying it for the handful of 14-year-old drinkers who were subsequently left booze-free in downtown Victoria and wondering if I was going to get busted for it. I was not, because privilege, but I digress.)

On the learning side, I kept discovering things here that I had no idea about, like the Crump twins, and getting much deeper insight into things I already knew a fair bit about, like the incarceration of Japanese-Canadians at Hastings Park.

Somehow I hadn't realized that the PNE kept Happyland running during the entire period of incarceration, with fairgoers separated by only a wire fence from their unjustly imprisoned fellow community members. Marino quotes Tom Tagami's personal testimony from the Hastings Park 1942 website, along with other stories from that invaluable site: "One Saturday evening after we finished our work, I sat by the window looking across Hastings Park at a dance hall called Happyland. The dance hall was just on the other side of the fence, where people were allowed to come and go freely. I watched a lively bunch of young people about my age – Caucasians – dancing to the popular music of Glenn Miller."

As a Vancouver Sun article put it at the time, "Happyland Ballroom at Hastings Park will not be affected by the establishment of the Japanese Clearing Station in the central area of the exhibition grounds.... Dancing will continue as usual, every Wednesday and Saturday throughout the spring and summer dancing seasons" (Marino p163).

HAPPYLAND. With your neighbours imprisoned behind a high wire fence for the sin of having Japanese heritage, where they could see you and you could see them.

So it's not all sunshine and light, neither the PNE nor East Side Story, and Marino's too honest to pretend otherwise.

Marino has privileged access to vast lore about the PNE and historic East Van, simply as a result of growing up there as a fourth-generation Italian-Canadian local, and his personal stories are what make this book irreplaceable. Beyond that, though, Marino's background research for this book was also impressive, interviewing multiple winners of the "Miss PNE" competition (including the CBC's Gloria Macarenko), fellow East Van Italian-Canadian kids and eventual BC sports heroes Bobby Lenarduzzi and Lui Passaglia, and a remarkable cast of PNE figures major and minor.

Books of local history, much like memoirs, are a mixed bag, with a lot of stories that never found the right editor. That's not the case with Nick Marino and East Side Story, which comes out from Charlie Demers and his Robin's Egg Books imprint at Arsenal Pulp Press. I don't know that I'd run to Marino for a different story (though if he has another book in the offing, certainly I'll check it out!), but he's precisely the right author for this book, and he found exactly the right editorial staff and publisher.

Thoroughly enjoyable: I've already picked up a few more copies to give away, and you should find one for yourself, too!