[MG1]

When I graduated from Strathcona Elementary and entered Britannia Secondary, I was in for a culture shock. Never have I seen so many caucasians. As a horny little grade 8 kid, I couldn't keep my eyeballs in my sockets. Italian girls......... Mamma Mia. I've never seen girls with such huge breasts! Most of them were pretty stuck up and had no time for skinny little Asians. I was so shy in grade 8. And those grade 12 boys. They were pretty scary in their football jackets. Football was really big at Brit back in those days. We had a great team. Barry Houlihan was the star of the team. He went on to play for the Lions until his career ended due to a terrible car crash. He went on to be a sportscaster for a local TV station and was pretty good at it.

I think our football team won the provincial title one year (Shrine Bowl) and went to the finals a few times. Our rivals back then were the Notre Dame Jugglers (private school bastards). They always seemed to beat us. I don't think Britannia even has a football team now. The football coach at the time was Mr. Shreiber <sp?> and Bill Vance, Jodi Vance's father, taught PE.

Britannia is Vancouver's oldest secondary school. In those days, the student body consisted of Asians from the Strathcona/Seymour feeder schools, while the remainder were Italians from the schools around the Commercial Street neighbourhood. You'd figure there would be some racial tensions there, but I never saw any of it. The school itself was not what it is today. They added a new wing to the school while I was there. I remember having science classes there along with shop classes. Walking across the skywalk between the old building and the new wing was awesome. A few years after I left Britannia, they built the ice rink, where the Canucks used to practice, squash court facility, and added the elementary school. I went back to Brit about two years ago and went in to see what it was like. To my surprise, there were some former teachers of mine still teaching there. How amazing is that? I thought they were older than the hills when I was a student there.

As far as the other secondary schools around the area went, Van Tech and Templeton were known to be the dumping grounds of East Vancouver. Students who got kicked out of the other schools would get transfered to Templeton. If they couldn't get their shit together there, they got shipped off to Van Tech. So, Van Tech was full of misfits and losers. Sorry, but that's the way it was back then. I'm sure those two schools had their regular classes for normal kids and then the special classes for the problem kids.

In fact, toward the end of my stay at Brit, I think they started a special program for kids who couldn't make it in regular classes - probably some principal from the other two schools said, "Fuck you Britannia, stop sending us your losers!" I remember the program being called 8H, 8J or something like that. We really never really saw the kids from there. Only in the yearbooks, because they were in portables way off at the other end of the football field. It was probably for druggies and pregnant girls. Yes, we had them back then, too.

Both Strathcona and Britannia have shrunken in size since I went there. The last I heard, Strathcona sold or rented one of their buildings to someone else. I'm not sure if it is a private day care or a private language school. Britannia is having a hard time keeping any programs afloat. Band, music, the arts, they're all fading out. So sad to see great things like that go. So much pride and history at that school and now it's like a wasteland.