When Jim Spilsbury, B.C's most famous pioneer entrepreneur, teams up with master storyteller and literary craftsman Howard White, the result is a spell-binding romp up and down British Columbia's rugged coast; eighty years of fascinating anecdotes and memories distilled into 190 pages. Jim Spilsbury grew up in a tent on Savary Island, squatting on crown land. His story is one of the classic "rags-to-riches" stories in Canadian history. As well as being as brilliant inventor and an ambitious, astute businessman, he had the intangible gift of being in the right place at the right time. In 1923, at the age of 18, primed with a correspondence course in electrical engineering, Jim Spilsbury began building sophisticated radio telephones. Fishermen bought them, loggers bought them, and eventually homesteaders, explorers and even governments bought them. "Radio boomed," Spilsbury recalls, "and it carried me with it." As we follow Spilsbury in his adventures, we meet Frank Osborne, the genius engine-builder; Emil Gordon, the obsessive flamboyant Powell River salesman who sold everything from refrigerators to cows; Red Mahone, the obstreperous Boathouse cook and Spilsbury's own bizarre family, including his rifle-toting mother who cut her hair like a man's and golfed on the beaches at low tide. Howard White, himself a child of BC's backwaters, brings the voice of authority to Spilsbury's amazing tale. A rare gem of authentic storytelling - it flows fast and bright, like a mountain stream.

Spilsbury's Coast:: Pioneer Years In the Wet West

History

White, Howard

SPILSBURY, Jim

Americas

Harbour Publishing

Spilsbury's Album: Photographs and Reminiscences of the BC Coast

Harbour Pub. Co

Spilsbury's Coast: Pioneer Years in the Wet West

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

His books with Howard White made a bestselling author out of Jim Spilsbury - the BC coast's legendary pioneer, painter, photographer, aviator, inventor and raconteur. Now all three volumes of the Spilsbury saga are available in trade paperback! Jim Spilsbury bought an airplane in 1943, when wartime restrictions prevented the use of his boat to visit the upcoast camps and settlements where he repaired radios. From this innocent beginning grew Queen Charlotte Airlines, and when he sold the business to Pacific Western Airlines twelve years later, it was the third largest airline in Canada. This is the history of the accidental airline and those incredible years of flying, growing, and scrambling. There's the trip from Vancouver to the Queen Charlottes and back that took eleven days and three airplanes; the Waco covered with lamp-black, inside and out; the fatally jinxed Stranraer; and the twelve-gallon ice cream sundae in the muskeg. There are tales of mercy flights, tragic crashes, and miraculous rescues and escapes, and many entertaining details of the luck, business skill, and hard work needed to keep an airline aloft. Affectionately known as "Queer Collection of Aircraft" by the loggers, pregnant homesteaders and touring 1950's movie stars who rode its ungainly "Flying Boxcars" through rain and fog, QCA beat out the competition to reign for one glorious decade as the queen of the booming post-war coast. There's never been an airline quite like the QCA and there's never been a flying story quite like The Accidental Airline.

The Accidental Airline: Spilsbury's QCA (Spilsbury Saga)

Readers loved Jim Spilsbury's first two bestselling books, Spilsbury's Coast and The Accidental Airline. But Jim wanted to give them more pictures, so he pored through his archives and came up with over two hundred. Spilsbury's Album is a fascinating look at life on the BC coast from World War One to the present. Jim's anecdotes range from the hair-raising to the hilarious, and his photographs bring to life Savary Island in the early days, his "Queer Collection of Aircraft" that became the third largest airline in Canada, and a bygone world of Indian villages, canneries, steamboats and floating logging camps - a rainswept, vibrant culture brought to life by one of its living legends.

Spilsbury's Album: Photographs and Reminisciences of the BC Coast

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