Short Pants To Striped Trousers
   The life and times of a Judge in Skid Road Vancouver

   Wallace Gilby Craig

Wallace Gilby Craig was born in 1931 in Fraserview, then a village-like

As a child of the Depression, he learned to make do with simple pleasures and value the neighbourly quality of ordinary people.

Short Pants to Striped Trousers recounts, with warmth, humour and insight, his journey from the family shack on Clarendon Street to a downtown law practice and twenty-six years on the bench of the Vancouver criminal division of the provincial court.

He says, “If the reality in Vancouver is that crime pays and is without punishment, and I believe it is, then the criminal justice system is truly a tattered scarecrow."

Over 100 photographs illustrate the text of Short Pants to Striped Trousers.

PART MEMOIR, PART LOCAL HISTORY AND PART POLEMIC . . .Craig thinks Vancouver’s future is in jeopardy because too many judges have gone soft on crime and too many politicians have gone soft in the head . . . Like his late hero, Judge Les Bewley, Craig is a jurist who expressed his opinions in the hard-headed, commonsense vernacular heard more often in the barroom than the courtroom.

                                                                        -- Ian Mulgrew, The Vancouver Sun

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1    Growing up in Rustic Fraserview, 1931 to 1954

1   Fraserview, a little village in southeast Vancouver
2   Princesses and Ladies at sea, trams and streetcars on land
3   Eighteen years a student, during the Depression, war and peace
4   Grandchildren for Eleanor and Bob Craig
5   Remembering some Fraserview families

11   A Lawyers Journey in Vancouver, 1955 to 1975

6   Craig & Black, 1955 to 1960
7   Craig & Craig, 1960 to 1965
8        Craig & Chong, 1965 to 1969
9        Boughton Street & Company, 1969 to 1975
10    Downtown Vancouver, ascendant metropolis

111  On the Criminal Court Bench, 1975 to 2001

11    “Judge Craig, welcome to skid road!”
12    Justice without law and order
13    Striking fear in women – unpredictable male violence
14    Narcotics, theft, robbery and murder in skid road Vancouver
15    The city’s best chief of police and its most controversial magistrate
16    A smattering of cases
17    Saying goodbye to 222 Main Street

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