North of Fifty-Three

Dressed in a plain white shirt waist and an equally plain black cloth skirt, Miss Hazel Weir, on week days, was merely a unit in the office force of Harrington & Bush, implement manufacturers. Neither in personality nor in garb would a casual glance have differentiated her from the other female units, occupied at various desks. A close observer might have noticed that she was a bit younger than the others, possessed of a clear skin and large eyes that seemed to hold all the shades between purple and gray—eyes, moreover, that had not yet begun to weaken from long application to clerical work.

Bertrand William Sinclair (1881-1972) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He immigrated to Canada with his mother in 1889. At age fifteen, he ran away from home to become a cowboy in Montana, after which he returned to Canada, settling in BC where he depicted in numerous novels the lives of loggers, fishermen and ranchers. Sinclair was enormously successful as a novelist; his novel "North of 53" sold 340,000 copies. After 1922, he made his home in Pender Harbour on the Sunshine Coast and became a commercial fisherman. His VHF radio broadcasts to fishermen, known as The Sinclair Hour, were widely known and respected. He did not retire from commercial fishing until age 83.