In the days when Tadanac was an exclusive neighbourhood for the brass of the Consolidated Mining and Smelting, Dr. Greg Crawford’s family stood out among its residents.
Dr. Crawford, who came to Trail in 1928 to work at what would later be known as the C.S. Williams clinic, was the personal physician of smelter boss Selwyn Blaylock.
This resulted in a special privilege. Blaylock (“Blay” to his friends) told Dr. Crawford: “Greg, I want you to pick any vacant property in Tadanac.”
But the spot the doctor chose for his house, at 209 Kootenay Avenue, puzzled Blaylock because it wasn’t among the desirable riverbank sites. Dr. Crawford explained: “I’m going to have a young family and I want them to be safe.”
Yet he hadn’t considered the site’s proximity to the smelter. Its sulfur piles would become a playground to his elder daughter Kay and her friends.
Crawford’s younger daughter, Marg, recalled this anecdote in an interview in the family home, where she still lives. Lazareff and Co., one of Trail’s most prominent and prolific construction firms, built the house in 1934.
“They were excellent builders and creative,” she said. “They put all sorts of interesting little extras in the house. They were very capable.”
The home retains many original features but has been altered a few times. An arched doorway has been converted into a bookshelf. A sunroom was enclosed when Dr. Crawford and his wife Isabel realized that a lack of vegetation meant anyone on the nearby soccer field could see straight through the house.
Dr. Crawford was just the first of many physicians to live in the fashionable neighbourhood as the company became less rigid about whom it would welcome. The Crawfords stayed there for the rest of their lives. Dr. Crawford died in 1976, age 76, while Isabel died in 2009, just shy of her 104th birthday.
Now, nearly a century after Dr. Crawford arrived in Trail, the city has agreed to officially dub the unnamed road that runs behind and next to the house “Crawford Lane.”
The unhealthy doctor
For a doctor whose commitment to his patients was absolute, Daniel James McGregor Crawford was never in very good health himself.
He had a hard upbringing on the Prairies, where he was the second youngest of 10 children. His father died when he was 13. But Crawford was bright and wanted to go to university. He achieved his goal by alternating schooling with working in a Medicine Hat drug store, which paid for his education and helped support his mother and younger brother Ralph.
Crawford won a gold medal for outstanding proficiency while in the University of Alberta’s faculty of medicine, but it didn’t stop him from developing peritonitis, an abdominal inflammation. He became gravely ill.
“There were no antibiotics,” daughter Marg says. “So the family was called. They all thought he was going to die. He pulled through miraculously. But I’ll tell you, his abdomen looked like a war zone.”
When Dr. Crawford graduated in 1927, his dean warned him that he was in no shape to take on a heavy practice and should stick to a desk job. Crawford accepted that advice and worked at the provincial mental hospital in Ponoka.
Eventually he recovered sufficiently to look at starting his own practice. Someone suggested Kindersley, Sask., but Dr. Crawford and Isabel, who were by now married, decided against it. Instead they stayed in Medicine Hat until an opportunity presented itself in Trail.
The busy doctor
When Dr. Crawford arrived in the smelter city, the hillsides were barren and the smell of sulfur from the smelter was inescapable. “Ashes of roses,” he would joke.
But he was impressed enough to put in a good word about Trail with a couple of his med school classmates, who later joined him there.
At the time, the downtown clinic where he worked dealt mainly with pediatrics. Tuberculosis was also widespread and Dr. Crawford became adept at deflating a lung to let it heal. In the early 1940s, he went to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and became an internist.
Practicing medicine “was absolutely everything to him,” Marg says.
It was hard for her to watch as the old C.S. Williams clinic was demolished last year, after standing vacant for over three decades. It was even harder on her late sister Kay, who had worked there as a lab tech.
By the 1950s, C.S. Williams was the leading clinic in the West Kootenay, with a staff of 25 doctors who shared on-call duties and hospital rounds while also keeping office hours and making frequent house calls. Doctors kept medical bags in their cars, ready for any emergency.
Marg recalls middle-of-the-night phone calls to their home, including one from the remote Doukhobor community of Blagodatnoye (Champion Creek). A couple of men came to get her father in a rowboat and take him across the Columbia River. But Dr. Crawford spoke no Russian and struggled to figure out the patient’s symptoms.
One snowy January night, he was summoned to a home on Daniel Street, high above West Trail. When he returned from visiting his patient, he couldn’t find his vehicle. To his horror, he discovered it had flipped over and landed one street below.
Dr. Crawford was also called upon by Castlegar’s Dr. Victor Goresky to examine a young boy in Robson experiencing growing paralysis. At the base of the boy’s neck, Dr. Crawford discovered an engorged tick, which he carefully removed. Much to the astonishment and relief of the boy’s family, the paralysis gradually receded.
On another occasion, Dr. Crawford visited someone in the Gulch who had a parrot. As he examined his bedridden patient, the parrot jumped up and down, asking: “How’s he doing, doc? How’s he doing?”
Devotion to his profession, however, meant Dr. Crawford had little time for family or hobbies. His reading was limited to medical books. He rarely used his golf clubs and while he belonged to the Masonic Lodge, he never had time to attend meetings.
His daughters would sometimes accompany him to house calls, but they would have to wait in the car. On Sunday afternoons he would do his best to free up a couple of hours for a family drive or an ice cream. But his patients always came first.
The doctor’s wife
Isabel Crawford was “plucky” and could still recite poetry at the age of 100, her daughter says. “Verse after verse. She was quite a character really in her own right.”
Isabel played piano by ear and could throw a cocktail party for her husband’s medical colleagues, but she was quiet and not one for socializing. By virtue of answering calls from her husband’s patients, she became something of a therapist.
“They’d talk to her and she’d calm them down,” Marg says. “She would say ‘all right, we’ll get back in touch with you shortly.’ But they talked to her for ages. And so I think she had her own role to play.”
After Marg’s sister Kay began working as a lab tech at the clinic, she and their father would often talk shop at the dinner table while Marg and her mother rolled their eyes.
Marg went off to university. As her father’s health declined, her parents spent winters in the Lower Mainland, to be closer to a cardiologist, and returned to Trail in the summer. In their absence, Dr. Crawford’s brother Ralph looked after their house. He came to Trail after the Second World War and became a purchasing agent with Cominco.
A lane called Crawford
The lane next to the Crawford home in Tadanac, which connects Kootenay Avenue to Maple Road (or Cominco Road, depending on the map), has never had a name.
But Marg’s neighbor across the street, Dan Bouillon, an environmental manager at Teck, thought that it deserved to be named after the Crawfords. He even prepared a homemade sign.
When he approached Marg, she was flattered but suggested asking the city for permission. Council has since endorsed the idea, although the lane awaits an official sign. (Bouillon’s sign will instead be put up in Marg’s garage.)
Marg is pleased with the recognition for her family.
“It means a lot, it really does, especially for my dad, because he devoted his life to this community,” she says.
“Nobody could have worked harder than he did. He’s a good example to young people that adversity doesn’t need to mean ‘give up.’ It just means you have to fight a little harder and be a little more creative in how you get where you want to go.”
