Standard The Hope
Office: 604.869.2421 www.hopestandard.com
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2, 2013
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HOPE AUTHOR RELEASES NEW NOVEL Forty per cent of net proceeds are donated to local charities
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ABANDONED HOME CATCHES FIRE Firefighters battle blaze on Silver Skagit Road Christmas Eve
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Looking back at the top stories in the news from June to December
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KERRIE-ANN SCHOENIT / THE STANDARD
Mount Hope glistens in the background Friday as the Coquihalla River flows toward the Fraser. Hope was under a white blanket last week, with light snow falling on and off every day.
Bringing life to 1928 steam engine Local marine engineer puts knowledge and experience to work
Jessica Peters Black Press
When Al Crook was just a youngster in elementary school, he spun his teacher an amazing sea-faring tale. He spoke to her about traveling from North America down to Venezuela for the summer. But the story got even richer than that. “I went there on an oil tanker!” he told her, with all the enthusiasm a
six-year-old could muster. Naturally, that unbelievable story led the teacher to call Crook’s mother, to discuss how young boys like to tell fibs. So imagine that teacher’s shock to hear the mother say: “Well, he’s telling the truth.” What the teacher may not have known is that Crook’s father was a sailor, as was his father’s father, and an uncle, too. So it comes as no surprise that Crook’s own life led him
out into the ocean. Crook is now a marine engineer by trade — has been for 34 years. “My father took me to sea when I was five years old,” he says, “and that was it.” He has spent most of his life aboard tankers and ocean liners, working on their steam engines. It’s a career that takes him all over the world, and back again. But when he gets home, he doesn’t hang up his tools and rest.
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He loves steam engines too much to leave them alone. “I just love it to death,” he says. “It’s good old fashioned engineering.” But his favourite steam engine is his 1928 Wallis and Steevens, which he’s been operating since 2001. He acquired it through a partnership with the Atchelitz Threshermen’s Association in Chilliwack. Continued on 3
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2012 YEAR IN REVIEW
Winter wonderland