Duthies on Seymour Street

Duthies in the 60's was a thrilling place to hang out --particularly as a teenager. Everybody was experimenting: with books and theatre and films and sexuality and drugs, music, art, politics and philosophy. Duthies was a hotbed of both the high and the counter culture movements in Vancouver. Bill would regularly buy tickets for the opera and ballet for the staff and he always shared the season’s symphony and playhouse tickets among them. He once furiously fired a staff member for not recognizing the great Australian diva, Joan Sutherland.

In other branches of Duthies the counter-culture was raging. The Seymour Street store was especially radical. Dennis Barrett worked there with Macie Duthie and Don Lewis and Richard Harper; I often worked on Saturdays and in the summers and I remember the times we spent squeezed into the tiny bathroom smoking pot. Bill had hired a lot of draft dodgers, more than he, in fact, ever actually employed. One such was Bill Moen from Minnesota who famously ‘almost poisoned the entire Duthie staff’ at a Christmas party with his hash brownies.

In December, 1970, the Seymour Street store was extensively damaged by fire. It was the first of two such disasters there. “Both fires were traced to staff emptying ashtrays into the wastebasket. Purdy’s Chocolates were right next door at the time; after the second fire, they moved out.