East Side Story

Nick Marino started working at Vancouver’s Pacific National Exhibition (PNE) in the summer of 1980, when he was twelve, and he finished in 1986, the year he calls a dividing line for the city because of Expo 86. 

A teacher and comedian whose family has lived in Vancouver for more than a century, Marino has an ear for a good story, an eye for a fairground character, and a storytelling style that’s frequently funny and not infrequently touching. Whether you have fond memories of the PNE (or of similar fairs elsewhere in Canada), or if you’ve never set foot in a major fair, East Side Story is a great read that goes well beyond the Gayway — as the PNE midway was improbably known. 

Marino writes achingly about his mother’s death and its aftermath, while telling evocatively of his teenage misdeeds and romances. The book is clear-eyed and blessedly non-nostalgic in its attitude toward relics like beauty pageants and freak shows, as well as the destruction of the nearby Black community of Hogan’s Alley. 

And Marino devotes a full chapter to the fact that the PNE continued merrily in 1942, even as Canadians of Japanese descent were incarcerated — a word he prefers to “interned” — in horse stalls next door at Hastings Park. He scathingly notes that the fair has repeatedly declined to erect a plaque explaining the ugly history. 

Black-and-white photos of the author as a teenager, as well as many images of the people and places he highlights, make an already lively book even more vivid.