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| Mary at her graduation from Bible college in Victoria |
Anita: And then she made the decision to come out to the rugged West Coast. She jumped on a mission boat and came out to Bamfield, and started working with the First Nations—and got stuck there. She took over that tiny post office, where she worked for many years until shortly before she died. Mary got sick and had to go into the hospital. I think she would have been there still after that if she could. She had a First Nations lady named Rose who was her second in line. Rose didn't want to take the job, and she said, I hope Mary comes back. But of course, that was impossible. And that's when Joe took over the post office.
Anita: Mary did many things for the First Nations people. She gave them all the money she had, even when it wasn't hers—like, when it was post office money. She gave it away, and nobody ever said anything. They were First Nations and they needed the money, so they got the money.
Joe: The story was that her every second check went to them. It was a check for her and then a check towards the band or the people that she was taking care of—Angie Joe, or some of the older elders in the band, or people who just couldn't make it on their own. In Sarita or even up at Pacheena Bay, that's what she did. That was the way she wanted to fill up her life. We lived on the east side, so I would come over by boat to pick up the mail once or twice a week. And there she would be, working away, with open ulcers on her legs. She shouldn't have been working anymore. But that was her life and her way of giving to the community.
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| Mary helping lead a church service. |
Joe: She lived in the net loft below Erik Wickham’s house. On the west side of Bamfield, you've got the grocery store, and then there was the Freer's house, Heather and Joe’s, and then beside that, the red house that was Wickham’s and Sandberg's property. I think they were all but lifetimers there too. But the net loft was down below that. It's still there. At the end of that building, at some point they put in a wall to close off one of the corners of the net loft for Mary. The net loft was a place to store nets, because it was a commercial fishing place, and they needed some place to pull the nets, dry them and repair them. So they created a small area for Mary, and she lived in there for as long as I knew her. No hot water—she had a cold water tap. And a toilet, bolted onto the floorboards, that went into a pipe that took it 10 yards further onto the beach.
Anita: It was just one little square room with a little oil cook stove. She had only candles in there at first because there was no power. It wasn't meant to be a place for anybody to live in. She just had nowhere else to go. And she was happy there. Later on, they put power in, but she had no hot water until just the last few years of her life. She had only the little cookstove to keep her warm. That was something that surprised me, how she managed the cold. She didn't complain about any of it; she just lived there. Mary was fine. She was happy. She spent most of her time in the post office.
Joe: She worked with the First Nations people in the church in Grappler Inlet. They built the church down there, a building they brought in by barge. Mary had gone in there with somebody else, and they brought Christianity in. But the church burned to the ground, and then they moved the church to Pacheena Bay.
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| The church in Grappler Inlet that later burned down. |
Joe: They named a piece of the walkway on the west side after Mary. Between the store and the post office, there's a small walkway where people get their mail, and they called it Mary Scholey Way. We knew Mary for the last four years she was there, and she was showing her years. Not Alzheimer's or anything like that, but she had the clarity of somebody in their mid to late 80s. Sometimes you would go in there and she would just mutter to herself and ignore you completely, or not even know that you were there until she saw you, and she would say, Oh, hello. And I would say, Oh, hi, I need the mail. She was quite interesting. When I took over the post office, there was a transitional period. Rose was going in there and covering for Mary, but she wasn't interested in the job.
Joe: At the time we first moved there, Canada Post was allowed to cash government checks—band checks, welfare checks, senior citizens checks. So, Mary at the post office was the unofficial local bank. If Mary had money, she would cash a check. If somebody came in with a government check for $350, she would say she had $125 on hand and give them that, then save up cash to pay out the rest of the money. But she would also help out any who needed it. In the end, Canada Post was out quite a bit of money, not on purpose or anything, but people kept asking her, probably abusing the situation. And Canada Post wrote it off in the end. They knew it was not for her own gain, but she gave to people what she thought they needed.
Joe: The road to Bamfield was absolutely the worst you could imagine. The first time I drove in, it was four or five hours from Port Alberni to Bamfield. I'm driving a little blue Toyota Tacoma, and I am lost. People said, follow the power lines. But there was a branch road to one of the camps, down by the inlet. And of course, there were power lines that way. So I thought, Bamfield must be down that way. I followed another logging road and ended up down at the beach where there's one house and a logging camp. And I say, I'm trying to get to Bamfield. Oh, no, no, the wrong way. Back up the road again, potholes a foot deep all over the place. And finally ended up getting there.
Anita: When we knew Mary, she was old and could no longer walk quite upright, shuffling along slowly. She sometimes wouldn't even notice that you were there. But I found her incredible, interesting. Rose said, Yeah, I don't know how she does it. You know, she can barely move, but she keeps going.
Joe: Mary had that West Coast look about her, a face of maturity and experience. But calm. You could tell that she was happy with her role and the direction that her life had taken. I'm not a religious guy, but I think that's the satisfaction you saw in her face, that fulfilment. She had a direction she wanted to head, and she was happy with the decisions that she made and what became of them. Even on a challenging day for her physically, when you went to the post office, you never saw her angry or cranky or upset. There was always a smile, always a friendly hello, always a welcome. It didn't matter if she had six bags of letters to sort—there was always time to stop and talk and have that moment with you.
Anita: That was a specialty of Bamfield in general—people did that. This is what I enjoy about my job [as postmistress in Honeymoon Bay]: it’s like what she had in Bamfield, though a bit more busy. Some people still look at me strangely when I say hello and have a chat with somebody who comes in, as if that is wrong. Mary stayed at her counter, but still had her chats. And nothing could disturb her—she still had her little conversations with people. I felt it was something incredible. And I guess that's why I run my little post office like this, too.
Joe: You would go to the post office, and Mary was sorting mail with the Dutch door closed to give her a little privacy, and that was the rule at Canada Post. You take a bag of mail and you pour it out on the table, and that's where you'd start your primary sort to break it down into different names or different areas or whatever, and then you go to the boxes and start filling them. The cash was in a drawer; there was no till, because everything was manual in Bamfield. There was no accounting except with a pencil and a good eraser. You'd open up a cash drawer and there were four slots for bills and four slots for coins. That's how Mary plugged away for years.
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| On a letter from Nelson, a postage cancel stamp by Mary's hand, dated December 9, 1986 |
Anita: It was still exactly the same when Joe took it over. I was hired as his intern, and he got called out one day, and he comes home and says to me, well, you know, tomorrow, you gotta go and run the post office. I had only a few hours one day to learn how to do it. So, here I am with my little rowboat, and that day was terrible weather. And I had to row over there. My arms hurt, but I made it. I thought a few times I would maybe tip, but I made it. And I said, oh my God, I have to do that whole thing again to get back home. And then I sit in this office and the first person comes and he had some kind of an account, but who knows how and what? Come back tomorrow, I said to him. And he says, this is easy. I’ll tell you what to do. So he actually had to walk me through how to run the post office.
Joe: When Mary was there, when you were mailing packages, Canada Post provided you with a destination book. And you'd open up the British Columbia section and then the Vancouver Island section, and then which column you are on Vancouver Island, you would have to go to that. And then you'd have to cross-reference with every other province or whatever, and then break it down into a district and a city—all so you could figure out how much to charge on a parcel.
Joe: Coming from the city to Bamfield and expecting to ship something, you go over to the post office and bother Mary. You stick your head through the little hole to see if Mary is free, or at least unbusy enough that she could take care of you. She opens up the Dutch door to receive your parcel, and she measures it all out. Then she looks at the destination and gets out the book. Five minutes of going through a book, trying to find the right page, and then she looks up the dimensions and finds out how much it will cost. Of course, there was no machine to print up a stamp for it, so it meant putting on stamps. Whatever Mary had there that was available to put on, she would stick on at that time. If the cost was $18, it was $18 worth of lick ’em stamps, stuck on the front, sides and back of the parcel. And then she had to cancel them all out with the hand stamp or round hand stamp hammer, hammering out all these stamps so that each one got cancelled. Also, if you were changing your address, you'd have a form that you and Mary would fill out. I'm moving; here's my address. Mary would say, that's $53. She would flip the form over to the back, and lick stamps. And that's what she had to do, and cancel them all because that was your proof of payment.
Joe: It would have been a three-day trip for officials to come down and audit Mary's office, because they would have come down on the Lady Rose. By the time they finished that audit, the boat had already gone over to the east side, back to the west side, and it was heading back to Port Alberni. The officials did not want to make the drive. They would have to stay up at McKay's or one of the other places. There was a lot of stamp licking, and 100s of stamps could go onto a parcel. We had stacks of sheets of stamps: there's the pennies, and there's the 2 pennies, and there's the 5 pennies. You take a sheet and cancel out the whole thing. And stick it on the top. And then you had to keep that form in your office in case they came down and audited. They would say, show me one of your mail changes. You go into your drawer and you pull out a mail change and they'd flip it over and they'd count the stamps to see if they had the proper amount on it. This must have been pretty crazy for Mary.
Joe: You think about Mary going up to Copper Island to see Nelson Dunkin, and she didn't have a big boat. She had a 14-footer with a small motor. As seaworthy as any lake boat is on the ocean, I guess. But she would go up there and deliver his mail. Once you get past Nookamus Bay, as soon as the afternoon comes, all the weather starts to change. During the day, you've got an inward flow of weather that goes up the inlet towards Port Alberni, and then in the afternoons, it starts coming back down. Suddenly, all these waves start backing up behind you. I fished a lot in a 14-foot boat out there, but it had a 20-inch transom on it. I had lots of room, but it was scary for me. And she had an 18-inch transom with a motor on that, pulling it down even farther. And these waves crashing up to the back of the boat. I couldn't imagine her coming back after dropping off the mail. She practiced her praying, let me tell you. And then doing that every week. Or every couple of weeks in the winter, you hope for a break in the weather or enough to get up there knowing that maybe that was the time to do it. You’re trying to stay close enough into shore because you don't want to be out in the open, not in a little boat like that. If you capsize, you hope you can swim to shore.
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| Mary visiting with Nelson Dunkin |
Anita: The pictures of Mary show how resilient the woman was, because she had only cold water to wash, but she was clean. I never saw her unclean. Even when she was older, and she looked a bit more raggedy because of her age, I never saw her dirty. She was always a tidy person. This is something that amazes me, that she could do that for years and years, stay so clean, with cold water.
Anita: When Mary passed away, the time came for her family—I'm not sure if it was nieces or what connection of the family—to go through her stuff. They went over to the net loft and into her place and went through everything and kept a few indigenous baskets, and then everything else was just tossed into the dumpster. It killed me. I don't think Mary's connection was to that part of her family. It was to her broader Bamfield family at that point. Myself and Rose went over there and pulled lots of photos and stuff like that out of the dumpster. It was like her life had just been tossed away. The family only kept Angie Joe's little basket that was handmade for Mary with love, some beautiful carvings and stuff like that. We found photos that went back to her time in Chemainus in her 20s and her work with First Nations kids, and we asked the Pentecostal Church if they were interested, but there was no interest at all, like they didn’t want the documentation. In the end, after carrying it around for a number of years, I finally got rid of her stuff myself.
Finally, few tidbits about Mary that I gleaned from the internet:
Mary must have had a wood stove at some point: “Sometimes when he fueled up I would ask, where to today, Billy? And his reply might be that Mary Scholey had no wood, so he would look for a log or that she had some logs but they needed to be cut.” – Barkley Sounder, Jul/Aug 1991
Though Mary preferred dogs, she looked after many feral cats in Bamfield. She established the famous “Bamfield Cat Colony” that can still be seen along the walkway on the west shore.
She wrote articles for Ha-Shilth-Sa, a West Coast newspaper.
Someone posted this photo on the Bamfield/Anacla Photo Contest on Facebook six years after Mary was gone. Below are some of the many comments made on the photo:
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- Wonderful woman, I loved her! Thanks for sharing this picture. - Rosanne
- Our beautiful Mary Scholey... she is so missed... so many precious memories... - Karin
- She was an amazing woman, one of Bamfield’s best. - Jan
- Our angel with a speedboat, loved this lady. - Ruby
- What a beautiful photo of a beautiful woman. - Liz
- We used to hitchhike across to the west side to go see her, eh Marena... - Carole
- Mary was such a loving person. She is wearing her Foxy button. She never gave up looking for her dear Foxy. - Liz
- She was a great lady with a heart of gold. - Wendy
- What a sweet lady! - Mandala
- She was a wonderful woman. Miss her - Corene
- Awe, Mary Schooley, miss her. - Steph
- Memories of a beautiful woman. - Clara
- i remember as a kid seeing her on my way to Sunday school. - Alec
- Mary bought my first basket and totem pole I made, for $5.00 each. They were not very good. - Tom
- Mary, what an honest truthful lady you were. love ya and may you rest in peace. - Elaine
- I miss her. She made Sundays so much more enjoyable. - Belinda
- I miss her too. What a beautiful lady she was. - Naomi
- Awwe, beauty pic. - Karen
- All bamfielders thought so. - David
- Miss you, Mary. - Cecil
- Mary Scholey! Heart of gold, that woman, so many good memories of her. Riding around in her blue truck with her while she delivered mail. Getting candy and chips for memorizing Bible verses. - Terry
- What a Legend, Mary would pay for me to go to Copper Island Camp every year. - Owen
- Absolutely loved her, she was so good to me. - Laura
- Mary. Such a beautiful lady. Forever remembered in the hearts of many. - Victoria
- Loved Mary so much, she was the kindest soul you would ever meet. - Charlie
- Awe, I miss you, Mary. RIP. - Irene
