BURST
On Aug. 31, 1957, Alex MacGillivray was in a jam. So he phoned his Vancouver Sun colleague Ralph Bower.
MacGillivray had met a beautiful young woman at the Penticton Peach Festival and grandly promised he could get her photo taken with Elvis Presley when he played Empire Stadium.
He promptly forgot about it, but then she called on the day of the concert. So MacGillivray asked Bower to help him out.
Against all odds, Bower talked his way backstage and snapped a photo of Elvis and Wendy Braine. It wasn’t published until 2000, after Bower found it while moving his extensive archive.
“She was a pretty girl,” reasoned Bower, who was 23 at the time. ”Elvis’s bodyguard liked her. I think that’s why she got in there, to be honest.”
The story is a perfect illustration of Bower’s personality and talent. He pulled off the impossible, took a fantastic photo, but knew the real reason he had gotten backstage — and it wasn’t him. He had kept the photo for 43 years until it was finally printed.
Bower died July 21 at Lions Gate Hospital in North Vancouver. He was 92.
He was the last of a talented cast of Sun photographers from the 1950s and ’60s, when the paper arguably had the top photo department in Canada.
Bower worked at The Sun for 42 years before he retired in 1997. His last assignment was a Vancouver Canucks game, which was fitting — he loved shooting sports, especially horse racing, which earned him the nickname Railbird.
“He was always along the rail to get pictures of the horses going along the track,” explains his son Doug.
That said, his most renowned sports shot wasn’t on the ice or at the track, it was a 2004 pic he took of a topless Pavel Bure getting a physical at Canucks training camp.
Photos had been banned in NHL dressing rooms and Canucks GM Pat Quinn gave him hell. But Bower argued Bure wasn’t in the dressing room.
“I sat down with Bure and gave him a print,” said Bower. “He said: ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were working for Playboy now.'”
Ralph Henry Bower was born on June 16, 1934 in North Vancouver. He lived on the same block in North Van his entire life, and started dating his wife Joan in high school. Aug. 4 would have been their 70th wedding anniversary.
In 1955, his high school pal Arv Olson landed a job at The Sun, and talked him into coming along, just for the summer. A two-month summer job turned into 42 years.
Photo technology changed constantly over his career.
”I started with a Speed Graphic (film camera) and ended up with a digital camera,” he said. ”It was the world’s greatest job, as far as I was concerned.”
He photographed the collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge on June 17, 1958, and won a National Newspaper Award in 1985 for a startling picture of a crazed man holding a baby by the heels out a four-storey window.
But sports and feature photography were his real forte. He photographed Pierre Trudeau doing a jack-knife dive into the pool at the Bayshore Hotel, a waterskiing squirrel at a Sportsmen’s show, and Muhammed Ali wielding an axe at the Vancouver airport in 1972.
“He grabbed the axe and yelled, ‘I’m going to Stanley Park to cut trees to get in shape for the fight!'” said Bower.
He kept a print of almost all his published photos, and in retirement mounted several exhibitions of his work, including a show of his Canucks photos at the Polygon Gallery in 2020.
One shot depicts Canucks goalie Dunc Wilson sprawled on the ice, snow covering his mask.
“A player had sprayed ice all over his mask when he came in on him,” explained Bower.
He was able to capture it thanks to his invention: hooking up a camera inside the net, with a wire under the ice and a clicker to take the photo. It might be the first “net cam” photo ever taken.
There will a celebration of life for Ralph Bower at 1 p.m. on Aug. 4 at Boal Chapel in North Vancouver. He is survived by his wife Joan, son Doug and daughter Kelly.
