Marjorie Sam (known after marriage as Marjorie Wong) was born in Brantford, Ontario on June 17, 1921.

Her father, Charles Sam, owned a restaurant called Purity Cafe on Market Street in Brantford, Ontario. He cooked a la carte and hot meals for many customers who worked in the area (adjacent to the train station) while her mom, Rose, baked pies and sweet desserts.

When Marjorie was a toddler, she fell on the hardwood floor in the cafe. The injured areas of her arm and orbital eye developed into bovine tuberculosis, because she had been drinking unpasteurized milk. The photo on her C.I.45 certificate shows a lumpy sweater hiding the arm which had just had the bone scraped of the TB infection. She lived at the Brantford Sanatorium children's wing until she was 10 years old. The head nurse took a liking to Marjorie and essentially raised her. When she returned to her family, she learned to understand the Cantonese dialect of her parents, but never became conversant in the language.

At the age of 16, Marjorie worked as a nanny for an army family. She earned about $20 a week including room and board.

When she was 19, Marjorie trained to become an aluminum welder and in Brantford helped build the fuselage on the Mosquito airplane. Now she was earning about $50 to $60 each week. In 1945, she moved to Toronto and worked at Wong's Fruit Market where she met Archie Wong (Wong Ng Chee) and married him the following year, on February 4, 1946.

Together, the couple would have six children and Marjorie would not work outside the home again until she was 43. Then she worked for another 27 years: as a supermarket cashier, as an inventory clerk at the Eaton's catalogue store, and finally at Sears.

She was a woman who really embraced things that she enjoyed.

In retirement, Marjorie became a huge fan of the British soap opera “Coronation Street.” She would watch it every night and then the entire 2-hour re-cap on Sunday morning. It was a great thrill for her to be taken for a drink in a small village pub when visiting in-laws in England.

She also loved watching Toronto Blue Jays baseball games, at the stadium or on television. She always got totally involved, shouting and cheering on the team. As one of Marjorie’s children recalls “If I phoned from my home in B.C. while a game was being televised, she didn’t want to talk. I had to try again later.” Over the years, she attended many Jays games and collected "bobble heads" as the team chased after a pennant and World Series Championships.

Marjorie also loved photography. She always had a camera available to take daily snippets of life and embraced digital photography with a passion. Her love of the camera influenced one of her children to become a photographer.

In later years, as her children left home and embraced special diets (e.g., vegetarianism, Indian, etc), Marjorie adapted her cooking. Trying new dishes was Marjorie's way to encourage her kids to visit more often for family dinners on Sunday.

Marjorie passed away on March 17, 2015.

Mary SAM was born SAM Mee York in Victoria on February 16, 1915. She was the third of eight children.

Along with her siblings, Mary was blocked from attending regular public schools. She instead received an education at a place called “the Chicken House” (Gie Jie Ook in Cantonese).

While growing up, she worked at Loy Sing Guen, a well-known butcher shop on Fisgard Street in Victoria's Chinatown that her father owned. The store is still operating today. Back then, it was a butcher shop by day, and a restaurant by night. Mary did the necessary chores like plucking duck feathers, barbecuing the pork, and serving in the restaurant. As one of the older children, she also looked after her younger siblings. Later in life, Mary worked in greenhouses and on farms.

In 1934, she married Chan Que ENG who was employed at the Pioneer Fruit and Vegetable Co. Together, they had seven children, although one child, a boy, died shortly after birth.

Mary passed away in 1988 at age 73.

SAM Wing Poy (also known as SAM Ying) arrived in Canada on May 6, 1889. He is best known for operating the Loy Sing Guen meat store on Fisgard Street in Victoria's Chinatown. The business first started operations in 1889.

It operated as a butcher and meat shop during the day. But in order for the business to survive, at night SAM Ying turned it into a restaurant and served wonton, chow mein and congee, considered his speciality. He also made candy.

The entire family helped run the store and the restaurant area. The children would pluck duck feathers, clean gizzards, barbecue the pork, and provide evening dinner service.

In 2022, the business was still operating as a barbecue shop and known one of the oldest continuously operating Chinese businesses in North America.

Ruth Wells Sandwell is a historian specializing in education, rural society, and energy's social history. She is the founding co-director and executive board member of The History Education Network/Histoire et Education en Rseau. Sandwell teaches at the University of Toronto at the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning.

Sir George Bailey Sansom was a diplomatist and Japanese scholar, was born in London on 28 November 1883, the only son of George William Morgan Sansom, naval architect, of Little Thurrock, Essex, and his wife, Mary Ann Bailey, from Yorkshire. He was educated at Palmer's School, Grays, and the lycée Malherbe, Caen, and later attended the universities of Giessen and Marburg. He passed a competitive examination for the British consular service in September 1903 and was attached to the British legation in Tokyo to study the Japanese language. He served as private secretary to Sir Claude Macdonald, ambassador to Japan, from 1905 to 1912, and also in consulates around Japan. In these posts, he acquired great proficiency in the Japanese language, including local dialects. In 1915 he was in London on home leave and, being unfit for military service, was lent by the Foreign Office first to the Admiralty and then to the War Office for political intelligence work, which took him to Archangel.

Sansom worked as secretary to the ambassador, Sir Charles Eliot, a post in which he made the acquaintance of many Japanese leaders and scholars. Eliot, for whom he had unbounded admiration, encouraged him to devote the spare time which was available to him in the relatively relaxed pace of official life to the study of Japan, her language, culture, and history. In 1928 he published his first work, An Historical Grammar of Japanese, a pioneer study. Already regarded as an authority on the early history of Japan, he published in 1931 Japan: a Short Cultural History, which was based on primary materials in Japanese and added a new dimension to the English-language literature on the subject. While he was dissatisfied with aspects of the work and wanted to revise it, it was reprinted as it stood in 1936 and on countless occasions thereafter. It became the standard and most reliable text for the university courses on the subject which were growing up in the United States and elsewhere. Sansom then edited the monograph Japanese Buddhism (1935) which Eliot had left incomplete at the time of his death in 1931 and added a chapter of his own. His scholarship was recognized when, during leave in 1935, he spent half a year in New York, lecturing at Columbia University.

From the 1920s Sansom was responsible for the commercial work of the embassy. He was appointed commercial secretary in September 1923 and then commercial counsellor in January 1930. In this capacity he travelled to the Philippines in 1932 and then to India in the autumn of 1933, where he played an important negotiating role in resolving the difficult Indo-Japanese cotton dispute in a dual capacity as representative of both the Indian and British governments. He was made a KCMG in June 1935, having been appointed CMG in January 1926.

From 1947 to 1953 Sansom was professor of Japanese studies at Columbia University and from 1949 to 1953 he was the first director of its East Asian Institute. It was during this period that he wrote The Western World and Japan: a Study in the Interaction of European and Asian Cultures (1950), in which he emphasized the influence of Western thought as it reached Japan down the centuries. He was able to make another academic visit to Japan in 1950 and to publish the seminal lectures he gave on that occasion under the title Japan in World History (1951). In 1955 he decided on health grounds to move to California, where he was given an honorary ‘consultant professorship’ at Stanford University. There he spent much of the last ten years of his life, freed from routine work, working on his three-volume History of Japan (1958–64). Considering the exacting standards that he set for himself, it was a marvellous publication, but the strains of age and illness affected the final volume. He had built up over half a century a range of intellectual contacts in Japan unusual for a diplomatist; and he was able to plough into his writing the richness of Japanese material towards which he was guided by a network of academic friends. He became an honorary fellow of the Japanese Academy in 1951.

Although Sansom's official career was distinguished in its own right, it is as an interpreter of Japan that he will be remembered. His writings, originating in linguistic and Buddhist studies, gradually moved away from cultural history and in later works tended towards social and political history. He was the bridge between Japanese scholars who were anxious to have their country understood abroad and a western readership who appreciated the style and wit of his writing.

HMS Sappho was a Fantome-class sloop of the Royal Navy, built by Wigram & Sons, Blackwall and launched on 20 November 1873. She was commanded by Noel Stephen Fox Digby and began service at the Australian station in December 1874. She served on the Pacific Station from 1881 to 1886, and was sold for scrap in December 1887.

Ruth Saunders was born in Camrose, Alberta in 1923, growing up in different parts of British Columbia. After high school she volunteered with the Canadian Women’s Army Corps, and served with Kitchener, Ontario’s CWAC Military Band No. 3.

After the war she attended the Royal Jubilee Hospital School of Nursing in Victoria, graduating in early 1950. She worked for about a year at the United Church of Canada Home Mission Hospital in Cold Lake, Alberta. She joined the Church’s Missionary Deaconess School and was assigned to the United Church of Canada’s Home Mission Hospital in Manning, Alberta. After taking a short course in the Korean language at Yale University, she went to Korea as a nurse missionary for the United Church, working as a public health nurse in the hill country in southern Korea. She was particularly involved with the care of Koreans suffering from leprosy.

She became Nursing Administrator of the United Church’s newly built Wonju United Christian Hospital from 1955 to 1989. Here she developed a school of nursing, which is now associated with Yonsei University. She retired to live in Victoria and later Chemainus, dying in 2002.

Barnett Savery was born on 21 April 1906 in Seattle, Washington. Savery received a BA from the University of Washington in 1927, majoring in philosophy, and later attended Harvard. At Harvard, Savery studied philosophy with a minor in psychology. He received an MA in 1933 and a Ph.D. in 1934. Savery went on to teach both at the University of Washington and Idaho. In 1942 he began teaching at UBC and, in 1949, became Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology. After these disciplines became two separate departments, Savery became Head of the Department of Philosophy in 1958. He served two terms on the Senate, 1957-1960 and 1963-1966. He was among those on the Faculty responsible for creating the Departments of Fine Arts, Music and Theatre.

Joan Sawicki was born in Burnaby, British Columbia in 1945. The family moved to Terrace, B.C. in 1956. In the 1960s Sawicki attended the University of Victoria earning a B.A. in Education in 1968. She majored in both history and geography. Sawicki was a secondary school teacher in Williams Lake from 1968 1969 and in Armstrong from 1971 1972. Sawicki gradually developed an interest in environmental and agricultural issues. She eventually worked in Ottawa and in British Columbia for the Ministry of Agriculture and the British Columbia Agricultural Land Commission. Prior to her career in civic and provincial politics Sawicki was a partner in a land-use consulting firm, dealing with natural resource management issues. From 1987 to 1990 Sawicki served on the Burnaby City Council. She chaired the environment and waste management committee and sat as a municipal representative on both the Greater Vancouver Regional District waste management committee and the Metropolitan Board of Health. Sawicki also served as the director of the International Centre for Sustainable Cities. In 1985 she was nominated to run for the New Democratic Party for the riding of Burnaby-Willingdon in the 1986 provincial election. Although she was defeated in 1986, Sawicki ran again winning the same riding in 1991 and 1996. She served as MLA for Burnaby-Willingdon from 1991 - 2001. Sawicki was elected speaker of the Legislative Assembly in March 1992, serving for two years. She then served as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Municipal Affairs from April 1994 to May 1996 before assuming the same position for the Minister of Environment, Lands and Parks from June 1996 to January 1998. She eventually resigned from her position over issues concerning a proposed land development project that was to take place on protected land under the Agricultural Land Reserve at Six Mile Ranch near Kamloops. From July 1999 to November 2000 Sawicki served as Minister of Environment, Lands, and Parks. Sawicki currently lives with her husband, Gary Runka, near Hagensborg, British Columbia.

Alan R. Sawyer (1919-2002) was an art historian, curator, museum director, collector, professor, author, and consultant specialising in pre-Columbian and Northwest Coast art. He was born in 1919 in Wakefield, Massachusetts, and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942. In 1946 he married his childhood friend Erika Heininger Sawyer (1922-2012) and together they had five children (Dana, Diane, Brian, Lynn, and Carol). Alan and Erika were avid collectors, and their collection of pre-Columbian and Northwest Coast pieces was often consulted by researchers and exhibited across Canada and the US.

Sawyer received an undergraduate degree in geology from Bates College in 1941 before studying at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1946-1948 and earning his MA in Art History from Harvard in 1949. That same year, Sawyer became an instructor for the art department at the Texas State College for Women. He was employed as the assistant to the Curator of Decorative Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952, and in 1956 was promoted to Curator of Primitive Art. While at the Art Institute of Chicago, he also worked as director of the Park Forest Art Center and taught courses at University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. From 1959 to 1971, Sawyer served as the Director of the Textile Museum in Washington, DC. He joined the faculty at the University of British Columbia in 1974, where he was a professor of art history until his retirement in 1984—when he was named Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts.

In addition to his teaching and writing activities, Sawyer traveled to South America to conduct field work and acted as an expert lecturer on study and leisure tours in Peru. As part of his research into Northwest Coast art and artifacts, he traveled to First Nation communities and assisted North American and European museums with determining artifacts’ provenance. He was the author of several works including Ancient Peruvian Ceramics : the Nathan Cummings Collection (1966) which was published through the Metropolitan Museum, and Mastercraftsmen of Ancient Peru (1968) that accompanied an exhibit at the Guggenheim which he curated. In 1969, Sawyer was awarded an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Bates College.

The Scandinavian Cultural Society (SCS) was founded in 1985, to help celebrate Vancouver’s Centennial & Expo '86. At the time, it was incorporated and registered in Victoria as: The Scandinavian Festival Society. In June 1987, the name was changed to: The Scandinavian Cultural Society. The SCS strives to promote goodwill and understanding among Scandinavians, promote and carry out Scandinavian cultural events and activities, and encourage learning about Scandinavian culture. The Society represents the cultures of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

Anna Scantland was born in Saskatchewan. In 1955 she received her B.A. at the University of British Columbia and then married Erik Lund. Her experience working at the Hastings Community Centre, Vancouver, B.C. sparked her interest in the problems of minority and immigrant peoples. She returned later to UBC to obtain her teaching certificate and began her teaching career in 1959.

Neville Vincent Scarfe, UBC's first Dean of Education, was born in Essex, England, in 1908. He attended the University of London, graduating with first-class honours in geography. After teaching geography until 1935, Scarfe became Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Education at the University of London, where he remained until 1951. Internationally recognized for his research work in the teaching of geography and the principles and philosophy of education, he became Dean of Education at the University of Manitoba in 1951 and remained there for five years. In 1956, Scarfe became the founding Dean of Education at UBC. A consolidation of the Universityʹs School of Education and the Provincial Normal School had given rise to the new Faculty of Education. He continued to guide the faculty until his retirement in 1973. Throughout his career, Scarfe wrote over 100 articles and gave numerous speeches around the world on education. Always an advocate for educational reform, Scarfe was particularly critical of the Chant Report on Education (1961) findings.