Digging up photos of the historic Olympia Cafe fire

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/06/2020 (2115 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Over the last 15 years of my time in Brandon, I have heard the name “Olympia Cafe” come up a handful of times, and always in reference to a singular event on April 6, 1953, when the popular restaurant burned to the ground along with two business offices, a dentist office and an apartment building.

That particular blaze is also infamous as the only one in the city’s history that took the life of a Brandon firefighter — 57-year-old Fred Brown, who died inside of the building in the line of duty.

At the time regarded as one of the worst fires in Brandon’s history, the fire raged for six hours before firefighters were able to bring it under control.

“Not until most of the interior of the sprawling block was reduced to charred ruin did the flames subside,” wrote The Brandon Daily Sun the next day.

I had only ever seen one rather well-known image that has been used and re-used online, and that is currently housed at the S. J. McKee Archives at Brandon University. It shows a crowd of people on 10th Street to the north of Rosser Avenue watching a firefighter at the top of a ladder while the fire burns out the top floor of the café. It’s a well-known image in Brandon circles, and part of the Lawrence Stuckey fonds at the BU archives.

But I’d always wondered what became of the rest of the photographs, as I had no doubt there would have been more images taken. After all, the Brandon Daily Sun published a full page of images from that day’s fire in its April 7, 1953 edition. As so many of the paper’s historic materials have been lost to time and negligence, especially those created before the 1970s, I thought there was little hope of finding any trace of the negatives.

But approximately six months ago, while looking through a filing cabinet in our archive room, I came across a box that had been tucked in the bottom drawer. Upon opening it, I found several yellow envelopes that sported the labels of a few important past events in the city’s history. One of these envelopes was marked “Olympia Cafe Fire.” Inside I found dozens of 4″x5″ negatives of the 1953 fire, and to my knowledge, many of them have never been published before. Most of the negatives are in good condition, although a few have sustained water damage from some unknown minor calamity.

My intent from the start was to digitize the images, repair some of the damaged images, and publish a special anniversary feature to mark April 6, 2020, which would have been 67 years after the original incident. Like so many things, however, the pandemic got in the way of my plans and I simply didn’t get to them in time to mark the date. Until now. 

Note that I did not repair all the injuries to the negatives. Some of them have still-visible water damage and some scratch marks. Of those that I have repaired, I have refrained from making any substantial changes so that the substance and historic quality of the image remains. 

One of the unfortunate things about Sun newspapers of that era is that the name of the photographer was not published in the cutline information that accompanied photographs. And so, unless someone has information they can pass along to me, the name of the photographer will be lost to history, as there are no such details accompanying the envelope.

Until then, the negatives will hold a place of honour in our archives. And the digital versions of them will help preserve part of the city’s history, and the Sun’s ongoing legacy in our community.

» Matt Goerzen is the managing editor of The Brandon Sun

» mgoerzen@brandonsun

» Twitter: @MattGoerzen