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Warren ‘Whitey’ Bernard remembers the war years in Metro Vancouver being tough for several reasons — his dad heading off to battle, a dire shortage of money and his mom struggling desperately to find a room to rent.

Bernard ­­— the blond boy, now 82, reaching out to his soldier father in the historic photo of B.C. troops departing New Westminster in 1940 — remembers “living in a storefront, other people’s houses and being boarded out from time to time.”

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Eventually, after the Second World War, Bernard said, his struggling, extremely hard-working mother and father not only found places to rent in Vancouver, they were able to live out their lives in houses they purchased.

Photo by DARRYL DYCK / THE CANADIAN PRESS

There is little doubt the Second World War was the biggest crisis that Metro Vancouver has endured in the past 80 years. Not only was much housing substandard, tens of thousands of young men went overseas to fight against Nazis and Japanese Imperial troops. It was an era of food rationing and blacked-out windows, of fear and crushed hopes.