Brown, Betty (Kovalcik)

Betty Kovalcik  worked in the Red & White Store in Princeton while in high school.  She moved to Vancouver and married Rex Pendril “Pen” Brown in Victoria.  Betty and Pen lived on a lighthouse on Pine Island for ten years before moving to Victoria.  Betty retired after working for the Provincial Government. They had two children.  She is interred at Princeton Cemetery.

Extract from www.lighthousefriends.com

Rex P. Brown arrived on Pine Island with in 1957, and in 1963, he received a fifty-dollar award for designing and constructing an extended aerial carriage servicing platform. The platform improved the servicing and maintenance of aerial tramway equipment and was installed at other sites on the West Coast.

In an article printed on Christmas Eve 1966, Keeper Brown explained how he would be spending the holiday at the station with his wife and their two children, aged eight and six. Planning for Christmas started had to start well in advance. Christmas cards had to be purchased a year in advance, and the traditional turkey was ordered in September, so it could be delivered to the island in early December. No visitors could come to the station during the winter as weather conditions made landings risky if not impossible.

Just how bad the seas could be was brought home in February 1967. Gale force winds were blowing as Keeper Brown and his wife retired one evening, but sleep was impossible due to the heavy surf pounding the island. Around 11:30 p.m., they heard chains clanking against the station’s fuel tanks and went out to investigate with Assistant Keeper J.P. Lewis. The sea had already broken a window in the engine room, which they patched with plywood, and then returned to the safety of the Brown’s dwelling to fill out a damage report.

A short while later, a fifty-foot wave crashed onto the island’s rocky shore, obliterating the fog signal building, pushing the engine house up to the Brown’s front step, washing away two 2,000-gallon fuel tanks, and dislodging the radio beacon’s antenna from its base. The lighthouse, a square, pyramidal, skeletal affair that had replaced the original lighthouse years earlier was only slightly damaged; a hole had been punctured in the bottom of the sheathing that surrounded the central stairway.

Not knowing if another mountainous wave was speeding toward the island, the Browns fled with their two children and the Lewises into the woods behind the station, where they built a fire and spent the night. A helicopter arrived the next day to survey the damage. The tower was reactivated the next night using an incandescent oil vapor lamp, and the Department of Transport estimated they could have a new foghorn set up within a week. The Browns left Pine Island shortly after the terrifying incident for Victoria where Pen served at the Coast Guard station.