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Image credit: John Sinal |
The Quiet
Philanthropist
Martha Lou Henley has spent much of her
life—and a good part of her vast fortune—
supporting the performing arts in Vancouver
By Michael Harris
Where’s Lou? Where’s Lou?”
Gay Sharp wandered about the old rambling house at Trimble
and Second, not enjoying her ninth birthday party. No
one would explain to her why her best friend, Martha
Lou Southam, wasn’t coming. Finally, an exasperated
older brother said, “Lou’s really sick.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you know what polio is? God, you
are so naïve. She could die, you know.”
Martha Lou Henley’s best and oldest friend, now
Gay Larsen, lives in a prestigious enclave of homes
in the Angus Lands, surrounded by park. Above her backyard,
which is supplied with birdfeeders, massive estates
(some approaching villa status) hunker into the hillside.
“I hated my birthday after that.” She takes
a little more coffee, looks out the window at rare sunlight.
It has been more than half a century. “I still
hate it.”
Martha Lou Southam and Gay had been born two months
apart to women who were fast friends. When Martha Lou
arrived at Vancouver General Hospital on January 7,
1944, she was a large baby, weighing in at nine pounds,
six ounces. This would prove to be her first and last
ostentatious entrance.
Growing up a Southam, her sister Stephanie Carlson says,
involved a feeling of “a specialness” that
did not imprint on young Louie in the same way. “It
was difficult,” says Carlson, “to have a
sense of self against everything the name meant.”
For Martha Lou, perhaps, selfhood had begun on a walk
to school one fall morning in 1952, a year and a half
before that ninth birthday party. “Come on, Lou,
hurry up!” cried Stephanie. They were going to
be late and York House was still blocks away. The joints
in Martha Lou’s legs had begun to tighten. At
school, Stephanie had to take her sister’s boots
off for her. And Martha Lou was sent home before the
day was over.
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Louie was a
painfully shy child; she was terrified of being
made to speak in class. (At 13, she got bingo
at a party but, afraid of calling out the word,
did not win the game.)
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The polio hit hard and everything changed. From her
birth, Martha Lou Southam represented the amassed fortunes
of the Southam and MacMillan families, which were fused
by the 1941 marriage of Gordon Southam and Jeannie MacMillan.
Whatever the emotions at play, it was an extremely useful
match: the Southams were in the newspaper business and
therefore required massive amounts of paper; the MacMillans
happened to run an equally massive logging company,
MacMillan Bloedel. In the 1950s, when polio struck Martha
Lou and her class was quarantined from the rest of the
school, the word “affluent” had yet to replace
the more honest word “rich.” And this girl
was rich.
But when eight-year-old Martha Lou was laid up in G.F.
Strong (where her father served as
president of the board), money made little
difference. She lost the use of both legs and her left
arm. Henley went from a background of extreme privilege
to a public institution and, what’s more, a public
disease that cared nothing for class. (Though she eventually
regained most motor control, she still walks awkwardly,
with crutches.) Hers was the 100th case of polio in
Vancouver; six weeks into her ordeal, the Salk vaccine
became available.
Still, hers was indeed a privileged environment to recover
in. Summers were spent at Qualicum with her four sisters
and two brothers. H.R. MacMillan had a swimming pool
installed to encourage Henley’s recuperation (the
nickname “Louie”—after Louie Armstrong—became
a joke about how strong her arms grew to compensate
for her legs). The clothes worn at Qualicum were very
British, very old-school, and the children would be
given ice cream and taken out on H.R.’s massive
boat, the Marijean. Sigrid, the Finnish cook,
prepared simple but perfect meals, and Oiva, her husband,
tended the gardens. Walking barefoot across the lawn
felt like traipsing on velvet.
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