Past Tense

The Man They Can’t Kill, Thursday 21 January 1932

Wally Woolridge was about to pull out of a parking lot when an explosion blew him 20 feet into the air and totaled his car. Miraculously, Woolridge was shaken up, but otherwise unscathed. When asked if he had any idea who would do such a thing, Woolridge said

Sure, I think I know who did it. I think I could put my hand on the man if I wanted to. But naturally I’m not mentioning any names. I’m not getting myself in any spot like that. I can tell you one thing, though. It’s the work of racketeers. This thing tonight is just another episode in the story of bombings, which have been taking place all over the continent during the last few months.

This was the third attempt on Woolridge’s life. The previous October, a bomb exploded in the rear of his car, but wasn’t powerful enough to get the intended effect. A few weeks after that incident, Woolridge came home to be ambushed by rifle fire outside his home. Eight shots were fired at him, damaging his car and the front door of his house.

Woolridge was a projectionist at the Colonial Theatre on Granville and he was active in the projectionists’ union. Some people thought the bomb might have had something to do with an intra-union dispute that led the projectionists of two Vancouver theatres to leave the International Alliance (IATSE), a big US-based union, to form the All-Canadian Union, which didn’t last long before having its charter revoked. One of the non-union theatres, the Royal (the old Pantages at 142 E Hastings), had been stink bombed seven times in the month before the car bombing.

JR Foster, a friend of Woolridge and fellow activist in IATSE, said the All-Canadian projectionists were just a group of local malcontents. “There is no doubt,” he said, “that this [bombing] is not just a local affair. It’s all a part of the bombings and intimidation campaign which has been waged against members of the union down south. Like that Los Angeles bombing a few weeks ago, for example.”

Others insisted that the bombing had nothing to do with labour politics, but rather that it was a personal vendetta against Woolridge. However, in the spring of 1933, the lobby of the Royal Theatre was blown apart by a bomb blast that was so powerful that it shattered numerous windows of the Dawson Building and the Balmoral Hotel across the street. Some people thought that incident might have had something to do with the radical Workers’ Unity League, which gathered at the Royal the night before to celebrate the anniversary of the Paris Commune, though no evidence was produced to support this claim.

Most likely, the bombings were indeed the work of the American mob. At the time, Willie “the Pimp” Bioff was in the process of helping the mafia take control of IATSE as part of a strategy to extort Hollywood studios by targeting individual theatres in various cities with strikes and intimidation. Bioff himself would later be killed by a car bomb for being a rat.

Wally Woolridge died in 1960 at the age of 75.

Source: Photo by Stuart Thomson, City of Vancouver Archives #99-4113

Source: searcharchives.vancouver.ca