Treasured Memories

By Bev and Bert Furlong
During 1939 Boeing set up a plant at Sea Island Airport in Vancouver, initially to build Blackburn Sharks, of which seventeen were built.  The plant also built 362 Consolidated PBY aircraft, both the Flying Boat and the Amphibian versions.  Bev’s mother, Anna Madalen Fahrni, who had a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Manitoba, got a position working in the Test Lab, where part of her job was testing rivets.  One day she made a small ring out of one of her test specimens. Madalen wore the ring until just before she passed away in July 2008, when she passed the ring on to Bev who has worn it ever since. 
In 2019 Bev and Bert went to an airshow in McMinnville, Oregon where they flew in a Boeing built PBY-5A, that Madalen helped to build.  The aircraft is credited with the sinking of a Nazi U-Boat.  Now the ring is a treasured memento of when everyone was part of a common effort to defeat the enemy.
Madalen Fahrni (in the centre) working in the Process Control Laboratory in Boeing’s Plant 3 on Sea Island.
Throughout the Second World War the British Commonwealth Air Training Program (BCATP) had training facilities across Canada with some in Calgary.  Airmen came from across the world to train there, including one young man from Australia.  Eventually, this young man met Bert’s mother, Amabel Turner, who worked in the basement of the Hudson’s Bay store in downtown Calgary packing parcels to go to service men and women overseas. The two went out on a date and he gave her a small pin to remember him. The pin shows a Martin 130 China Clipper of Pan American Airways. The young man was shipped off overseas and Amabel never saw or heard from him again. Before she passed away in 1989, she gave the pin to Bert. Bert does not know if his mother recalled the name of the young man or not, but it is now a treasured memory of a young Unknown Australian Airman. 
​The pin Bert received from his mother on the left and the ring Bev has from her mother on the right. 
Both of Bev and Bert’s mothers married young men from the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) who served overseas, and several other relatives on both sides of our families served in the all three branches of Canadian Armed Forces. Madalen married Gordon Smith who served as a Medic with the RCAF both in England and in Holland, and after the war became a family doctor. Amabel married William (Bill) Furlong who continued to serve in the RCAF until he passed away in 1959.
Gordon and Madalen Smith
Bill and Amabel Furlong
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