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Pemberton woman profiled in new book

More Moxie than Money to celebrate 50 years of women in business
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Built for Business From left to right: Denize Callaway, Bernice Davidson, and Donna Denham

A retired businesswoman now living in Pemberton is the subject of an upcoming book that celebrates 50 years of women in business.

Denize Callaway, the founder of Tri-C Secretarial Services Inc., a company that has operated in Vancouver for over 50 years, is the subject of More Moxie than Money by North Vancouver-based personal historian Bernice Davidson, who herself worked for Callaway at the company.

The book tells the story of three women who have operated a company that started small in Vancouver in 1957 and that went on to grow to over eight times the size it was when it began, according to Davidson.

For her, the book is a chance to commemorate the business’s 50-year history and tell the story of how it began and then changed over the years.

Davidson’s journey with Tri-C Secretarial Services began in Revelstoke, where she lived in an unhappy marriage and operated a fish and chips restaurant with her husband. Their relationship was bad enough that one day she packed two suitcases with some basic clothing and carted off with her daughter to Vancouver, where she set about starting a new life.

Her son, already in Vancouver, was fixing a photocopier in the Tri-C Secretarial Services office on Burrard Street. Seeing that it was a busy office, he told his mother that they could probably use some help. It was there that she met Denize Callaway.

“I was given a letter to type the woman said to me, okay, do you want to stay and work now or come back tomorrow?” Davidson said. “That was how it was, and that's how I started working there.”

It would be the beginning of a partnership.

Callaway formed Tri-C Secretarial Services in March of 1957, after being fired from her job as a secretary with the McCormick’s biscuits company on New Year’s Eve. Though upset by the firing, it nevertheless marked the start of a new life for her.

“They decided that they had somebody else that they wanted to have the job in the office,” she says. “It was a very sad New Year's Eve for me for a while, but then it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me.”

After working at McCormick’s she took up secretarial work with an agency in Vancouver. She found herself becoming bored, as the company did not keep her busy enough.

“I saw how much the company was making and how little I was making, and then I thought ‘hey, I’m on the wrong side of the stick here,’” she said. “I’m going to jump over the fence and I’ll be the boss and I’ll hire people and pay them a little bit of money.”

She and two friends got together and decided to start a company on their own. Her original partners, however, did not want to change their careers and left her to start Tri-C Secretarial Services.

Callaway says the biggest challenge was establishing a name for herself in the Vancouver business scene, but she also had enough financial trouble that she wound up operating the company out of someone else’s office. She had a friend with an office on Cardero and Georgia in downtown Vancouver who said she could use his office equipment if she did some secretarial work for him.

She then set about calling all the businesspeople in the West End to offer up her secretarial services.

“Fortunately for someone like me, there was a lot of young people who’d been in the war,” Callaway said. “A lot of the people had gone back to university… UBC was graduating a lot of young people there in architecture, engineering, all kinds of services, and so these young people were trying to get into business for themselves.

“We could provide the type of service they needed if they were working on their own by doing their typing and their copying and things like that.”

While other secretarial services sent employees out into other companies’ offices, Callaway brought the work into her office.

“We just sort of reversed the trend a little bit,” she said. “I think I was probably the first service who did this because most secretarial services that were operating at that time… they would send somebody out to somebody’s office for a day or two or a week or whatever.”

Tri-C Secretarial Services took on a variety of groups over the years, a clientele that came to include associations such as the Canadian Club of Vancouver. Tri-C Secretarial Services would help organize events with the Canadian Club that would include guests such as the Prince of Wales and the publisher of the Globe and Mail.

It was around this time that Davidson began her work with the company.

“I came from Revelstoke where I was making fish and chips, and I came down here and about two years later I’m sitting in the Royal Suite at the Hotel Vancouver waiting for the publisher of the Globe and Mail to come,” she says.

Looking back on her time with the company, Davidson sees Callaway as a tough, capable and professional woman who was also a very supportive boss when she started working for her.

“If I needed time off to handle my personal life there was never any question about that, just go and do what you need to get done,” she said. “One day my son ended up working out of town and he came to town and (Callaway) said, ‘Away you go and spend a day with him.’”

More Moxie than Money will have its official launch in Vancouver on Friday, May 23, at the current offices of the company, which is now called Support Services Unlimited.

Davidson ultimately hopes to tell a story about what women can do with limited financial resources, but who can still see opportunities rather than roadblocks.

“When you come from making fish and chips in Revelstoke to doing that, it’s a wonderful thing, so no wonder I wanted to write about it,” she said.