Don’t let his beard or his size fool you, say friends, co-workers and bandmates of fallen Vancouver Park Board arborist Jody Taylor. He had a heart of gold.
“He comes off as a grumpy guy. But he’s a super huge teddy bear once you get to know him. He’ll do anything for you,” said Lennox Lobban, Taylor’s partner in a Park Board bucket truck for 13 years. “It’s been very hard. All of us, we lost a really good friend.”
Lennox is just one of several people sharing amazing stories of Taylor’s life and art – stories that include helping save a woman from a burning building, taking a popular Vancouver hardcore band touring across Europe, even saving a pregnant raccoon from a tree.
And they want to keep his memory alive for the ten-year-old daughter Taylor’s death leaves behind. Friends have already raised $10,000 on a GoFundMe page for an education savings plan for Tristen Taylor, started by former bandmate John Franco.
“I have no words. He was a pillar to me. He was more than just a guy in a band. He was my brother,” Franco told CTV News.
Taylor died Thursday while doing a routine job, pruning heavy branches from a Catalpa tree that was leaning into Kitsilano’s Connaught Park.
The branch split and fell, crushing him in his bucket truck. It’s not yet clear what happened.
It was especially hard news for Lobban to hear. Taylor’s partner spent most of those 13 years in that bucket truck, working with trees all over Vancouver.
In 2005, the pair were working near East 7th Avenue and Rupert Street when Taylor spied smoke coming from a nearby house. Lobban told him to pull down the bucket and they jumped in the truck to get to the house.
“We ran over. The lady had just come out of the house at the back. Jody got to her first. She climbed on his back and walked around to the front where it was safe. From there, we went to action to make sure there was no one else in the house,” he said.
Then, Lobban and a worker with BC Gas leaned in through a smoking window to turn off the gas.
“There was smoke all over the place,” Lobban said.
Video from CTV News archives shows a bungalow consumed in fire, with firefighters wandering through in full gear.
Both Lobban and Taylor were taken to the hospital with smoke inhalation. Firefighters hailed the pair’s good work along with another good Samaritan, giving them a Certificate of Commendation.
“It was the right thing to do. We didn’t do it to be recognized or to be a story. We did it because we’d have done it no matter what,” he said.
A year later, on CTV News archive video, Lobban and Taylor can be seen arriving at the scene of one of their most unusual calls, on Jervis and Davie Streets: a pregnant raccoon stuck in a tree.
“We’ll have to get all this off first,” Taylor says, pointing at the branches of the Catalpa tree the raccoon was dangling from.
Officials had already tried to coax the pregnant raccoon from the tree. Others had sedated it, greased it up, and tried to pull it down. To no avail.
That’s when the pair ascended to the tree in the bucket, and chain sawed off the limb with the raccoon still inside.
Once on the ground, the raccoon still had to be sawed out of the tree. So Lobban and Taylor did that too – coming within inches of its fur.
“Were you nervous, cutting in like that?” asked CTV reporter Rob Brown at the time. “Yep,” said Lobban.
The raccoon was saved, and then it was back to work, said Lobban.
“Once we finished the job, it was back to what we did normally,” he said. “A little bit of excitement over a couple days.”
Before he started working at the Park Board, Taylor was the vocalist for popular Vancouver hardcore band Strain. “He wrote with his heart, his howl, his heartache. No one wrote words like that in those days,” Franco said.
Photos at the time show him belting out lyrics into the microphone, surrounded by fans cheering him on. One show at the Town Pump in Vancouver stays in John Franco’s mind.
“Strain played with Seaweed I believe. All the kids from Seattle came out. The Undertow guys. The place exploded for Strain. They were built up listening to Strain EPs,” Franco remembered.
“Everybody in Strain was floored, couldn’t believe what was happening. Every word, they dog-piled on Jody. He was loving it. It was a place in life he cherished the most,” he said.
Franco went to Europe and toured with the band. In those photos, Taylor can be seen sticking his tongue out and mugging for the camera.
“We bonded together. Whenever he talked about it, he lit up. He talked to me, I saw it in his eyes. He would tell people about these experiences. To have someone in my life like that is extremely rare,” Franco said.
A memorial is growing for Taylor at the tree that came down. And his death is causing his coworkers to do everything a little bit slower, just in case.
“It could have been me,” Lobban said. “I think most of the guys are going to be second guessing themselves for the next little while. They’re going to be worried.”
Now so many people are coming together to support Taylor’s daughter Tristen, Franco said.
“Everyone I’ve talked to, it’s so overwhelming how many people are touched by Jody. Their first words are, ‘Tristen, oh my god.’ We are there for her for her life and we want to throw it out there she can come to us any time in her life and ask about her father. We’ll tell her stories,” he said.
They will have plenty to tell.
Jody’s celebration of life will be held Saturday, April 9th at 1 p.m. at the Maple Ridge Baptist Church (22155 Lougheed Highway).
The Vancouver Park Board also has a parallel youcaring fundraising page also as a legacy for Taylor's daughter.
