Roots
East Vancouver, 1933. The youngest of a rather large family of Swedish immigrants.
Ralph Sultan was born on June 6, 1933, into a house-painting family in the Mt. Pleasant district of East Vancouver. These were Depression years, and money was scarce. The story of his life began in a modest three-bedroom house filled with eight brothers and sisters, long before Harvard, The Royal Bank, or the BC Legislature.
The Early Years
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Ralph Sultan was the youngest of eight children of John and Selma Sultan, who had immigrated to Canada from the small villages of Grästorp and Sunnantorp in Sweden. They ran a house-painting business and lived in a three-bedroom house in the Mt. Pleasant district of East Vancouver. These were Depression years; money was scarce. Ralph’s first jobs: Age ten, helping an uncle build a cabin at Kawkawa Lake. Age fourteen, painting houses alongside his father, his brothers, and his sisters.
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During World War II, Ralph’s three older brothers served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. His brother Sigurd earned the highest RAF medal for accurate mine laying at Königsberg Canal from a Lancaster bomber. After the war, his brother Paul earned a PhD in labour economics at Cornell, and pioneered what became known as the Phillips curve. His siblings shaped Ralph's own ambitions.
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Ralph attended Florence Nightingale Public School, where at age eight he sold wartime savings stamps to his classmates, once fainting mid-pitch and knocking himself out on the corner of a desk. At King Edward High School he edited the school newspaper and was named class valedictorian, though his run for class president ended in a decisive loss to the school's most popular athlete.