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 born on June 6, 1933, the youngest of eight children of Swedish immigrants John and Selma Sultan. The family ran a house-painting business and lived in a modest three-bedroom house in the Mt. Pleasant district. These were Depression years, and money was scarce. Ralph's first jobs were helping an uncle build a cabin at Kawkawa Lake and painting alongside his father and his brothers and sisters.
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His parents had emigrated from Grästorp and Sunnantorp in Sweden. Three of Ralph's older brothers served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. His brother Paul went on to earn a PhD in labour economics and became known for early work on what later became the Phillips curve. Paul's path 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.