Vancouver owner shocked home has unpaid mortgage from 1963: For $1,900

A woman who has lived in her parents’ east Vancouver house since she was a baby was shocked to learn that 60 years later it has an outstanding mortgage.

Her parents, Marcello Stefanon, a terrazzo tradesman, and Maria Stefanon, bought the house on East 16th Avenue in the Renfrew-Collingwood neighbourhood for $16,000 with an $11,000 mortgage.

They moved in to the tidy bungalow when Stefanon was three months old, on Nov. 22, 1963, auspicious as the day U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, something she remembers her mother commenting on later.

But why her parents took out a second mortgage a few weeks later from a couple named John Reginald Oliver, a salesman, and Mary Florence Oliver, “I don’t know.” She likely never will since her parents and John have died and Mary is likely deceased.