Bob Erlam belongs in the Yukon’s colourful five percent. As one time owner of the Whitehorse Star, he has to be. With Bob Erlam, the ideas just kept coming. More often than not, they were offbeat stories with a…
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Ralph Hudson was at home on two courts. The basketball court and the court of law. Born and raised in Victoria, he was better known to his many friends as Buzz. On the basketball court, he played for the University…
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His real name was Jimmy Richards but I never knew anyone who called him anything but Buzzsaw Jimmy.
It’s a nickname he earned for the unsafe but effective contraption he used to cut cord wood.
By looking at Jimmy, you…
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When the young man arrived in Whitehorse in 1949, he was looking for adventure – or maybe just a job. Over the years, he found both - and more.
Paul Lucier was nineteen when he made his way from Windsor…
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Let George do it. That’s a motto that seems to symbolize the history of fastball in Whitehorse. When I was playing the sport back in sixties, we counted on George Kolkind, that is. The elderly gentleman was always there for…
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It’s a long way from describing the Sourdough Rendezvous dog races on radio to doing the play-by-play broadcasts for the San Jose Sharks of the National Hockey League. However, it’s a journey Randy Hahn made with relative ease.
He…
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It was an historic day for native people in the Yukon. In February, 1973, representatives for the Yukon Native Brotherhood were in Ottawa to present their Yukon land claim.
Led by Chief Elijah Smith, they delivered a document called 'Together…
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When Audrey McLaughlin loaded her pickup truck and headed west from Ontario in 1979, she could not have imagined the roller-coaster ride that in ten years would take her into Canadian history book.
Ontario-born Audrey Brown married a mink rancher,…
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When I first met him in the late 1960s, he liked to be called Klondike Dick. Richard Finnie had a soft spot for Dawson City where he was born in 1906. His father O.C.S. Finnie was a mining recorder at…
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Back in 1959, my last year in high school, I and three of my school chums played in the Whitehorse Senior men’s hockey league. We were all fresh out of Juvenile hockey, barely old enough to drive and had the…
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The lot in life for Oblate Priests who made the long journey from France to the Canadian north was to provide spiritual guidance in very isolated communities. It was no different for Father Jean Mouchet who arrived in Canada from…
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His dad has been the architect who designed the Parliament buildings in Ottawa, among other great Canadian buildings. So there was good lineage for the man who designed the Yukon's first official post office. The first post office in Dawson…
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Christopher William Pearson arrived in the Yukon in 1957. He worked for the Territorial government until 1973, and then went into private business. In 1978, Chris became a politician and was elected to the Yukon Legislature. For the first time,…
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Canada's centennial year, 1967, was an exciting time in the Yukon. There were all kinds of celebrations and projects. Unnamed mountains were being climbed. The Yukon River flotilla saw boats of every description heading from Whitehorse to Dawson. Most of…
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Here at home, I have a beat-up old curling broom. A real broom. Not the kind of shot-enhancing devices that curlers use these days to control the speed and curl of the rocks. Nope, this one is a real corn…
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When Whitehorse was incorporated as a city in 1950, the first Mayor was a jovial character with an infectious smile and impeccable work ethic. Gordon Armstrong needed those qualities and more. The tiny town was a disorganized hodgepodge of many…
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On a cool morning of November 7th, 1971, a Cessna 172 aircraft took off from the Whitehorse airport. Four young people on board were going on a sight-seeing tour of Carcross and Tagish. That tour took on dramatic proportions when…
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