1948 Yukon Nuggets

Jimmy Quong

If anyone knew the Alaska Highway better than Jimmy Quong, I would like to meet him. For most his adult life, this unassuming gentleman worked on and for the highway.

A Vancouver native, Jim Quong started working on the Alaska Highway in May, 1942, with the U.S. Public Roads Administration in Fort St. John. As a draftsman, Quong provided engineering drawings of everything needed to make a highway work properly. And he was meticulous about the job.

Quong’s name is associated with bridges through the entire length of the highway. He was there in 1943 when the first Peace River bridge at Taylor, half-way between Fort St. John and Dawson Creek, collapsed - and he helped design its replacement. This introduced the young draftsman to the challenges of creating a steel structure from his scale drawings.

Jimmy Quong was known to his colleagues as the man who put everything on paper. Not only drawings of bridges and culverts and road beds, but also photographic images. His professional life was engineering design, but his love was taking pictures and developing them himself.

Quong was a key engineer in designing bridges on the Dempster Highway, the Donjek River, Nisutlin Bay (the longest on the Alaska Highway) and the bridges over the Yukon River at Marsh Lake. He also helped design the complicated roadway we know as the Skagway Road. All the while, he kept a photographic record of the work.

Not surprisingly, Jimmy Quong was one of the very few engineers admitted to the profession without a university degree, choosing instead the laborious examination route while working on the job.

 

During his career, he worked for the American and Canadian militaries and, finally, with the Department of Public Works. All the while, Jimmy Quong packed his camera, recording construction projects as well as other aspects of life in the Yukon - church gatherings, family events, everyday Yukon scenes. Many of his photos are now important museum artifacts in the Yukon and beyond.

 

At his retirement they gave him a Life Membership in the Association of Professional Engineers of Yukon in recognition of his dedication to the profession.

Jimmy Quong passed away in Vancouver at the age of eighty-six.

 

A CKRW Yukon Nugget by Les McLaughlin.