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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There’s something about long time Yukon families that remind me of that pleasant old song from the late forties. It was called Dear Hearts and Gentle People.
The Ryder family of Whitehorse were dear hearts - important members of Yukon…
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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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A time long ago and far away, I produced a series of radio programs for kids called The Adventurers of Ookpik, the arctic owl. The stories of Ookpik’s adventurers were brought to life through a variety of arctic animals who…
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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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One of the delights in attending the Whitehorse Elementary High School on Fourth Avenue, back in the fifties, was taking art class. Strangely, as I recall, art was a mandatory subject until about grade ten. I can’t imagine why because…
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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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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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My first airplane flight came in 1954 when I flew from Whitehorse to Dawson City where I would spend the summer holidays with my brother who was the Canadian Pacific airlines agent in the gold rush city.
Was the aircraft…
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The Yukon lost a little bit of its soul. That's the way a noted Yukon historian described the reaction on that Friday back in 1974, when the Whitehorse and the Casca were reduced to ashes.
Two grand old veterans of…
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