Living Landscapes: Memories of the Project

The lineup of buses that used to be outside the cafeteria or where the Bay was … maybe a half a dozen sometimes and they would load up people with hardhats on, very quiet … Ken Johnson would get on – and he was one of these “90-day wonders” - and within ten minutes to the site he would have been telling a story to everybody … have them laughing or have them singing.  (Ron Whyte)

The buses used to come round to the construction site, pick up the construction people, take them back up to the Mess Hall for lunch and then take them back to the job.  These buses got earlier and earlier and earlier until by about a quarter to 12 the busses were already there.  Of course the guys would look and say, ok the bus is there, in you get, off you go.  JB [Whitton] was trundling around in this truck and there was this bus at about 10 to 12, fully loaded, about to take off, he stopped his jeep, he got on the bus and said to the driver ‘Drive to the payroll office” and the driver did and he said “All you guys are fired.” … and he said to the driver “Your fired too, for letting them on.”  So they all got fired and left.  (Bill Moore)

The beauty of working for J.B. is that if you worked for him, he had the privilege of reaming you out if necessary, but no one else better.  If anyone else bad mouthed you JB would be on them like a ton of bricks.  (Bill Moore)

During the construction years, thousands made Kitimat their temporary home.  Housing was a challenge and many ways were found to house all the personnel in bunkhouses, trailers, small houses on skids, and an old sternwheeler, the Delta King, all in various camps between Smeltersite and Townsite.  John Pousette remembers:

One of my first assignments was to accommodate people, make sure there was accommodation for people who were coming and of course KC – Kitimat Constructors – were very much in control of accommodations.  So I had to arrange for a place for them [new employees] to sleep, I also gave them the introductory interview to the place and introduced them to the kitchen, made sure they had blankets and all the things that had to be done.  We were given first the Delta King and then we had some temporary tents that were down beside the old Helen’s Café.  Dave Chow was running the restaurant, and he was very helpful with us because the gambling tent and the first two tents we had for accommodation were down beside his restaurant.  He had a temporary restaurant down by the beach there.  (John Pousette)

…accommodations were pretty scarce at the time so I lived in a tent with … 5 other fellows… That was down on the flats before you got to the … Alcan property. But I wasn’t there very long when the chief operator offered me a room in his house. So I sent for my wife and we lived in Jerry Savard’s house for a period of time until we could rent a house on Gull Street. They made a basement apartment.  (Noel Lewis-Watts)

Ron Whyte, during his time working in Alcan’s Vancouver office, learned more about the accommodation:

At the other end of the office was Dunkelberger who was … the person responsible for buying the Delta King.  He had this clause in the Aluminum Company, he was an American, he was a very smart dresser … he knew what to do and he knew how to get it done… I believe that through his contacts in the States he was responsible for moving the 350 plus [housing] units plus other equipment after the job was done up here.  Somebody had to do it so they formed a disposal operation which he headed out of the Vancouver office

…all along we were just “tooth and jowl”.  There were four houses of us in a row, and of course there was no phone….but if house number one flushed the toilet, it would go through all the houses and so we’d get together for coffee in the evening and you’d flush, and so you could tell by the sound of the flushes which house…they were hosting the coffee party.  (Mary Hermann)

I thought the housing was great. It was this little shack but it was a house, and the view was spectacular…to look out your window and to walk outside!”  Lots of dust, a tremendous amount of flies – those awful horseflies that take the flesh right out of you when they bite…and a whole new world because I’d never been in construction before ever and I met many, many, wonderful, wonderful people.  Friends we still have today.  We had a bond there because it was so isolated, that you had to do within yourselves, everything.  (Mary Hermann)

We sent out to Woodward’s every week for everything we needed and that’s bobby pins, tea towels, whatever.  Everything!  Everything you needed in your house, you sent an order to Woodward’s and bless their hearts…they didn’t charge anything for shipment….What you go to the store for today – everything came up on that boat and that was the big night.  [The] boat came in on Saturday night, down you went and got all your nice supplies and your mail and of course the men had all this liquor that they’d ordered.  The police would hold some of it back so it wouldn’t be used all in one night…  (Mary Hermann)

Margaret Kinnear and her son Mike arrived in Kitimat on December 6, 1953. 

We came up from Vancouver on the Princess Norah. We had the car on board and everything, so we arrived at the wharf and settled into our Smeltersite house. Guy [her husband] was already there.  We took the car with us – I remember them loading it… it was hanging over the ocean.” … Our first house was in the Smeltersite…. a prefab house with three bedrooms and one living room with an oil stove to heat the whole place. Everything was in the living room --- washer, dryer and stove.  It was a little crowded for a while. 

(Life) was very interesting. Guy worked so hard….he wasn’t home very much. He was always down at the plant. I cooked my first Christmas dinner. We had some fellows in whose wives hadn’t arrived yet…. that was in the smeltersite house. We had friends there, of course, ….from Arvida and British Guyana too….(Margaret Kinnear) 

I entertained quite a bit. We played bridge and we had tea parties… I was having a tea party the night the transmission towers went out… we didn’t see Dad for four days after that…. between Kitimat and Kemano. That was never supposed to happen according to the engineering results. Of course the townsite didn’t have any power for a couple of days and I think my Dad arranged for BC Hydro to bring in a generator up the railway tracks so at least they could get some power going into the town. It was a fairly exciting 10 days not to have the power on. (Mike Kinnear)

As the Project expanded, smaller camps such as Moore Creek and Anderson Creek were opened.  Anderson Hill Camp was a further addition for arriving families.  Each was provided with a trailer and an addition.  It was only a matter of time before citizens figured they could build their own additions.  Scrounging resulted, and the additions were aptly named “Joey Shacks” after the cartoon character Joey, bungling Company employee, created by Al Beaton.  In those first urgent years of construction (1951 – 1955), Kitimat Constructors or K.C. published a weekly newspaper called Casey Sez. 

The editors were Jim Scott who had started the paper in September 1951, and Al Beaton who took over “Casey” in the spring of 1952:

Beaton was a roommate at the last part.  He was definitely a person that had his own mind.  He was able to not only paint it, draw it and say it and the proof in the pudding the Vancouver Province had him … he put out the local weekly paper and it was Joey – he was Joey and Joey was getting in trouble with the security people, or didn’t like the dust on the highway.  His favourite pose – he’d have his hand on his knee opposite … in a crouch position and somebody would be telling a story in a room on a Saturday night and having a beer and he’d interrupt usually halfway through the story … he’d step outside after a few drinks  there, maybe a garbage pail nearby, and he would throw it down the hallway or something ridiculous and make a lot of noise and then come back in the room and peer out and say, “Who’s making all that noise out there?”  That’s the type of person he was in a way.  (Ron Whyte)  

 

When my Dad worked for Kitimat Constructors he was payroll master and he had a staff. He was actually put into character by Al Beaton in the Al Beaton series, standing there with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, looking out the window, while another worker was attending to payroll.

He was actually tending to one who came in for a check. On the desk you can see a heart-shaped inscription with Dad’s initials AC, for Art Coghlin. I thought that was quite memorable for Al Beaton to caricaturize my Dad.”  (Terry Voitchovsky neé Coghlin)

Camp life had its perks. Smeltersite had lighted streets, a Hudson’s Bay, bank, cafeterias, school, post office, hospital, RCMP, recreation hall, and small shops. The Hudson’s Bay Trading Company, like its wilderness outposts, sold everything, including groceries.  The Baxters were very involved in the initial set up of the grocery distribution:

[Basil] asked me to send a list of the sort of things wives would need when they were shopping – this was when they were first setting up the grocery store part of the Bay.  There was a lot of things they didn’t have and if you wanted much of a variety with fresh fruit and vegetables and meat and so on what we used to do was we used to send a list down to Woodward’s and the Woodward’s personal shopper would get it and then they would send it up on the boat, and then we would have what we needed, so you didn’t forget the salt or something on your shopping list. One or two others decided that this was a good idea so they asked Basil “Would you mind if we gave you a list?” and so it ended up that – I don’t know how many of us he was buying for in the end – but he used to make a long list of all the various things, and of course he didn’t do them separately because it was a bit of a bother to do more differently, pack and so on, so they all used to come up, the meat was in dry ice and then he used to open all the boxes, once we got them off the boat, and then he’d have everybody’s shopping list and he would make up the boxes and then they would come round that night and collect it all.  (Cathy Baxter)

You had to make your own entertainment and find things to do to fill your time.  The recreation halls were beehives of activity.  There were nightly movies, amateur theatre, talent shows, art exhibitions, and concerts.  Sports at the recreation halls included table tennis, basketball and floor hockey.  Social clubs, a discussion group, a library, and a lecture series on photography started up:

I spent half the night developing things in the Camera Club. … Somebody decided to sell their equipment, it was an enlarger, a printer and all the paper and the liquid and everything, so I took it to my room … two or three o’clock in the morning I was still developing pictures.  Not from the point of view of taking pictures and framing them and putting them on the wall as camera clubs do.  It wasn’t that to me – it was learning the process and use of the equipment that really got me going.  (Ron Whyte)  

At the time I was there there were twelve girls and about 2500 men. … I was sort of involved with the entertainment part of it because the office I worked in there was a chap there from England called Bill Hutchison and he was very good at the piano, and so he and I sort of collaborated.  He wrote the music and I wrote the words to songs for the musicals we’d put on.  We put on ‘The Shooting of Dan Mac Grew’, which was one of the things we’d put on and I was the lady in the photograph, and at the end of the play I stepped out of the photograph and down onto the counter and danced.  … Half the cast had been drinking and they’d forget their lines and they’d say ‘What comes next June?’ and without trying to move I would tell them what was the next line.  We’d put on dances and there would be these few girls to dance with all these men, and by the time the evening was over, with their big, clodhopper boots you were ready to put your feet in a bucket of water.  … You have to make your own entertainment in places like that.  (June DeLory)
  
[Fire Chief] Aubrey Creed…decided we would have a library.  Well, I was in charge of the bunkhouses down below and so I got all the fellows who were doing the cleaning up and that sort of thing, every time there was a little paperback – because everybody was reading, that was the main entertainment – would throw them away.  So what we did, we got Aubrey Creed, in his old fire hall … to put shelves along one side of the old fire engine and across the front, and so we filled those shelves with magazines, paperbacks and so we established the first library.  (John Pousette)

Anderson Creek Camp had a twelve-lane bowling alley, billiards and snooker.  Drinking and gambling added to Kitimat’s early reputation as a crazy frontier town.  Gambling and liquor was overseen by camp security – gambling tents were set up and liquor orders were distributed and held by the security men.  They were there to keep the peace and keep people safe.  Of course, safety was often challenged but every event that occurred with the men was taken in stride:

[The gambling tent] was like something out of the Klondike; it was a tent, literally a tent.  And you would go in there … everyone was smoking so there would be a sort of layer and you’d have to sort of peer underneath it to see the action.  That went on for ages.  They would get people who would come in, gamble, make a stake and go out in the boat, and they’d continue to gamble on the boat.  Wouldn’t get off, because by the time they got to Vancouver they were clean out and then come back to Kitimat to make a stake.  (Bill Moore)

John [Grey] had a nice little car and he was parked in front of our house…and there was this great big culvert hole.  It was about fifty feet away…John used to come out and stay overnight because he was afraid he was going to be killed on the Delta King with these guys throwing bottles around at night.  He used to sleep with his head in…a wooden box….So the lights go on and John and Art and I all jump up and John looks out there and his car is gone…Well this big fellow come down the road in this Edsel and he was drunk and he hit John’s car right at the back and he hit so hard that he threw it over and it landed upright in this hole and the top of the car was about a foot below the ground level….Well the fellows [from the Townsite Camp] would come up to in front of our house to wait for the bus…and so they would go and stand on top of this car and have their pictures taken, and it was just hilarious, you see some guy standing there posing and he’s straightening his hair, and having his photo taken…  (June Coultan)

Cathy Baxter and Iona Burnett opened stores in their Smeltersite homes:

I started it in the front room, and really and truly it was because with all the children and they had birthday parties and so on - there was nowhere to buy anything.  We had toys, games and started from there.  We were sort of pushing everybody out of the front room by this time, so Pat Wright’s wife, she lived behind me, she came in with me and … then Basil built this piece onto the house – little, wee shed affair attached to the house - and I had the store in there, and then I had Avon products.  Iona Burnett, she was two houses up from me in front.  She started the same sort of thing with clothes, ladies clothes.  So we used to go to Iona’s for a new dress…I remember going to her for a Christmas dress; one for Christmas and one for New Year.

The food in the cafeterias in Kemano and Kitimat was provided by the Canadian outfit Crawley, McCracken and was first rate.  The main cafeteria above the Hudson’s Bay Trading Company at Smeltersite was able to feed 1800 men daily around the clock:   

Since construction was on…24 hours a day, the Blue Room or the Mess Hall…the shift coming off had dinner at 7 in the morning.  You could have breakfast when you’re going on day shift around the same time.  You came home for lunch at noon.  The shift going on had dinner at 4 o’clock.  The shift coming off had breakfast and we coming off day shift had dinner.  Then again at night you could go in for another meal at midnight.  I must of gained about thirty pounds there.  Because that’s all we had to do…Your job ended at 5 o’clock or so.  You gathered and you drank scotch between 5 and 7 until you could get into the dining room and then of course at 8 you might go to a movie that night down in the old hall and then that was it.  So there wasn’t much to do, and even in those days, radio wasn’t very good either.  I can remember clearly – we were interested in a Grey Cup…and we used to run around with our radio looking for a hill to try to pick up the ball game so there wasn’t… in the daytime very good radio communication…  (Harry McLellan)

…they also packed lunches…There were two or three fellows in there in the kitchen just packing lunches for the men to take with them down to the Smeltersite…the four to twelve shift used to get a dinner at midnight and the others would get breakfast…it was all around the clock.  It was a real food factory.  You could smell food cooking all the time….Every Saturday night was steak night and strawberries and ice cream at our camp and Sunday was always turkey.  Every Sunday of the year it was turkey, and for a change of pace, families from the Smeltersite used to come out and pay for a dinner at Townsite Camp just as a treat because where do you go?  You go to Dave Chow’s café and that was always jammed full of guys – bearded guys you know, pushing in and out, and so the families with young children would come out and they’d eat at the camp.  (June Coultan)

Dave Chow’s restaurant, Helen’s Café, was in the same complex as the Smeltersite Recreation Hall.  It was an extremely popular place with the workers – many fellows went there for their meals and as a meeting place:

Dave Chow had a good restaurant down there….I ate there for a couple of years.  Anything you wanted – steaks, breaded veal cutlets, stews, soups, anything.  It was full service.  (Harry McLellan)

Many of the workers had left behind families to come to Kitimat.  The Hermanns had many fellows come to call:

A lot of fellows from the bunkhouses who were up there on their own…our house was open house for a lot of those young people….Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday dinner ... (Mary Hermann)

Fishing was a popular pastime for many, as was hunting:

…the people in the camps.  There was very little for them to do after work – very, very little.  So fishing was a big thing and every single night there’d be a knock on the door and of course they couldn’t serve the salmon in the cook’s shop and some nights we’d get 70 pounds of salmon to cook and I’d freeze it and I’d use it and finally we buried it because what else are you going to do.  We had the best garden you ever saw in your life….The salmon coming out of our ears…all these people.  (Mary Hermann)

Charlie Fox was a very nice boss.  He liked fishing too.  And if you took off early in the morning to get to work at 8:30 or 7:30, whenever it was we started, and you spent an hour down there at the bridge.  You’d park beside the bridge – you’d get down underneath the bridge, and you want to do a little bit of fishing for an hour or so.  If you had a fish on, you’d play that fish until you got it, and then as long as you took that fish in, it didn’t matter if you didn’t show up until three o’clock in the afternoon as long as that fish was on there fighting you and you fighting the fish, Charlie wouldn’t say a word.  “Charlie, I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry, but look at what happened to me.” You’re holding onto a fifteen or twenty pound salmon.  “Oh that’s alright Dutch.” [If you were late for work and no fish] that was a different story.  (A.E. “Dutch” Vrooman)

We went out duck shooting with Wynne-Jones – this guy Vince Critchley had a 40 foot boat – an ex fishing boat.  … Down to Cleo Bay and Passion Cove.  We were going to go duck shooting in the morning – we went out the evening before and bedded down in the boat.  … Wynne Jones regaled us with stories of how he went shooting here and he shot so many duck and we were sitting there, absolutely glued to every word he said … amazing, gosh, he must be a good shot, terrific!   Well, in the morning we were going over to Bish Creek … we were set down on the shore and we were going to go over this little ridge between Bish Creek and sort of see if there were any duck in Bish Creek. Wynne Jones went in the little row boat with one guy and they went round the headland … we were high-tailing it over, going through all the brush and bramble and stuff and we heard bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!  We said Oh, my God, we’re too late, he’s really into a flock of ducks!  And we came over and the sight that greeted our eyes – the shooting stopped just before we got there – Wynne Jones was standing up in the boat, this little row boat, he had an oar firmly clasped and this poor wounded duck was sticking it’s head up and he was going whompf – trying to kill this duck with an oar.  All this firing had been one duck that he’d wounded.  (Bill Moore)

It was almost like a family, you know, you all got in together, you helped each other, every Friday night we used to go down to the wharf to see who was coming - some poor fellow waiting for his wife and kids to arrive – and we used to do things to help them get the house ready and all that.  It was exciting; every Friday… of course you were waiting for your mail.  (Cathy Baxter)

Before joining her husband Basil in Kitimat, Cathy Baxter sent baking, mended socks, letters and many much desired items to Basil on a regular basis:

… every week he used to get cake and cookies and stuff because they were well fed in the bunkhouses – they had steaks coming out of their ears – but they didn’t get the sort of things you would get at home.  Of course, there was nowhere to go to buy a packet of biscuits or anything that you felt like.  Every week he used to get what I used to call his Red Cross Parcel, like he got when he was a Prisoner of War.  He was very popular because all the other fellows shared in, and then I remember at one stage where he said would I send him a teapot and some tea?  So I sent him a teapot and some tea – from then on at night in the bunkhouse they always used to have a cup of tea.

Many women with children in tow were re-united with their husbands.  Soon schools had to be formed at Smeltersite, Kemano, and West Tahtsa Lake.  In Smeltersite, Cathy Baxter recalls:

There was no school – they did start a kindergarten.  It was quite funny because in one letter that Basil wrote me before I ever got there…at that time in BC if there were six kids you had to have a teacher, and they figured with our two and the Wynne-Joneses and Wilbur [Hallmans] we could get a teacher, because we were thinking about the future.

Most of those who came to work in construction were young people with young families:

…everyone was twenty-five and had two or three little kids.  Well Art and I were old – he was forty-three and I was thirty-two.  So the younger people would say, “Oh the Coultans are an older couple.”  (June Coultan)

Cathy Baxter recalls her arrival:

When I got to Kitimat it was quite a surprise because we were met by this fleet of jeeps and the fellows…They took us to the house and I walked in the house and all the furniture was done and all the curtains were hung and in the kitchen all the dishes were in the cupboards, because of course all the stuff had gone ahead of us.  Everything was unpacked, and they’d even made up the beds.  I was absolutely stunned.  We were expecting to put up beds and make them, because the stuff only arrived the day before we did, you see…All the fellows that Basil had bunked with were there and they were all grinning away and they said they thought it was the least they could do for all the cookies and cakes I’d sent.

Single women arrived in 1952 to fill office and hospital positions.  These “brave souls” received many marriage proposals.  They also did not know in advance just what they would find when they arrived.

When I went up there I had a winter white coat and black suede shoes and a white hat with a veil and right off the boat you know and into this mining camp atmosphere – water and mud.  It was funny.  (June Coultan)

I ran the teletype machine between there and Vancouver and the BC Interior, Terrace and so forth, we’d talk back and forth, we ordered things on the teletype.  I ordered all the booze.  I’d order things for the different girls that were there from Vancouver and we’d order sometimes clothes and different things and have them sent up on the next boat.  

The girls were put in bungalows three to a bungalow, we each had our own bedroom and there was a bath and a kitchen and a living room.  The men, of course, were in dormitories, bunkhouses and so forth so the girls were living quite high on the hog compared to what the other people had.” (June DeLory)

Just for the fun of it I decided to have a different colour hair.  So I asked the girl in the Vancouver office to send me up some henna, so she sent up this henna – my gosh, my hair turned orange!  So I quickly had to order something else, so I ordered up silver, so she sent up the silver stuff … from that I went to brunette.  In one week I was four colours and Mr. Malby, who was the boss … I was in his office for about a week while his secretary was on holiday, and every couple of days I had a different colour hair.  He nearly had a fit!  (June DeLory)

I was invited to go and play  at the Rec. Hall … had to wear these shorts and a top, and I had no idea when I went in there … I hadn’t been in town more that a few days, I guess, but I used to play tennis a lot and I thought badminton shouldn’t take very long to learn.  When I got in there the whole Rec Hall [three courts] … it was knee deep with men.  They were all there watching, and to begin with I thought My goodness, they’re keen on badminton!” Then I realized it was because the girls were there and we were in shorts!  (Betty Moore)
 

Everyone was so very young that there was an explosion of births and the temporary hospital on the beach was filled to capacity.  Hilda Prause recalls:

They had so many babies at that time – when Tommy was born – they used dresser drawers for bassinets.