Living Landscapes: Memories of the Project

It was a neat community because everybody was new there. We were meeting new people and new friends and they were coming from all walks of life and parts of the world …Britain, Germany, you name it … it was like little Europe at that time.  (Terry Voitchovsky neé Coghlin)

Kitimat had a strong community spirit from the start.  People from all walks of life and from many countries were all adapting to a new way of life in the brand new town of Kitimat.  Cultural groups formed - Italian, Portuguese, Greek - and membership grew.  Service clubs such as the Kinsmen and Kitimat Rotary, the Elks, and Kiwanis formed.  Many new residents became members of the Royal Canadian Legion, the Nechako Toastmasters and Kitimat Business and Professional Women's Club.  The Kitimat Chamber of Commerce formed in 1955 and commerce thrived at Nechako Centre and City Centre.  Shopping aimed at being exclusive and top quality in Kitimat.

Jack Cummer worked at first for the Hudson’s Bay Company at Smeltersite, and then managed a record store as well as Coghlin Hardware in Nechako Centre:

I left the Hudson’s Bay Company with a[nother] fellow. By this time the Nechako (neighborhood) had opened up the big shopping centre. We opened a company called Northern Radio and Record Supplies. …Johnny was the radio operator in Kitimat. And so I went in [with him] and managed the record business. And it was certainly interesting because there was no radio in Kitimat at all … we had a thriving business. … Every night a fellow that became a friend of mine who worked in the pharmacy …would come over to the store and we’d have a few drinks. He had a great big record player with a twelve-inch speaker on it.  I guess we were sort of carrying on, having a bit of a party…We never invited anybody. One night I went outside and there were about 40 or 50 just outside, listening to the nightly concert you know. I thought it was great.  (Jack Cummer)

I left the Hudson’s Bay Company with a[nother] fellow. By this time the Nechako (neighborhood) had opened up the big shopping centre. We opened a company called Northern Radio and Record Supplies. …Johnny was the radio operator in Kitimat. And so I went in [with him] and managed the record business. And it was certainly interesting because there was no radio in Kitimat at all … we had a thriving business. … Every night a fellow that became a friend of mine who worked in the pharmacy …would come over to the store and we’d have a few drinks. He had a great big record player with a twelve-inch speaker on it.  I guess we were sort of carrying on, having a bit of a party…We never invited anybody. One night I went outside and there were about 40 or 50 just outside, listening to the nightly concert you know. I thought it was great.  (Jack Cummer)

Early days were filled with public events – concerts, dances, and sporting events.  Alcan employees formed the Kitimat Works Sports Association (KWSA) and soccer, softball, and hockey were the competitive sports for the town.

In the summer of 1954…Gordie Booth and Jean Martin formed the Kitimat Curling Club….it was decided to go ahead and build a two-sheet curling rink in Kitimat, and that started somewhere after that.  So it would be in the fall of ’54 – worked all winter on it and all next year, so that would mean that at the end of ’55 we had a two-sheet curling club [next to the Rod & Gun Club].  So that was the centre of activity, and of course down that hill…we had to go down that hill to get to it so we had some jolly old times getting out of there during a big snowstorm….Anyway that Curling Club really opened up…New Year’s Eve, 1955.  It was a big party.  (Harry McLellan)

… In about 1962, we must have had good cooperation to build the boards of the rink.  I know we had an old bus stop from the construction days as the player’s box … our season was very limited and depended on the temperature.  It could be very short and pretty slushy on occasions … many mornings I got up about four o’clock and went down with my son, who was older at that time and we would shovel off the snow so the kids could come on at six or seven o’clock and get their hockey games in.  [This was the] outdoor rink at City Centre, down below the upper level.  … I got the idea and a bunch of like-minded fellows that were interested we decided we’d try to start the hockey up, there weren’t too many kids who had hockey experience at that time.  (Bryan Quinlan)

The Brush & Palette Club started up, the Rod and Gun Club built its clubhouse and curling rink beside Kitimat River, and the Kitimat Yacht Club formed and took over the now flooded graving dock site for moorage.

A bunch of us got together and we built about a dozen sailing dinghies…and we sailed them all summer long out on the bay in front of the dock, and…we kind of mass produced them.  Gordon Hirtle and I built all the masts for these sailboats and the boom, and somebody else did the hulls and somebody else did other parts of it, and then we got together and put them all together and we had about a dozen and some pretty keen sailors amongst the group there too and we had a lot of fun…  Matt Gooding brought his big Black Dog …He had built it in Newfoundland and got transferred to Kitimat with Alcan and put the boat on the deck of a ship – a freighter – and … the first time it hit the water was when they lifted it up off the freighter into the water in Kitimat and so there were lots of keen sailors.  (Dick Hermann)

That was the beauty of the early days, if you wanted something like that [Rod & Gun Club] everyone chipped in and you built it yourselves.  And the result was that the Rod and Gun Club truly was looked after well because … you were kind of like an owner…  (Bill Moore)

Music thrived in the high school and Kitimat’s Little Symphony was formed.  Roy Ruddell played the violin and recalled the Symphony’s early beginnings:

We started a few of us, just at night – I played the piano a little bit, and this friend of mine [Ken Armstrong] played the piano and also played the violin.  So we would take turns singing.  So then we thought we’d have a barbershop quartet maybe, so I got some barbershop quartet music and we did that.  We got going on the barbershop quartet and then I found that Ken could play the guitar a little bit too and as I said he played the piano, and Phil Douglas-Tourner…was also in the quartet.  He also played the violin and then I knew that there was a girl … Margaret MacDonald, and she played the cello.  So I said, “Why don’t we get a little trio or something like that together?”  They thought that was a good idea so we got that together.  I sent away and got some music … I heard of some other people who were wanting to play.   And then a man from Arvida who was in drama had decided to have a play and he worked hard with a bunch of people and produced a play and he asked me … would you play something between acts?  At that we said, “Whoa, we’ll have to get much better than this!”  So that spurred us on.  So we got a few more people and after awhile it seemed like people came from here and there...  We mounted two concerts a year, a fall concert and a spring concert.  We had them in the school auditorium.

The Fine Arts Association brought travelling art shows from all parts of Canada to Kitimat and a library and museum were included in Kitimat’s Master Plan as symbols of a stable urban community.  Residents were very enthusiastic to create sophistication in their new community.  Women’s service organizations were formed and fashion shows were held as fundraisers.  The new hospital opened in 1960 and many women joined the Hospital Auxiliary:

I remember having hospital teas in the new hospital.  They were all very dressy, very dressed up, very formal, the doctors coming down.  Those are really special…Dorothy Jones with her white gloves, pouring tea…At times, it was extremely fancy…  (Hilda Prause)

The weather was a constant topic. Appropriately, the name Kitimat means “people of the snow.”  Fred Rodrigo remembers the weather during the early years:

In 1954, Alcan had brought three large snow blowers from Quebec, all ready for the snow that would come, to keep the roads clear to the smelter. And it didn’t hardly snow. We had a lot of rain. So they sent two of the snow blowers back. But in 1955, my oh my, did the snow ever come down. We had a real winter. I think we had pretty close to forty feet of snow…. of the real heavy stuff. At the smelter you had three parking lots for the day shift, the afternoon shift, and for the night shift. And full-time kept them busy to clear the snow… from one parking lot to get ready for the next shift. When you came off shift you sometimes had trouble finding your car. And winter after winter it was the same every time. We came home and you could not get onto your street because it wasn’t plowed out. So everybody was parking on the roads and then waiting for the graders and blowers and then you had to start shoveling the snow off your roof because you knew if you had a lot of snow, it was always followed by rain and it was usually on the weekend for some reason…The snow … made it a nice, close community as well because you know, as you were shoveling snow on the roof, you were also visiting with your neighbour next door who was also shoveling snow.

Bev Rodrigo states: 

I think Kitimat people made it happen. You know …I think the fact that the plan didn’t develop the way that they wanted to, didn’t deter the people from saying “well it’s not going to stop us from doing what we want to do. I think the only thing that really was [that] made it more awkward and more difficult was that having city centre the way it was, which was [that] there was no main street … there was no real downtown core…

I think people who haven’t been to Kitimat really have lost something. I think that’s an experience I would not want to have missed.… There may have been a lot of single guys up there, but I think the people who lived there in the early, early days would not have exchanged that experience for anything. It’s probably [its] uniqueness. And the other thing that’s probably very unique is that I think the children who grew up in Kitimat have a sense of ethnic community that a lot of others never get to understand and enjoy.

Fred Rodrigo concurs: 

It certainly broadened us as well, you know, because you are interacting with different kinds of cultures that you have a much more diverse attitude, I think, towards people, and an understanding of people, that a lot of other people don’t have that opportunity to get. And you can’t help but get that when you are living so close with them. Our kids went to school were actually in the minority of kids that had English as a first language or had any understanding of English… How do you help those children learn in that kind of situation…, I think that’s probably one of [the] things Kitimat can be most proud of.  It is that they managed that, and a lot of communities can’t…

Bev Rodrigo concludes:

 You know, Kitimat is still home to me. If someone asked me where I lived, Kitimat would be the name that I would say. I’ve lived all over BC but Kitimat is… really what I would consider home…. We had such a positive experience there…I think Alcan can be proud of what they did in the early days because it could have been easy to have not given the kind of guidance they’ve given and do it in a positive way.