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Tales from the dump
with Walt Humphries
Friday, June 29, 2007
If you had of been at the dump last Saturday morning you might have spotted a group of around 50 people doing a dump tour.
They were in fact hard to miss because they were all wearing blindingly white T-shirts. I had never seen so many white T-shirts at the dump at one time because white is not a salvagers colour of choice. It was a bright sunny day, so all that white looked a little like an ice flow had descended on the dump.
If you had of looked closely at the T-shirts they all said NWT Air 45th Anniversary Reunion because Bob and Roxy Engle were celebrating this event along with a number of friends and former employees.
They ended up at the dump because at last year's Geoscience Forum Gala an auction was held to help support the NWT Mining Heritage Society and Roxy had won the bidding war on a guided tour of our beloved dump.
It was one of the highlights of the reunion and everyone seemed to enjoy him or herself, although for some of the people it was their first actual trip inside the bowls of the dump.
Others, because they had lived in Yellowknife, knew all about the dump and the noble art of salvaging and despite the early hour a few even left with some good salvage such as picture frames, an umbrella, an engineer's ruler and a couple of books.
So some money went to a good cause, people had a memorable experience and the dump was seen once again as a great place for tours and social functions.
I think a tour of the dump should be on the agenda of all conferences, conventions, business meetings and reunions held in Yellowknife.
It is also a great tourist attraction and draw, which is why it is listed in the Northern
Frontier Visitors Centre's brochure, as one of the things to do in Yellowknife.
The next day the new sign for the Bob Engle Industrial Park was unveiled. Bob Engle came to the North in 1956 and worked as a contract pilot for Wardair for a few years then in 1961 he founded NWT Air. He started out with a single Otter aircraft.
This was in an era when the Canadian Transport Commissions made it as difficult as possible for a new air carrier to grow but despite that, with a lot of dogged determination he grew NWT Air into a major carrier of people and freight in the North.
By 1975 NWT Air had Hercules aircraft and scheduled flights from Yellowknife to Rankin Inlet, Iqaluit and Winnipeg. By the mid-eighties they had 200 permanent employees, 40 pilots, carried 75,000 passengers yearly and hauled freight around the world. Eventually, the company was taken over by Air Canada.
So Bob was the founder of a very successful company and a pioneer of modern aviation in the NWT and Nunavut. Despite the contribution he made to the North, it took the city 30 years to name something after him.
At first I thought something more prominent than an industrial park should have been named after him, but in a way it is fitting because it was his hard work, entrepreneurship and industry that saw his company grow.
He even went on the tour of the Yellowknife dump on the weekend, so his name and Roxy's names, should be added to the dump's unofficial guest book and to the growing list of dump supporters.
You just never know who you will see at the dump.
- Walt Humphries is a well-known Yellowknife artist and prospector
