Gord Kolle:  

I'm 71 now and newly retired. My time in whitehorse and at FH Collins SS are distant memories that i look back on with fondness. In retrospect i was a blip in F.H. Collins history. Not only was i not there long enough, i was not a popular person, or even that noticeable. More of a loner. However, i was observant and that helped me later, when i became a newspaper reporter. BUT i digress.... i'm just gonna let my memories come back to me in no particular order. I may be mistaken in my reminiscences but that's what memory does. It can never be completely accurate. It can get close though. My lens is opaque after so many decades. Hell, it's 55 years since i left whitehorse in august, 1969.just after graduating grade 10.. I cant remember everyone's last name. Impossible. I have no yearbooks to verify the people that I knew so bear with me please. it's all in great fun and sentimentality. Nothing is meant to hurt anyone. SO...my recollections are culled from a time in the last century, long before the internet and social media . they may or may not be accurate... .perhaps they might be better called 'reflections of a stranger passing through.' it's because i went to eight schools (including kindergarten in whitehorse) from age 5 to age 19 . i have more memories than friends. i''ve learned that when you move that much, your best friend is yourself. BUT....maybe, just maybe, a few FHC people might recall me... , i'm thinking mark wedge, danny phillips,teddy wiebe or butch bendera.... maybe even gail hackney(cute), claude gobeil and adele maruk (cute). that's because my memories go from fuzzy to clear when i recall those names.. .i even think my picture would be in the FHC yearbook northern light 1967-1968 and 1968- 1969. i remember getting a class photo one year. i found it and posted up with my 'now' pic on this site. i was wearing a norwegian sweater ( i was born and lived in norway until age 3) but i don't have those yearbooks. . there's no record of my FHC years for me....so maybe somebody else has those yearbooks and will [ook me up and say, 'oh yeah, that guy.'...... anyway, i lived in whitehorse from 1957-9 , after that, Spray, Alberta, then Montreal, then wabush lake, labrador, then niagara falls, ontario and cooksville, ontario and then whitehorse again, from 1967-69. i loved whitehorse, the mountains it was nestled between, the widerness touching the town's edges, the pristine , clear air and forests (i remember a massive forest fire surrounding the Horse when i was up there and even an earthquake when i was there in 1957) and the wildness of it. yeah...whitehorse was a GREAT place in which to to be a kid growing up. you know?...yeah, you know... so.. i came right from ontario's smog ridden Golden Horse Shoe to the horse in august 1967. we drove the family car ( a new 1967 ford custom) from niagara falls, ontario, all the way to mile 918 via the alaska highway. of course i was no stranger to the north. coming from norway right to whitehorse and then to other northern communities. oh yeah, one thing...since i went to grade 13, my grad year is 1972 but i've noticed most of my FHC class mates graduated in 1971. i guess that that means that they were in the four year tech program, while i was in the five year academic program. Am i right? or am i wrong? memory can be a real killer... well, let's start with teddy wiebe. i knew teddy first in niagara falls, ontario. i met teddy through billy lamb, one of my best friends and also a neighbor on the same street, oxford street. back then, i went by my norwegian name: JAN. one day, we were playing on harvard avenue and billy has this friend named teddy (wiebe) with him. teddy was laid back and used to sing the tv commercial 'yipes stripes, beechnut's got 'em.' remember billy lamb, teddy? and the time we all went to your house and you showed us this big chinook helicopter model. we were all into model planes in those days.. and then in grade 10, i bumped into teddy in downtown white horse, across from hougen's department store!! The last time i had seen teddy, he was in grade 4... now he was a teenager. I could see the years on him but I could also see vestiges of that little kid that I played with. we exchanged pleasantries and back slaps and went on our way. we never hung out at school. the vibes were different. we grew up and grew apart...but..that's life, isnt it? and i remember Clark Taylor, whom i met on my first day in grade 9. hey, clark had a cruel streak. he called out yvonne bendera in class and yelled, 'bone bag, helmet head.' why? adolescent cruelty, right clark?, the world is truly black and white. when you're cool. there are cliques to navigate through and around. either you're in... or you're looking in...or you're with the 'don't fxxk with me ' crowd , or the outcasts (read weirdos) or the perpetually bullied and finally, the un noticed ( of which i was one). so clark came up to me after class and told me that he knew me back when i was five years old, living my first time in whitehorse in 1957-9! it was true...i do remember playing with him.... then clark took me to his house where we shot some pool in his basement. i remember him driving me downtown for something but in the end, he too disappeared from view. just not enough groundwork to restart a friendship which had ended at kindergarten... i remember doug oulton who was a friendly guy to begin with but later became a prize axxhole.. and diane kohler (hot), i was tongue tied around her, plus, she had a boyfriend..their lockers were next to mine. and it made me blush when they got to kissing right at the locker next to me.what the hell was i doung there? well, for one thing, rooting around in my locker. for school stuff...I HAD TO BE THERE! DAMMIT!! and then there was young butch bendera, whom i met when my family stayed at the ben-elle motel until we could get the pre-fab house at 20 tagish boulevard, or was it 20 tagish road?. butch' was younger than me. his family owned and operated the ben-elle... his sister, yvonne bendera, was in my class . but butch loved the military, just like me...and a friendship of sorts was born.. one afternoon in september, 1967, butch and i climbed the clay cliffs of whitehorse airport to view the wreckage of a USAF martin b-57 attack bomber which had crashed that summer, killing the crew. Butch and i found the wreckage in the bushes near the end of the runway and grabbed pieces of twisted metal as souvenirs...now that was cool, real cool. butch and i loved military aircraft. even went to visit a world war II Boeing B-17 bomber that had landed at the airport. the 17 had been converted into an aerial mapping survey ship. but it looked just like the bombers in the TV show 12 o'clocxk high.... and we were up close and personal...what a hoot, eh Butch? and then there was red haired danny phillips, man we were tight at FH Collins for awhile. danny lived across the street from me as well. he was a great model airplane painter! his favourite saying: was 'Mint!' danny had a lot of cool friends so i'll never understand why we hung out..but we did... i remember him and me discovering open graves near the base of the airport plateau. the spring rains had caused the clay to shift and split, forcing a nearby old graveyard to crack open, exposing several mouldy and broken coffins. Danny and i could see the skulls and skeletons! it was nightmare city..but the grisly scene kept me on track to becoming a horror film fanatic in my later life...... once, Danny and i scaled grey mountain together in April, 1968, climbing the rock face bare handed and taking six hours to reach the summit, this hike included an hour punching through the scree and bush covered swamp at the mountain's base. there was no easy access road up the mountain back then. we took our dogs ringo and taffy on the climb and we filmed the whole adventure on my dad's movie camera... it was exhilirating , breath taking and such a rush to see tiny whitehorse in the foreground and mt. lorne in the distance, its snow capped peak standing apart from the backdrop formed by the rest of the rockies' jagged bluegray teeth... we scratched our names and the date on a stony outcrop right at the top of grey mountain. Wonder if our names are still there... Now i see that there is a tourist road up there and human markers of all kinds. Horrible. Danny and i climbed the face with our bare hands right from the forested base up to the windswept top...when there was no road. There was nothing announcing civilization. Who needs it? Mastering that climb felt like we were on the top of the world on a 5000 ft mountain. but it was our mount everest accomplishment. There is so much fun and pride when you're 15... On the way down, danny threw a rock that split my head open. and i had to go to the hospital to get stitches and a tetanus shot! hey, battle scars., right danny?. .other classmates were mark wedge, who was quiet and cool, even though he wore glasses. ...i really liked mark.. he, like me, was an observer and he made comments only after surveying the scene. that's why i liked him. no foot in the mouth guy here. when mark spoke , he had something to say, so people listened. there was Ed Snow, the first student i met in the FHC study hall. Ed helped me immeasurably by just talking to me and hanging out, explaining the school. My grade 9 classmates included suzanne carpenter (beautiful blonde hottie with a tough as nails personality) and Viva Macdonald, a quiet, pretty girl with long, dark hair. her main binder had 'god is dead' written on the cover. yeah, those 60s days, when we all copied the hippies and their call for non-violent revol...Expand for more