THE KÜTNE READER

In 1962-63, the American jingle house of Richard H. Ullman Associates produced a series of cheesy but oh-so-catchy songs to promote radio and television stations and the towns they served. They presumably aired on those stations and were also issued as 45 rpm singles. The music was virtually identical; only the lyrics were tailored to fit the town. Some were embraced as civic anthems (notably in Regina) but in the pre-Internet world, people probably had no idea that their son

One of West Kootenay’s least known attractions is an amazing map of the Kootenays and Okanagan in the pub of the Salmo Hotel , created in March 1955 by Vancouver sign painter Jack Lines. We know the date and the artist because he signed it. I haven’t measured the map, but it takes up a good portion of the wall behind the pool table. (Unfortunately, the location of the table and way the room is lit make it very difficult to get good pictures.) It has a red border, with the wor

Six West Kootenay/Boundary residents and one former resident were among the 1,200 passengers and crew who perished when a German U-boat sank the RMS Lusitania on May 7, 1915 off the south coast of Ireland. There was also one survivor from our area and three others who narrowly avoided sailing on that fateful trip. The RMS Lusitania is seen in a 1907 painting by Norman Wilkinson. (Wikipedia) The Chantry family Harold Chantry (or Chantrey), 23, and his wife Mina, 22, arrived i

The Cody Caves (naturally occurring) and hot springs caves (mostly or entirely human-created) aren’t the only caves in and around Ainsworth. Several months ago, Angela Ortega dropped off a newspaper clipping (seen below) that she correctly thought I would find interesting. It’s from the Calgary Herald of June 5, 1912 and reports the discovery of prehistoric fossilized bones in a cave at the Silver Hoard mine. The Vancouver Sun ran the same story that day with the headline “

Three noteworthy bits of Greenwood memorabilia (Greewoodiana?) have sold on eBay in the last few months. On Aug. 4, a dry-mount photo of Greenwood looking southwest sold for $225 US. Rossland photographer William J. Carpenter took it in the late 1890s or early 1900s. The seller was in Tacoma. An envelope from the British Columbia Copper Co. Ltd. smelter at Greenwood, postmarked 1900 and mailed to Sweden attracted 16 bids and netted $277.79 US on Oct. 2 . The seller was in Sto

What does Fred Flintstone’s mother-in-law have to do with West Kootenay? The woman who provided the original voice for Pearl Slaghoople on the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series was Verna Felton (1890-1966), who also did voiceover work for Disney, appearing in Cinderella, Dumbo, The Jungle Book, Alice in Wonderland, Lady and the Tramp , and Sleeping Beauty — as fairies, villains, and elephants. That’s her singing Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo in Cinderella . She worked extensively in radio

One of the most beautiful pieces of Kootenaiana ever produced was Perry’s Mining Map of 1893. It’s admired for its cartography and plethora of unusual place names, many of which appear for the first — and sometimes last — time. (David Rumsey Map Collection/Stanford University) The map, measuring 26 by 40 inches, was drawn by T.P. O’Farrell, based on surveys by Charles E. Perry, and lithographed by Rand and McNally of Chicago. It was exhibited as part of the BC mining display

Here’s something that seems completely lost from local memory: from at least 1922 to 1943, a ferry crossed the Slocan River at Slocan Park. Looking into it took me in several surprising directions — including a meteorite landing, a message in a bottle, and Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. The first mention I can find of the ferry is in the BC government public accounts covering April 1921 to March 1922. An expenditure of $606.94 is recorded as being paid to N. Wolverton to ru

Larry Kwong, the NHL’s first player of Asian descent and the oldest Trail Smoke Eaters alumnus, died on March 15, 2018.

The photo below comes from a glass plate negative found in Alexander T. Garland’s store in Kaslo and is believed to show the International Hotel at Nelson. If so, the woman pictured may be Alice (Mother) Foster, alias the Midnight Nurse. It’s hard to say for certain: there are no other pictures of her or the building to compare it to. The hotel opened at the corner of Vernon and Stanley streets in 1890 but burned down in January 1894. (Kootenay Lake Archives 990.012.0058) Koo

The Nelson Daily News of Nov. 2, 1912 announced a new brewery would be built in Nelson’s Fairview neighbourhood between Nelson Avenue and 2nd Street, north of Kokanee Avenue (then called Kootenay Avenue) and reproduced the concept drawing seen below. The plant was to be built by the Fritz-Steiner Brewing & Malting Co. at an estimated cost of $40,000 to $50,000 ($891,000 to $1.1 million today). Local merchant A.S. Horswill was president of the company, which was capitalized

I’ve previously written about the birth of Florence Columbia Holliday aboard the SS Columbia in 1892. She wasn’t the only person born on a steamship in the Kootenay. George E. Shaw was mine accountant and personnel manager at the Bluebell mine in the 1920s. He was responsible for the payroll and the company store. In 1914, he married Margaret Alice Webb. According to Terry Turner’s Bluebell Memories , p. 72, “Shaw lived in Riondel north of the Beeley house between 1921 and

The New York Times bills itself as the newspaper of record in the United States but has an international reputation. It’s one of the few American newspapers with a Canadian bureau and it regularly publishes news about Canada. Long before it reached its present status, it was reporting on events in the West Kootenay. In fact, our area has showed up on its pages regularly beginning in 1891. “Kootenay” or “Kootenai” has appeared 756 times since the paper was founded in 1858, al

The Oxford English Dictionary, that great repository of words that bills itself as “the definitive record of the English language,” is not lacking in West Kootenay content. The dictionary, first published between 1884 and 1928, and updated many times since, illustrates each word’s history with a series of quotes, demonstrating its earliest use and evolution. Some of these quotes were taken from West Kootenay publications or refer to events that occurred here. The dictionary a

A rare picture has turned up of a man suspected of involvement in the 1924 train explosion that killed Peter (Lordly) Verigin.

While quite a few postcards show First Nations scenes in East Kootenay, not many exist from West Kootenay. At least, there are only a few we can comfortably say were taken on this side of the Purcell mountains, since the location was not always listed. Although the captions always said “Kootenay Indians,” I don’t know whether these people are Ktunaxa or Sinixt; the photographer probably wasn’t aware of the distinction. We know who he was, though: Allan Lean of Queen Studio in

Recently Doug Jones bought a batch of early Nelson photos from someone in England. There were lots of terrific shots, but what left Doug (and me) slack-jawed was a never-before-seen Neelands Bros. photo of three tipis near the CPR wharf with the SS Nelson in the background. “When I saw the tipi image, I had to get it,” Doug says. “It’s such an amazing undiscovered picture, it just had to come home. The seller was a dealer in England, who kindly included about 20 more local p

I picked up a couple of interesting postcards by Hughes Studio recently, showing the mess on Rossland Avenue in Trail following a huge rain storm. A note on the first one indicates they were taken in 1932. In this photo we are looking southeast. The still-standing Colombo Lodge is third from the right and Kootenay Breweries is at far right. The building second from the right still stands; I presume it was also part of the brewery. Below is roughly the same view today, from Go

I had a call recently from Mitzi Hufty, who was reminiscing about the old Lakeside Motel in Nelson — presently being demolished to make way for Lakeside Place , a 47-unit housing project for seniors and people with disabilities. She remembered the motel as a kid in the 1940s, having moved to Nelson from Slocan City. It was then called Lakeside Bungalow Court. “I remember the motel perfectly,” she told me. “We used to cut through it all the time to go swimming at Lakeside Par

I recently came across a charming anecdote about hockey legend Lester Patrick in West Kootenay that I had never seen before — and in fact found several slightly different versions of it. The first appeared in the Toronto Star Weekly of June 27, 1936 as follows: RECALLS PATRICK UNKNOWN MAESTRO Lester preceded fame to coast — Wanted by Slocans Nelson — Reputations did not travel very fast into this West Kootenay country 30 years ago. So Carl Lindow, now postmaster at Salmo, 15