THE KÜTNE READER

Hand-painted signs on the north and south sides of the Grand Forks Gazette building at 7330 2nd St. advertise both its current and former...

Sundown Slim was the champion liar of the Lardeau. The king of whoppers. A master fibber without peer. He had a fabrication for every...

One of the most venerable and unique made-in-BC business names ceased to exist on March 22, 2018 after 103 years. The last Overwaitea...

The Big Orange Bridge will soon be the Big Green Bridge. The new private owner of the span across Kootenay Lake’s West Arm in Nelson...

In 1940, Nelson city council was planning to build a new city hall next door to its existing one at the foot of Ward Street. Local...

Sometime after the Silver King Hotel in Nelson was demolished in 1947, a sign (seen below, circa 1960s) was painted on the side of KWC...

A few months ago I was forwarded this tattered but terrific photo, previously unseen (at least by me). It shows the Silver King Hotel and...

In the spring of 1973, you might have met a guy in the Slocan Valley named Bill Lane, who was living in his van. He looked like many...

These Art Deco masterpieces, held by the City of Vancouver Archives, were drawn by the firm of Townley and Matheson, who designed...

Second in a series on signs that outlived the businesses they advertised. This one is on the back of the building at 607 Front St. in...

The photo below is probably the second most-reproduced image ever taken in West Kootenay (next to R.H. Trueman’s vertigo-inducing shot of...

There is a space between Vernon and Lake streets in Nelson that, near as I can tell, has always been vacant. Several buildings have been...

Last September, a group including scuba diver Brian Nadwidny went looking for a Caterpillar tractor supposedly lost in Kootenay Lake at...

This is the first in a series looking at phantom signs of West Kootenay/Boundary. I thought I would start with a Nelson building that has...

Notorious train robber Bill Miner had a lookalike in Nelson. This story appeared in the Nelson Daily News on Nov. 16, 1911 and was...

Did crooner Bing Crosby (pictured below in a Wikpedia photo) hang out in the West Kootenay before stardom? There are several suggestions he did but, while it’s not impossible, the proof is scanty. Crosby was born in Tacoma in 1903 but his family moved to Spokane when he was three. In Tracks of the Beaver Valley & Pend’Oreille (2002), Anna Reeves writes on p. 61: “Joan and Leo Langergraber were listening to a talk show host interview Bing Crosby concerning Bing’s early boyhood

On Oct. 26, 1892, the sternwheeler Columbia was on the Arrow Lakes, en route from Little Dalles, Wash. to Revelstoke, when a passenger...

In 1992, a classified ad appeared in The Mystery Review, a now-defunct quarterly magazine, that read as follows: Put Rossland, British...

The City of Trail bought the Union Hotel (pictured below) and a neighbouring building last year with plans to tear them down and sell the...

When he wasn’t out sleuthing, Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street in London. According to Wikipedia , at the time Sir Arthur Conan...