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Early Years and Rural Alberta 1932-45

Chapter 2

George Evanoff was born in Edson, Alberta, in 1932, the second child and first son of Elia and Mita Evanoff, immigrants from the village of Capari in the southern Balkan state of Macedonia, just north of the border with Greece. Elia and Mita’s first child, Luba, better known as Luby, had been born some six years earlier in Macedonia. George and his younger siblings, John and Mary, were born in Canada. George Evanoff’s father, Elia, westernized his first name to Louis after he arrived in Canada. I will refer to him by his Canadian name, except for references to his early years in Macedonia. He was born around 1900.

The Evanoff lineage in Canada began with George’s uncle, Vasil Evanoff, father of George’s cousin, Bob, who played a key role in George Evanoff’s early life. I met Bob Evanoff and his wife, Liz, at their home in Vernon, British Columbia, in June 2000. Bob, who was born in Canada in August 1927, confirmed that his father was the first member of the Evanoff family to come to North America from Macedonia. Vasil, whose first name was sometimes westernized to William or Bill, was also born in Capari, a small mountain village just three kilometres north of Pelister National Park and only six kilometres north of 2,601-metre Mount Pelister. The outdoors and the mountains had apparently been in the Evanoff blood long before their move to Canada. Vasil and Elia’s parents owned a small flour mill in Capari, the millstone of which was still lying on the property when George Evanoff and his wife Lillian visited in 1997.

After making the crucial decision to come to Canada, Vasil Evanoff caught the first ship he could find that was heading for North America. He was seventeen years old when he left Macedonia and landed on the Gulf Coast in Galveston, Texas. There he worked cutting railway ties from walnut and oak, before making his way to Quebec. Bob Evanoff told me that his father drifted up to Canada, picking up work along the way.

From Quebec, Vasil drifted west, meeting Bob’s mother, Rosie Stephan Chanasick, in Vegreville, Alberta. Rosie was born in Austria. After they met, Vasil and Rosie moved a little farther west to Edmonton, where Vasil did well with a series of businesses, including barbering. According to his son, Vasil had a kind of gold-rush fever in him, so when he heard coal mining was taking place southwest of Edson, a small railway town midway between Edmonton and Jasper, he moved west again. The couple relocated to Bickerdike, a tiny branch-line community west of Edson. Perhaps Vasil was drawn closer to the mountains, as the environment was similar to the one he had grown up in.¹ Rosie Evanoff was upset at leaving Edmonton as they had been doing well there, especially because after the move Vasil was lucky to get one day a week of steady work, and had to do odd jobs such as shoeing horses. There were benefits to living near Edson, though, especially the abundance of wild game for meat.

In 1926, Vasil wrote to his brother, Elia, in Macedonia. Bob felt that his dad was lonely for the family connections of his childhood, and especially missed his brother. Vasil also had two sisters in Macedonia that he sent money to. According to Bob, they seemed reluctant to leave their homes, so Vasil decided to scrape together enough money to send for his brother, a feat that was tough to accomplish in the 1920s. Although he was already married with a child on the way, Elia was motivated to come to Canada because life in Macedonia was difficult, and rumours were drifting out that Canada was giving away land. The opportunity to own land was something that few could aspire to in Macedonia and many chose to immigrate to Canada.

George Evanoff’s parents, Elia and Mita, with family and friends at their wedding in Macedonia circa 1925.

Elia came right away, leaving behind his new wife, Mita (Kotevski) Evanoff, who was pregnant with their first child. Nearly six years passed before the young couple was reunited, and before Elia, who now called himself Louis saw his then five-year-old daughter, Luba. These were (and sometimes still are) the circumstances that people endured for the opportunity to immigrate to Canada.

The mainstay of supporting the family in west-central Alberta in the 1930s was the railway. Many men performed manual labour, particularly the task of keeping the track clean, rather than working “in an engineering department or anything like that, since most of the people who came from the old country were not that well educated,” Bob explained. All the same, Vasil used to say that his grade four schooling in Macedonia was equivalent to grade eight in Canada.

Not long after Mita joined her husband in Alberta, their second child (their first son) was on the way. George Evanoff was born on March 19, 1932. Soon after arriving in Canada, Louis Evanoff also had a store in Bickerdike,² a small settlement thirteen kilometres west of Edson where the railway forked west and south.³ In their historic book, The North-West Passage By Land, Viscount Milton and Dr. W.B. Cheadle discussed what they called “The Great Coal-fields”⁴ during their June 1863 travels through the area. Milton and Cheadle’s best-selling account of the prospective riches of the Canadian Prairies and British Columbia helped to encourage the creation of Canada as a nation that extended from sea to sea, and the migration of large numbers of settlers to the western regions.

Almost seventy years later, when George Evanoff was born first son of the most recent immigrants to the northeast corner of the Coal Branch, it comprised small mining communities such as Coalspur, Mercoal, Cadomin, Lovett, and the 1,830-metre-high town of Mountain Park.⁵ The McLeod River rises in the Rocky Mountains near Mountain Park and Cadomin, and wanders through the Coal Branch area to pass just south of Edson, where it was the scene of some of the young George Evanoff’s earliest adventures.⁶

George Evanoff grew up in Edson, Alberta, which is situated on a major highway, railway, and the scenic McLeod River, roughly halfway between Edmonton and Jasper.

Bob Evanoff remembers his Uncle Louis’s store in Bickerdike as “a tiny little thing the size of a kitchen.” In the 1930s, there were no highways and places like Bickerdike had few residences and few people. The only way to get to the coal branch was by railway, and Louis’s store was conveniently located at the branch point. As well as labouring on the railway, Louis also ran a business buying and selling furs. “You had to know what you were doing,” said Bob Evanoff, “because it was give and take, with the best man coming out on top, and it was a fluctuating business.”

Louis Evanoff didn’t do any trapping, and unlike his brother, Vasil, and later, his eldest son George, he never owned a gun. Perhaps Louis had an aversion to guns dating back to his military service in Bulgaria, east of Macedonia. Bob remembered that Louis showed the kids “the scar of a bullet that went through his leg and hit the bone,” said Bob. Instead, Louis bought furs from trappers, farmers, and in the case of squirrel furs, from kids like Bob and George. “He would call me into the back of his store,” Bob said, “and I’d bring maybe twenty squirrels, and he’d say the price was ten cents. But hardly anything would qualify for a ten-cent squirrel. It was down to eight cents, simply because he had to buy low or he’d lose his pants on it at the Edmonton fur auction. I don’t know how long George’s dad stayed in that sideline, but you could make good if you knew what you were doing; it was just like the Chicago stock market running in a two-bit town.”

Cousin Bob

At the time of George Evanoff’s death, George’s older sister, Luby, and both of his parents had predeceased him. Bob Evanoff did not come into the picture until George was of school age; therefore, apart from the family background just described, the first five years of George Evanoff’s life are nearly blank. Bob Evanoff was slightly younger than Luby, and the cousins started school together in the same grade. Bob’s first recollection of his younger cousin was when his father, Vasil, transferred their first residence, situated a mile east of Edson, to George’s dad, and Bob’s family moved to a house four blocks down the road. Bob, who was nearly five years older than George, recalled that they really got to know each other when George started school, and for the next several years they were inseparable.

As Bob talked about his early relationship with his cousin, the genesis of George’s lifelong passion for skiing became clear: “Being older, I would take George out all the time. I was a nut for skiing, and going through the snow, trapping, and everything else outdoors. They were hard times. We tried to make skis out of boards but we had no way of turning the points up. George’s first real skis were made from yellow pine, with a leather strap.” Bob was the first person to ski with George, and as events turned out, I would be the last.

Bob described the first ski jump that they made: “I don’t know how old George was, he was just a little kid, and I preached no fear into him. I said ‘George, do not hesitate. Don’t look too long at the ramp down the hill.’” George soon found that others were afraid to go down; “George couldn’t go fast enough, so he built another scaffold to launch from, and he was already doing a terrific speed when he hit the hill, before going off the jump.” George Evanoff’s skiing career had begun.

Bob influenced George in other ways, introducing him to hunting and staying out overnight in the bush. Bob again talked about what he called “the fear aspect.” Many times he told George, “Don’t hesitate — the longer you think, it gets worse.” Later, during my own twenty-year friendship with George Evanoff, I saw a man who had matured into a thoughtful leader and careful planner. But once he had determined a course of action in the outdoors, I never saw him hesitate. Bob’s lesson stayed with George throughout his life.

In his later years, one of George’s many outdoor interests was canoeing, usually taking long river trips with his wife and friends. Again, it was Bob who first introduced George to canoeing, using a leaky skiff that the two of them built together:

We just loved working the [McLeod River]. I made a pirogue — a style of boat where you just bend the boards, pointed at both ends and bottom nailed, and we could paddle that thing like a canoe. Down the bank, about three miles outside of Edson, there’s a big rapid, and we would shoot the rapid and then we’d be into white water. And we would take the canoe, pull it back up, and we’d shoot the rapid again. It leaked, but not fast enough before we were through the rapid, and could empty it and drag it back up again.

Bob related an incident with their pirogue that must have had an impact on the young George Evanoff — and that came close to taking his life: “The danger was the roller, and I told George, never turn a canoe sideways in a rapid, it’s the worst thing you can do.” As he told the story sixty years later, Bob’s voice was laden with emotion: “Oh, man alive it really scared me, and I’m telling George not to fear. We thought we’d take a dive right over a boulder, but this time we made a mistake, and suddenly the boat plunged in and took a lot of water, and the next roll foundered it.” The river was high and dangerous.⁷ Bob explained the thoughts that ran through his mind: “I thought: I don’t want to drown George because I’ll have to answer to his mother. I told George to drape himself over the canoe and just slightly kick his feet to keep himself stable on there, and we’ll drift to the shore.”

Having done what he could for George, Bob concentrated on his own predicament: “I’m doing all I can, now, to save my own neck, and I barely made it. The river was in near flood, because that’s when it’s most exciting — the rollers were really roaring … I had to pull myself up with the roots and the branches because I was waterlogged with my clothes and boots on. I looked way down the bend and I thought I saw him. I had to run with sodden rubber boots and clothing through the bush, and I caught George on that bend.” His brush with death did not deter the young George Evanoff’s adventurous spirit, and in the best tradition of blood brothers, he and Bob kept the incident to themselves. “I don’t think the family knew what happened, because we never said a thing,” Bob recalled.

Bob explained that the water of the McLeod River was clear when they fished it as kids, and that it remains that way today. Bob and George continued to fish together after they had both completed their schooling and George had moved to Edmonton. Bob introduced George to his friend Paul Kindiak, who was equally keen on fishing and hunting. As time went on, Paul and George would fish together in the Edson area, with Bob joining them occasionally. The area by the McLeod River where George fished in the summer and learned to ski in the winter, is now a municipal park called Willmore Park.⁸ Edson’s Willmore Park offers a summer boat launch and camping facilities, and winter tobogganing on what was once George’s first ski hill.⁹

After George’s death, some of his friends asked whether the outcome would have been different if somebody had been with him on October 24, 1998. The question had certainly occurred to me because I was hiking across the valley from him when it happened, and I might easily have gone with him that morning had either of us known what the other was doing. Bob had similar thoughts. With their canoeing mishap in mind, he said with emotion, “I know if I had been with George on that fateful day, things would have turned out differently.”

Siblings John and Mary

By 1999, Bob, along with George’s younger siblings, John and Mary, were the remaining members of the original Evanoff family in Canada. I spoke with John Evanoff in June 1999 during a visit that he made to Prince George a few months after George’s death, and a month later I spoke with Mary (Evanoff) Nixon at her home in Nanoose Bay on Vancouver Island.

John talked about George’s proclivity to build things from an early age. George had told his wife, Lillian, that as a youngster, he always kept leaving his dad’s tools out in the yard, and John affirmed that his elder brother was always getting in trouble with their father as a result of using his tools. “Once we built an aeroplane — like a swing, tied between two trees, cockpit and everything. Mary was the guinea pig. We tied her in — you had to have a safety belt in an aeroplane. Dad got home, and of course his tools were all over the place, and Dad liked to look after his tools, and George had to tear that aeroplane down right then.”

George Evanoff, right, with younger siblings, John and Mary, and mother, Mita — around 1942.

Mary was too young to recall the event directly, but she remembered her mother telling her about it later. “On the trial run, the rope broke, and I landed somewhere out in the field. My mother came running out, saying: ‘What have you done to Mary?’ And George replied: ‘She’s OK; we had her strapped in.’”

According to John, this wasn’t the only time George caught grief from his dad: “I remember we had done something bad, and Dad was mad and took off after us. It was probably something to do with the tools, or we had broken the windows in the chicken coop with our slingshot … I stopped and said go ahead; Dad was soft, and he didn’t touch me, but George took off right over the fence and Dad took off after him. George got a licking and I didn’t — it was the fastest I’ve ever seen him go.”

George Evanoff’s desire to build or improve things was a trait that characterized him later in life. Many times he discussed and demonstrated the importance of good tools and taking care of them, an ethic that he evidently learned the hard way from his father. There wasn’t much that George could not turn his hand to, whether it was in his electrical trade, plumbing, design and construction, building furniture, cabinetmaking, or improving and tuning outdoor equipment. Even when relaxing in camp in the mountains or on a canoe trip, he rarely sat still for long. He occupied himself with improving the camp, and was always ready to press anyone who incautiously appeared to be doing nothing into helping.

Mary, who was four years younger than George, didn’t always fit into her brothers’ ideas of play. “Where we lived in Edson,” Mary explained, “there were only two other families that had children in our age group, and they were all boys. I was the youngest, and I always wanted to play with them, which they didn’t really care to have me do, but I tagged along. In the summertime, we played ball, and I would always be out in the outfield. In the wintertime we played hockey on a creek, and I was always goalie.”

George and John grew up during the war years, and John related an incident that took place in a dugout they had made across the road from their house. John said they made two dugouts that were “not really deep, just enough that you could sit in them,” and a tunnel. The project came to an abrupt end after a neighbour’s horse fell into the tunnel: “We got scared and must have run for miles. We thought that maybe it had broken its leg or something, and we ran away somewhere close to town and slept in the bush. We hoped they wouldn’t think it was us; but when we got back the horse had got out. I guess it wasn’t as deep as we thought.”

John explained that their parents would sometimes go away and leave George in charge: “Mum used to go to Red Pass once a year. She and her friends would go up into the mountains every day, pick huckleberries, and bring them home to can them.” On one well-remembered occasion when their parents went to Edmonton, George made French toast for his younger siblings. “It was awful,” John said, “and he made us eat it.”

Craig Evanoff’s partner, Bonnie Hooge, was listening as John told the French toast story. She described the time in 1995 when she and George Evanoff had helped to guide an expedition led by Robert Lloyd George to the icefield and mountain named for his great-grandfather, Britain’s prime minister during the First World War, David Lloyd George.¹⁰ They were in the Kwadacha Wilderness of northern British Columbia, and it was George Evanoff’s turn to cook dinner. George was his usual efficient self, except that when the food was served, somebody complained that it tasted funny. Bonnie explained that “George, who was always in a hurry, scurrying around to get things done, had emptied the packages of desiccant that had been in the freeze-dried food containers to keep the contents dry, into the food, thinking they were sauces.” Their guests weren’t impressed, and dinner had to be redone.¹¹

George Evanoff, second from the right, helps guide Robert Lloyd George on the Lloyd George Icefield in northern British Columbia in the early 1990s.

George Evanoff’s desire to learn how things worked was established early on; he once cut open Mary’s doll to see what made it cry. The eviscerated doll seems to symbolize Mary’s early childhood association with her rough-and-tumble older brothers, but there was another side of George’s relationship with his younger sister. John explained that “George built Mary a cradle for her birthday. It was a big surprise. Maybe it was in payment for the doll, but he liked to build things.”

John noted that his brother read Popular Mechanics, and kept a stack of 1930s issues in a little cabin, six miles south of Edson on the McLeod River, near the hill that they skied on: “We all devoured those magazines, and we liked to build things such as bows and arrows. We used to go to watch a hockey game, and if we got a broken hockey stick, we were in. Hockey sticks made really good bows. George was quite an archer; he used to do a bit of that with Paul Kindiak. We would get two hockey sticks, laminate them at the handle, and shave them down to make a round bow. Then [for arrows] we would buy Port Orford cedar.”¹²

George Evanoff with his bow, along with his younger sister, Mary.

Bob Evanoff remembered introducing Paul Kindiak to bow shooting. According to Bob, Paul became such a skilled archer that he won several provincial tournaments in the “instinctive” style of shooting.¹³

Neighbours

The Kutyns were the Evanoffs’ friends and nearest neighbours; both the adults and children were close. Mary Kutyn was a good friend of George’s older sister, Luby, and the Kutyns had two sons who were about the same age as the Evanoff boys. John Kutyn was about George’s age; he died tragically in a plane crash when he was in his early twenties. He had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in Edmonton on January 28, 1952, as a flight cadet, following a path that was similar to the one his older brother, Michael, had taken during the war. John Kutyn died on January 22, 1955, at the age of twenty-two. He was the navigator of a City of Edmonton 418 Squadron Mitchell bomber that crashed on a training flight.

Michael had enlisted in Edmonton in June 1941, the year that his family moved to Edson. He flew many operations as a navigator with No. 10 Squadron during the Second World War, and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in April 1945.¹⁴ When I spoke with Michael Kutyn in December 2005, he was eighty-three years old, and sounded much younger. Life had treated him well, he said.¹⁵ Michael Kutyn remembered George Evanoff from his visits to Edson while on leave during the war. Michael was ten years older than George, and was likely someone that both George and Michael’s own siblings looked up to as a role model.

Unbeknownst to the younger boys, this respect worked both ways. Michael Kutyn described a visit to Edson while on leave one Christmas. George and John Evanoff and John and Joe Kutyn had built a ski jump on the hill down to the creek that ran between their respective properties. They had gone to a lot of trouble to get the ski jump ready to show him, Michael said, and they enticed him to give it a try. “I was scared stiff,” Michael Kutyn said with emphasis. “I’d have sooner gone on another mission than gone off that ski jump, but I couldn’t let them down since they looked up to me as a hero, so I went down it.”

Joe Kutyn was about Mary Evanoff’s age, and was a good friend of John’s. Joe told me that his family had moved to Edson in 1941, and they stayed there until after their high school graduation. They lived about three blocks closer to Edson than George Evanoff’s family, although in those days, Joe noted, there were no blocks.

Two other boys, Eddy and Bobby Jenson, who were about George’s age, lived across the street from the Evanoffs. According to John Evanoff, the Jensons spent a lot of time with the Evanoff and Kutyn boys, swimming, fishing, and hunting in the summer and fall. He recalled that during the winter months they “held ski jumping competitions with the Kutyns and Jensons,” and on the creek nearby they “used to clear an area of snow and flood a section of the creek to make a small ice rink” where they skated and played hockey.

Edson

Mary recalled their early family environment: “We listened to the radio a lot, and we used to play Monopoly as kids when we were a little older. Our family, so far as I remember, did not sit around and talk. George had a bit more of a rapport with my dad, being the eldest son. Because my parents were European, George was the number one son, so he was looked upon with favour because of their upbringing.”

Despite the challenges of being the youngest girl in the family, Mary remembered the positive aspects of growing up on the edge of small-town Edson: “We really did have a great childhood because we used to roam all the time. We spent a lot of days just walking in the bush, or walking to the river to swim. During the wintertime, the closest riverbank was three and a half miles away. We cross-country skied there, and we took pork beans and wieners to cook for our lunch. We were much freer than kids are today; we were always outdoors.”

From Mary’s recollection, the population of Edson was between 1,500 and 2,000 when she was a child. Mary described the industry in the area: “The railroad was big. My dad worked on the railroad, and there was a lot of farming around. There was also some part-time trapping, although Dad only did that when we were younger. Later, the pipeline came through in the early 1950s; I think that was when Edson had more of a boom, although we left in 1952, so we weren’t there to see what long-term effects it had.”

Home Life in the 1930s and 1940s

Mary recalled that after their dad bought the family’s house on the outskirts of Edson from his brother, he added on a long kitchen and a bedroom at the back:

I had a bedroom to myself after my sister left, when I was about ten years old. George and John shared the bedroom off the kitchen. The furnace was in the dugout basement and heat was piped up to all the rooms; before that we just had the wood stove in the kitchen and a pot-bellied stove in the living room. We were also the only ones in Edson to have a brick barbecue before barbecues were in fashion. Because we had a well in the back, and didn’t have electricity, my mum stored her homemade butter there. We very seldom bought bread — Mum did all her baking. When we were coming home from school and were three or four blocks away, we would smell doughnuts and run home, knowing they were just coming out of the oven. George quite often baked powder biscuits.¹⁶

When I asked John about their mother, he simply said: “She was always there.”

Mum used to make the pies on Saturday, and we’d both be working on Saturday. George would be in the butcher’s shop and after work he would go to a movie or something, and he would get home about ten or twelve o’clock. There’d always be a bunch of pies made, and by morning there wouldn’t be much left. We always brought a lot of kids home; the house was always full; everybody was comfortable there. George would bring friends home and they would be sleeping all over the house, some on the floor. It was the same in Edmonton.

Lillian added, “George’s friends were all welcome. His mother was quite happy. She never said anything; but as long as we were happy, she was.”

John expanded on their early home life:

Maybe it was just being there; maybe that influenced George. Where he grew up probably had a large influence on him; he had a stable family and a stable home. They never entertained us, like you have to do nowadays, driving the kids hither and yon — we made our own fun. They just didn’t have the time; it was a different lifestyle, we were just left on our own, as long as we didn’t get into trouble. We had lots of chores as well; we had to get the water, feed the chickens, clean out the cow’s barn, and I used to build fires in the morning.

The biggest chore came each fall when Louis cut and sawed a huge pile of logs that his sons had to split. I recalled helping George split gnarled, dense alpine fir on several occasions at his ski lodge in the 1980s and 1990s. Because of its age and the small size of the growth rings, it was some of the toughest wood to split, and I remember that my axe would often barely make a dent in it, or would just bounce off, whereas George would swing the axe for hours, with sure, effective strikes. When I commented on George’s splitting skills, John explained that he had a lot of practice:

We split wood the first couple of weeks in September. We had to split all that wood, and then we had to take it into the woodshed and stack it for the winter. It seemed like that woodpile went on forever. We were one of the few houses with a furnace. It was just convection, no forced air. But Dad had built this out of a forty-five-gallon drum, with a plenum out of strong mud, and we just ran the ducts right out of the basement into the bedrooms. It was just a dug basement, and it was cold — that’s where Mum used to store all her vegetables.

Their mother had a big vegetable garden, and while George and John did some potato hoeing, their dad loved to do most of the garden work.¹⁷ As a child, George preferred to be fishing, but the outdoors could not continue to dominate his time outside of school and his chores — as he entered his teenage years, the drive to earn money, expand his horizons, and search for a career began to shape his life.