Next time you’re downtown, I suggest you steal 15 minutes and go see Rolf Hougen’s collection of 1950s Whitehorse photos. It’s upstairs in the old Hougen’s department store building on Main Street, better known today as Coast Mountain Sports.
The photos capture a different time. The grandparents of today’s Whitehorse grandparents are gangly twenty-somethings, dressed in the Whitehorse version of the latest 1950s fashions. Old US Army surplus trucks rattle down an unpaved Main Street, grizzled First Nations trappers carry their furs into town and the twenty-somethings are grinning awkwardly for the camera in front of shacks and hastily built plywood boxes serving as stores and restaurants.
There was no television. The US Army brought radio to Whitehorse, but for live radio sometimes it was easier to get Radio Moscow’s English service than Southern Canadian stations. If you wanted to buy a Ford pickup, you went to the Northern Commercial store at Third and Main. The winter carnival held for a few years after World War Two had petered out. And if you wanted to go to university and didn’t have the money -- and not many people did in those days -- there were no scholarships.
Rolf Hougen isn’t in many of the photos, because he was taking them. He knew photography, since he had been managing the family’s small shop and its photographic supplies since he was in Grade 12. He moved to Whitehorse in 1944 aged sixteen. It was his father’s second move to Whitehorse. The first had been in 1906, when he saved money by walking along the railway from Skagway to Whitehorse instead of buying a ticket.
In 1952, the store burned down. Hougen responded by doing something that would become a trademark of his long life: building.
The Hougens bought the bowling alley next door and built a bigger store.
After the store was rebuilt, he heard about television and decided Whitehorse needed it. He was a founder of WHTV. It was laughably primitive by today’s standards. In the beginning, it showed one black-and-white channel to a few hundred subscribers for just four hours a day. The recordings were sometimes six months out of date. It wasn’t until 1965 that they started trucking tapes up the highway so Whitehorse could watch Gilligan’s Island only a week later than Vancouver.
WHTV continues today as Northwestel Cable.
He went on to found CKRW, the first commercial radio station in the Yukon.
In 1969, he acquired the rights to the Ford dealership and acquired land on the edge of town at Fourth and Black. He built a modern dealership with a garage and showroom that would have seemed at home anywhere from Peoria to Fairbanks.
Nor did he slow down in his forties.
Watching Gilligan’s Island a week late was fine, trucking tapes up the Alaska Highway didn’t work so well for the news or NHL games.
It was time for a more audacious move: satellite television, and on a national scale.
According to the History of Canadian Broadcasting, Hougen spent three years in the late 1970s putting together a consortium called Cancom. It included stations that would become household names in the Yukon, such as Victoria’s CHEK, Edmonton’s CITV and Hamilton’s CHCH-TV.
In 1981, federal regulators approved Cancom’s license and it became the “first national satellite television and radio service provider to remote and underserved Canadian communities, a population at the time estimated at about 1.8 million people.”
Twelve-foot satellite dishes were soon popping up in communities across Northern Canada.
None of this was easy. Federal regulators were persnickety. Established Southern television executives were suspicious. The technology was cutting edge. It wasn’t that hard to pirate the signal. The business struggled financially at first, but gained momentum. In 1983 Cancom added more stations Yukoners of a certain age will recall: ABC, NBC, PBS and VOCM from St. John’s, Newfoundland. Then it invented a scrambling technology. Eventually, the company went public on the Toronto stock market.
It wasn’t all business for Hougen. He personally rescued antique glass plate negatives of E.J. Hamacher, whose early photographs of Whitehorse are now iconic. He was a founder of Yukon Sourdough Rendezvous in 1962, which continues today. He was also one of the 17 Yukoners who came together in 1980 and donated $100 each to found the Yukon Foundation. Today, the Yukon Foundation has grown to have almost 200 funds, mostly donated by Yukon families, supporting Yukon students and community projects.
Young Yukoners should ponder all this when looking at the photos. We live in a time where spectatorism is rampant. Go on vacation, and everyone jumps on Facebook to share their thoughts. Propose something at work, and your colleagues from other departments will shower you with comments and criticism -- constructive or otherwise -- at lengthy meetings. Try to build an apartment building or start a mine, and there is an entire industry of spectators to critique your every move.
But I know there are young Yukoners out there who have the same drive as Hougen. In addition to checking out his photos, I suggest you also take inspiration from his determination to get stuff done and his spirit of invention and problem solving.
Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and the winner of the 2022 Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist. His most recent book Moonshadows, a Yukon-noir thriller, is available in Yukon bookstores.
