While I was a journalism student, and a serving member of member of the Canadian Naval Reserve, I was deployed to Cadet Camp Whitehorse in 1978 to teach northern cadets the basics of sailing.

As the Army instructors running the camp only provided me a few days a week for training the kids on naval lifeboats, I spent most of that summer sailing around the southern lakes from our Lake Bennett base.

I enjoyed my assignment so much that I vowed to return, and the Navy granted me my wish. In May 1980, immediately following graduation from Algonquin College, I packed my military kit bag and returned to Whitehorse for a final summer of cadet instruction before entering the newspaper business.

At that time, Mary-Ann Vandenberg, my girlfriend from college was a junior reporter for the Ottawa Citizen working alongside Jim Butler (now the Star’s longest serving editor).

When I told Mary-Ann I planned to get a media job in Whitehorse after the cadet camp closed, she quit the Citizen, drove across the country and up the mostly gravel Alaska Highway to join me.

Before she left the Citizen, Mary-Ann recalls Jim asking her: “What the hell do you want to go way up there for?” “I’m taking a chance on love,” was her answer.

When Mary-Ann arrived in July 1980 she interviewed for and was offered two positions: one was reporting for the Yukon News; the other was executive assistant to the Whitehorse city manager. The executive assistant job was more appealing because it paid $15,500 a year — $3,000 more than the News would pay.

She told Yukon News editor Pat Living about me, and I was hired for the job first offered to her and thus began our nine-year residency in Whitehorse. We both established our careers and started our family, with our two daughters born at the old Whitehorse General Hospital.

In 1981, after a year in Whitehorse, we were driving home from work one fall day and Mary-Ann spied Jim Butler shuffling along Second Avenue in the wet snow and gathering gloom. “Jim, what are you doing up here, she queried?”

“I got tired of the Citizen politics and wanted a change.” he said. “I’m working for the Whitehorse Star now,” he explained. After 43 years, Jim has endured the ups and downs of Yukon journalism and is one of the longest serving editors in Canadian history.

Back in the late 1970s, the Star and the News competed head-to-head for a brief time in Whitehorse. By the time I joined the Yukon News in 1980, the News had lost the battle for daily publication and returned to being a broad sheet weekly publishing a Wednesday newspaper, and a Friday television guide that featured canned entertainment news. Even though we didn’t face the daily deadline pressures of the Star, competition was intense to get the scoop, a difficult task when the Star had a large reporting staff back in the 1980s.

Jim Butler and Massey Padgham, both Carleton journalism grads, were consummate news hounds. Massey even looked the reporter part in the quintessential grey trench coat he wore on assignment.

Massey became the Star’s editor after Jim Beebe left in the mid 1980s and he edited the paper for six years before taking a taking a news job down south.

The Whitehorse Star proved to be a training ground and launch pad for many journalists careers over its 124-year history.

Rick VanSickle, who started out at the Star on the press room floor as a printer’s assistant in 1978, showed a knack for writing. He began writing sports and entertainment pieces for the Star and became good at it. An opportunity came up at the Yukon News to turn that paper back into a daily again and Rick crossed the road to help get it off the ground (he would later leave for Ontario and return once again to Whitehorse for one more stint at the Star).

Rick went on to a full 20-year career with the Sun chain of newspapers and rose to become editor-in-chief of the Ottawa Sun in 1988. He is now retired from newspapers but publishes and writes for a wine website he founded and owns in Niagara, Ont.

Long days and low pay were the reasons a lot of reporters exited the industry early or crossed over to the “other side” to work in media and public relations, as I did after three years at the News. I had a growing family to support and still wasn’t making $20,000 a year.

Yukoners should salute the selflessness of its long-term employees who dedicated their entire working lives at the Star. Jim Butler, editor, 43 years, Vince Federoff, photographer 46 years, Chuck Tobin, reporter, 38 years. These guys covered the stories, took the photographs, wrote the news and the editorials that documented the events and informed the Yukon community for almost half a century.

They did it in servitude to their craft and community.

Print journalism in this country and elsewhere is a dying industry. We’re headed into a news media Dark Age which has staggering consequences for fact-based journalism and an informed citizenry across this country.

By KEVIN SHACKELL