A fixture of the Whitehorse community passed away last Friday.

Maggie Tai was a lot of things to a lot people – a hair dresser, a restaurateur, a softball player, friend, a mother, or simply the life of the party.

But however Yukoners knew her, what will be remembered most was the passion and love she threw into everything she did.

Tai is perhaps best known for the businesses she ran in Whitehorse over many years – a hair salon on Main Street and a dress shop she owned in the 1990s.

She also owned and operated the former Sam N Andy’s restaurant, next to the hair salon, with her former husband.

Tai died after suffering a heart attack. She was 75.

Born in the English town of Billingham in 1947, Tai moved to Canada at the age of 12 and settled in the Yukon in her 20s.

Tai had gone to school for hairdressing and took part in hairdressing competitions across the country as a young woman.

She quickly set up her own shop after moving to Whitehorse. She married Sam Tai and the two had a son, Andy, when she was 30.

“It wasn’t too long before everybody knew who Maggie T was,” Andy said in an interview Thursday.

“Because everybody needs to get their hair cut.”

Maggie would give free haircuts to the homeless, and her son said she never hesitated to give someone a trim in an emergency.

But people didn’t just know her because they needed her services. 

She was a social butterfly with a zest for life. 

“She was someone that always made you smile when you were around them,” Andy said.

“She just had this zest for life that spread a certain positivity into this world. And I think that’s probably how people will remember her.”

And a lot of people will remember her.

Tai was a social butterfly. 

A regular at downtown bars like the old Taku at the corner of Main Street and Fourth Avenue, Tai loved to dance, sing and party with the locals on a Friday night.

She played softball with the Kookatsoon Lake Kooks, often arriving at games in her 1970 Chevrolet Impala converible well into the 1980s.

She also took in festivals and arts around town.

“She just got her feet stuck here in the Yukon and loved it so much,” Andy said.

“She had a kid and started raising the family and got to know pretty much everybody who lived here,” he added.

In her later years, health problems forced Maggie to use a scooter to get around, and she used it to get out in the community and make her presence known.

She took up painting and continued cutting hair out of her house in Hillcrest.

Andy said he’s planning a celebration of life for his mother, tentatively set for May at the Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre.

“Then we’ll do a procession up to Grey Mountain where we’ll bury her in a plot that’s up there next to my Auntie Kathleen …. That’s what she wanted,” her son said.

He remembered another funny story about his mother.

“Mom was a bit of a crier, and she would cry at the funniest things,” he said.

“I remember we went to watch King Kong as a little boy and there is a scene where King Kong’s baby is trying to get to King Kong and I look over and Mom is bawling her eyes out, LOL; she is full of emotion and had a very sweet sensitive side as well.”