The late Jim Beebe helped guide the Whitehorse Star through one of the territory's most noteworthy times in recent history.

Beebe, who died unexpectedly March 19 in Victoria at the age of 62, first took over as editor for a brief period in the early 1970s.

It was during his return to the helm from 1978 to the spring of 1982 that Beebe and Star staff reported on dramatic and everlasting changes to the territory's landscape and its social fabric.

It was under Beebe's watch in 1979 that the Dempster Highway was opened, piercing through mountains and slicing across tundra like nowhere else in the Western Hemisphere.

In a journal-style report, the late editor provided readers with an insight into the ruggedness and beauty of a wilderness witnessed by few until then.

He sat as the boss, but maintained his affection for writing and reporting, with features like his experience on the Dempster to an in-depth view inside the workings of the Whitehorse Copper mine.

As Beebe's seat was just beginning to warm in his second tenure at the Star, the days of governance in the territory underwent a dramatic shift, from a supposedly non-partisan territorial council to party politics.

The Conservatives, since renamed the Yukon Party, were the first to rule.

Then in his mid-30s, Beebe and the staff watched as the sun began to set on the Yukon's relatively prosperous times of the 1970s.

It was an era anchored by the success of the Cyprus Anvil Mining Corp. mine near Faro, Whitehorse Copper and a generally healthy mining industry.

The early 1980s brought devastation to the Yukon's economy.

Jackie Pierce, the Star's owner-publisher, worked alongside Beebe both in the early 1970s and as the advertising manager during his second stint at the newspaper.

Beebe, she said, was in charge during periods of great change for the Yukon.

'He was a fine editor,' she said.

Current editor Jim Butler, who Beebe hired by telephone out of Montreal in 1981 to become the paper's government reporter, said he had immense respect for Beebe's vast knowledge of the territory, his broad network of news contacts and his strong sense of journalism ethics.

'It's incredibly sad that someone with such a sweeping knowledge of the North, and his keen sense of history and tradition of newspapers, has left us while still in the prime of his life, especially as a family man,' Butler said.

Beebe was born in Lincoln, Neb. in 1945 and came to Canada in the 1960s as an anti-Vietnam War activist.

His career as a reporter began with the Toronto Star before he first came to the Yukon in the early 1970s.

Following his departure from the Star in 1982, Beebe went on to work as a communications advisor for what was then the Council for Yukon Indians, and later moved over to the Yukon government.

In 1992, Beebe moved south and began a career as a senior advisor in several ministries with the Province of B.C. over the years.

He is survived by his wife, Lorna Harris, two children and many members of his immediate family.

The Star has had only three editors in the last 29 years Beebe, Massey Padgham, from 1982 to 1988, and Butler, from 1988 to the present.

Padgham now works on the news desk of the Vancouver Sun.