Ask people around Whitehorse about Dave Robertson, and chances are you will rarely hear a story about the former newspaper publisher and Hansard editor which came from the man himself.

"He never told me too much," recalls Barbara Robertson, his wife of 44 years. "But every now and again I would hear from someone that he had helped them buy a house or start a business."

Dave Robertson died of cancer last Thursday evening. He was 72.

It's not so much that he was a secretive man, Barbara says, but rather he didn't need or want any praise for the help he gave.

"He didn't make a spectacle of what he did," she remembers. "He was a very, very generous man. Very honourable."

Dave was born in Edmonton in January 1936 to David Macfarlane and Janet (nee Hughes) Robertson. His father was a military man, so the family moved from posting to posting around the country, eventually coming to Whitehorse after the Second World War.

Dave Jr. was still a teenager and loved the wild northern country. It was then he became friends with the Ryder family, a friendship which would last until his winter years.

The family eventually left the Yukon and returned south.

Dave wanted an education so he applied to Le College Militaire de St. Jean, military college being one of the only places a young man of limited means could get a degree.

It was there he met his first wife, also named Barbara.

"My mother used to go to the cadet dances," their eldest son Stephen says, "although they first met in church. My father chose to go to the anglophone service because it was the shorter one. He was not a particularly religious man."

The couple married in 1959 and had two children, Beverly (B'Lee) and then, after returning to Whitehorse where Dave was posted as a staff officer, Stephen.

When they separated in 1962, Barbara returned to Quebec with her children and Dave stayed on in the Yukon.

He loved the place but was unsatisfied with his work.

"He was really impatient with the army," Stephen says. "After the war, it was harder to be promoted and he saw so much opportunity in other things here."

So he left Camp Takhini and set out, like so many men before him, to make his fortune.

One of his first jobs out of uniform was as manager of the Sourdough Rendezvous. He had a little office in a local motel, and became friendly with the young British girl named Barbara Williams who worked the front desk.

"I had come to the Yukon for three months," Barbara says. "I wanted to see a bit more of Canada before heading off to New Zealand."

But once the determined Dave had set eyes on her, he wasn't about to let her fly away.

" 'Stay and marry me and we'll go to New Zealand together,' " Barbara remembers him saying. So she stayed, although it wasn't until 1993 that the two actually managed to get away on their Kiwi vacation.

It was during that time as Rendezvous manager that Barbara remembers first realizing the extent of her husband's good will.

"He co-signed on a business loan for a young couple he knew," she says. "And then they skipped out, leaving a trail of debts all around town.

"Dave never even suggested putting the business into bankruptcy, although we had very little ourselves then. He paid the last bill they had left behind 13 years later. He took lots of blows but he would never do it to somebody else."

Dave and Barbara had three children together, Cathy, Lisa (Dayle) and Douglas, and both worked in the early years to get the families fortunes rolling.

Dave tried his hand at several businesses; he started Malamute Construction with Mel Olson and David Hardie, ran a lunch wagon and also a restaurant on Fourth Avenue.

He and his brother Rick even launched a company where they would build a house in under a week for $5,000.

But the place where he really made his mark was in publishing. Dave bought into the News Advertiser in the late 1960s with his friend Ken Shortt.

By 1971, he was the sole owner. Five years later, he successfully bid for the contract to produce Hansard, the daily transcript from the territorial legislature.

At a time when Canadian women were still fighting in the courts for their right to breast feed in public, Dave was inviting his team of young female employees to bring their babies to work with them.

"We had a very good team of people," recalls Lois Cameron, a long-time friend and colleague of Dave's.

"They were all young women in their productive years, so naturally there were babies.

"They would work when the babies were sleeping, and feed them when they needed to be fed - right there in the office, if they chose."

And when the young ones grew too big to be at the office, Dave recruited Barbara to babysit, Cameron says.

"He was way ahead of his time. We would go to Hansard conferences, and we were on the leading edge all the time ... technically and culturally. Dave was a tremendous team leader."

Dave renewed his contract to produce Hansard every three years until 1998, "when he decided he didn't want to be there every day.

"He encouraged me to take over the contract," remembers Cameron, who is still the editor of Hansard, more than 30 years after coming to the territory from Vancouver with the firm hired to transcribe the legislative debate.

"I think he had more faith in me than I had in myself. He was a fine man."

He had a philosophy of equality which many remember him for today.

"I heard an old friend say once that Dave was more of a socialist than a Liberal," says Ted Staffen, the Speaker of the legislature, recalling the enthusiastic debates he would have with Dave around election time.

"He had a kind heart for the underdog, but he was also an astute businessman."

"He was a capitalist with a socialist bent," Cameron says. "He had a powerful social conscience. I remember him saying that if someone couldn't work or didn't want to, that was their right. He loved to work and he was happy to do it for others who couldn't or wouldn't."

He even went so far as to take over the payment of transcribers' wages when the government refused to give them a raise from $10 an hour.

"The government just saw them as typists," Cameron says. "Dave knew how much they were worth and so he gave it to them."

Dave revolutionized the way Hansard was printed in 1977 by introducing his staff to a new technology most of them had never before laid eyes on: computers.

"This was a giant step forward," according to Cameron, "because it precluded typesetting. You could do things with those computers that you can't do today, things I miss, like being able to send a paragraph from one file to another with one command."

And he always stayed on top of the newest technologies, looking for ways to streamline the process.

It is thanks to him, Staffen told the legislature Dec. 15, that the Yukon has the fastest turnaround time in Canada, "if not the Commonwealth" for its Hansards.

Always the workhorse, Dave worked until the last days of his life, says Barbara, insisting that a desk and computer be set up in his home when he became too weak to go into the office.

He will be remembered as a man who strove to make things better for others through his own labour and generosity.

"Loyalty to Dave was never a question," Cameron says. "You didn't work for Dave, you worked with him."