Ed. note: longtime Whitehorse resident George Balmer takes Star readers decades back in time in this two-part feature. The second part will be published next Friday.

In 1977 in Ross River, there was no TV and there were no cell phones. We could only listen to CBC radio on AM (that was in the days before CBC was bought by the Liberal government).

Each house in town, and our office, had a big black plastic phone with a rotary dial (no touch-tones then).

That phone was the highly valued property of Northwestel, and they watched over each one like it was their child. There was no such thing as a user-supplied phone.

You could phone anyone in town by dialling just four digits. A long distance call to Whitehorse, when the lines were up, required dialing all seven.

So how did we keep in touch?

We didn’t, and we didn’t seem to need to.

Somehow everything was done efficiently and on time.

Being called by someone on a phone was something that might have happened three or four times a day.

If we didn’t pick up the call, they just called later, or not. If there was someone in the office, they might answer and take a note, but there were no answering machines (that innovation was still years away).

We all knew that phone calls were usually seen as harbingers of trouble. The rest of the time, we just worked.

To communicate amongst ourselves, Forestry had VHF radios on our own frequency.

Radio calls passed through a series of repeaters that were mostly confined to highway corridors. Our mobile radios also had the Yukon government frequency, which we shared with Highways and the RCMP, which was sometimes useful.

Typical of all the Yukon offices, we had a seasonal secretary.

She (there were no he’s in those days), sat in the office from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every weekday. If anyone important needed us, they knew to call her.

She relayed the information to us when she next saw us, or she left us a note.

The rest of her time she handed out and accepted official forms (filled out by hand).

She filed our hand-typed reports, paid all bills, and dealt with any visitors.

The closest we came to a computer in the office was her electric adding machine. Once a year, if she behaved, she was allowed to go in to Whitehorse to meet with her associates.

Aside from the secretary, the Ross River staff included a combination land use and forest type who was usually the senior person on site, and a fire control officer (me in those years).

I supervised a four- or five-person seasonal fire crew that were a tremendous source of entertainment, and usually of productivity.

They were almost always stoic First Nations types who I later realized were admirably tolerant of my missionary zeal.

In Ross, we also had a fire lookout man. I can assure you that particular lookout man never missed spotting a fire as a result of glaucoma!

All our weather reports and fire situation reports were transmitted to Whitehorse each day by the “tele-type” machine. It sat against the window in the spare office.

It was slightly smaller than your modern kitchen range. It had a mechanical “qwuerty” keyboard at the front that you used to type your entries.

Above and behind this keyboard was a moving typewriter head that typed onto a large roll of yellow paper.

Each press of a key produced a solid “chunk” noise as that head struck an inked fabric tape to leave an imprint of each letter. When complete, the message was torn off and read or filed.

An incoming message was announced by a “ding” and the roar of the machine coming to life in the next room.

No alarm or bell was really needed; everyone in the building could hear the motors and fans come on.

Within a few seconds, the machine-gun-statico of an incoming message drowned out any other noise in the office. When the message was received, it would simply shut down.

Like at the start, no other alarm was needed. The message could be torn off the paper roll and be read, passed along or filed.

Sending a message was a hands-on exercise. Learning to successfully send a message on these machines was part of the initiation into the Forest Service guild.

On the right hand side of the machine was a rotary dial, just like on one of the regular phones. This was used to dial the phone number of the receiving office.

On the other side was a gadget that could produce an inch-wide coded paper tape.

Before you started typing up your outgoing message, you fed the free end of the paper tape into the gadget and secured it there by closing a little gate.

Now, as you typed, your words appeared on both the big yellow paper roll at the top, and also as a series of holes punched into this ribbon of paper that spilled out from the gadget and fell to the floor, where you tried not to step on it.

This tape could easily reach two or three metres long. When you were done typing your message, you opened the gate in the gadget and the tape was torn from the spool inside the machine.

To send your message to the outside world (Whitehorse in most cases), you placed the free end of the same tape back into the little gadget and closed the little gate to hold it in place.

Instead of punching holes, it would now both pull the paper tape along and transmit those rows of little coded holes.

This whole task had to be done precisely; any misalignment, any tear, any fold or restriction would cause the whole tape to self-destruct in an impressive display of flying confetti.

Once you were ready, you would dial the phone number of exactly the same type of machine sitting in an office at the destination.

Every one of 10 regional offices in the Yukon was trying to send the same type of messages to the same machine in Whitehorse at the same time, twice a day.

A lot of my time was spent, three metres of tape laid out in loops around my arm, repeatedly dialling that rotary dial and getting the “beep.....beep.....beep” of a busy signal.

But the connection confirming “BEEEP” was like the starting gun to the sprinter, you were hair-trigger-poised to push “SEND”.

Then three metres of paper tape would be pulled through in a furious rush of movement and noise in about five seconds

Or, it produced a shower of paper confetti and a munching noise that announced only failure, and the chance to do this all again from the start (there were never survivors).

Success required simply tearing off the printed copy from the top of the machine and filing it.

There were no fax or photocopy machines in that office; we had carbon paper and mechanical typewriters.

Our file cabinets were full of original copies of forms, messy carbon copies of letters sent, and yellow tele-type messages folded to fit.

We had no computers and no GPS; we used real maps and knew enough not to get lost.

There are more Ross River stories in my book A Yukon Game Warden’s Stories, which will soon be available online and at Mac’s Books.

By GEORGE BALMER