The Whitehorse Star is not so much a newspaper steeped in history, playing a pivotal role in shaping the Yukon, it’s more of a family.

If you worked at the Star, you were part of it. I learned that quickly.

With only one dream after leaving high school, which I finished at the Carcross Community Education Centre in 1976, I cold called the Whitehorse Star in 1977 to see if they had any openings for a reporter.

I chose a path to journalism after being impressed with a speaker who came to our school to talk about freedom of the press and the community newspaper’s role in that.

Paul Koring was the editor of the short-lived Northern Times (and later a key columnist for the Globe and Mail), and his words stuck with me.

I was not a reporter, I did not go to journalism school, and I had never written a news story for anyone.

Just a lot of existential poetry that seemed to make perfect sense at the time … but only to me.

Even though I was “politely” turned down for a reporting job by publisher Paul Erlam, and the man charged with running the web offset press that printed the daily paper, I was not going to give up my quest of becoming a reporter for the Star. I devised a plan.

I returned home to Toronto, where I grew up, got a job at a printing plant, and quit seven months later.

I was back at the Whitehorse Star, but this time, I told Paul, who was the son of the retired owner at the time, Bob Erlam, that I was a ticketed pressman and could help him with running the presses. As luck (and fortune) would have it, the Star needed someone like me, and I was hired.

I really had no idea how a newspaper press operated (it was a web press, not the sheet-fed press I worked on in Toronto), but I watched and learned and eventually became the head pressman.

While printing the paper during the day, I begged the editor at the time, Jim Beebe, to let me cover amateur sports at night for the paper.

Reluctantly, he agreed.

There did came a day, when Beebe, a tough-as-nails, no-nonsense kind of editor, called me into his office, sat me down and told me in no uncertain terms that I was a terrible writer.

I was shattered, but I did notice that the stories I submitted to him didn’t look like the stories that ran in the paper. I just thought that was the way it was.

In that meeting, Beebe said to me that he was willing to show me how to correctly craft a newspaper story, but I would have to watch and listen carefully to why he reworked my story while he edited my copy.

At that moment, Jim Beebe and the Whitehorse Star changed my life.

It wasn’t long after that I moved from the ground floor pressroom to the second-floor newsroom (with my own office to boot, but slightly less pay) where I began writing about sports and the arts full-time, and eventually hard news and features.

I was living the dream with some of most interesting people I have ever known.

While I missed the beer fridge in the press hall, I thrived in a busy newsroom, with phones ringing constantly, production manager Linda Burns barking orders, Beebe racing to meet the daily deadline and the reporters’ clickety-clack at lightning speed on their word processors, squeezing in those last few magical words.

It was exhilarating. It was like going to war every day and seeing the results as the paper rolled off the press and were on their way to newspaper boxes, stores, and homes throughout the Yukon.

The Whitehorse Star was a lifeline for many, but none impacted more than the staff who built that paper five days a week without fail.

We were a tight unit.

After the stories were filed, everyone came together to help the composing room get the pages ready, gave ace photographer Vince Federoff (still at the Star, by the way) a hand processing negatives, chipped in with burning the plates and did whatever was needed to get the Whitehorse Star into the hands of readers.

Yes, there was yelling and screaming and more than a few choice swear words tossed around, but when the presses rolled, that meant is was Taku time, and the friendly smack talk with other media types, including reporters from CBC radio, the Yukon News and CKRW.

We could bicker among ourselves, but pick a fight with one of us, you picked a fight with all of us. It was a family, a little dysfunctional at times like all families, but a family, nonetheless.

Our work lives melded with our off-the-clock lives.

We started the Mixed Media Slowpitch League to keep us out of the bars (sort of) in the summer.

It was the first mixed (men and women) league in Whitehorse and the only league to accept players of all calibres, mostly from media outlets and support businesses, but also a teachers’ team, the Kookastoon Lake gang and a team that consisted of “strays,” organized by the late Maggie Tai (hairdresser, and bon vivant).

We played on the worst diamonds in Whitehorse, had the respect of no one, lacked equipment, but did not care.

Our newspaper lives at the Star were intertwined with our personal lives. Our leader fostered a family-first attitude.

Jackie Pierce, the late publisher and later the owner of the Star, watched over us, pulling us back when we ran astray.

I don’t think there was a Christmas when I wasn’t invited (but declined) to Jackie’s home for Christmas dinner, knowing I had no family in Whitehorse.

I left the Star four times, sometimes to find my calling at bigger newspapers in Toronto.

Threes time I came back with my tail between my legs, and Jackie took me back into the fold, no questions asked.

Even when I left the paper for a rare opportunity to turn the Yukon News into a daily paper for the first time, and when that failed, left for the Timmins Daily Press as the city editor, she once again took me in after I returned to the Yukon to try to save my (first) marriage.

I left for good in 1986, got hired at the Toronto Sun as an editor, became the editor-in-chief of the Ottawa Sun, Sunday editor at the Calgary Sun and assistant manager back at the Toronto Sun before finishing my life-long journalism career with Postmedia.

I never forgot where I started and who was in my corner my entire working life. The Whitehorse Star is a family, and I am a part of it forever.

There were memorable scoops during my eight years at the Star.

None bigger than a one-on-one interview with Blues Brother actor Dan Aykroyd who had snuck into town with partner Jim Belushi to scout out a “Blues Brothers Yukon movie,” as the headline screamed.

I was tipped off by a composing room staffer who was partying with Belushi the night before.

After leaving messages at every hotel in town, the editor shouted across the newsroom to me: “Line three! Someone claims he’s Dan Aykroyd!”

Thinking it was a prank, I still took the call. “Hello?”

“Hi, this is Dan.”

Pause.

“You know? Aykroyd from Hollywood. Meet me at the Capital bar at six.”

Photographer Fedoroff and I met the superstar actor over beers at the Capital bar for a couple of hours with the tape recorder rolling.

He then posed on a Main Street bench for photos. I can’t remember a larger headline for any story ever at the Star.

The Globe and Mail called the next day asking if I would freelance the story to them.

When my parents saw the piece in the entertainment section of their morning paper in Toronto, they called to say how proud they were (even though the Globe messed up my byline, calling me Richard von Sickle).

And there are memories I’d rather forget.

To the editor (who shall go unnamed) who sent me to Carcross on a slow news day to interview Polly the Parrot: how could you be so cruel?

That foul-mouthed bird had more swear words than a drunken sailor. To see that “interview” and Fedoroff’s photo with that damn parrot on my shoulder in the Whitehorse Star was not my finest journalistic moment.

And then there was that time, as a 23-year-old pup reporter at the Star, I was summoned (I think everyone else was otherwise busy) to boot it down to the Annie Lake Golf Club to interview Jake Epp, the federal minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development in 1979.

As I explained to the late Gregory Bryce for his Yukon Moments column written in 2020, “I’m shirtless with a ball cap on while interviewing Jake Epp. Probably inappropriate to interview federal ministers today with your shirt off, but, hey, these were simpler times long gone and never coming back.”

Thankfully.

The stories that have appeared in the Whitehorse Star since it was founded in 1900, when the Klondike Gold Rush could still be considered a current event, are a part of the territory’s history that cannot be matched.

The thousands and thousands of editors, reporters, photographers, composing room staffers, ad takers and designers, business office workers, printers, paper carriers, publishers and receptionists who have passed through those doors on Second Avenue and earlier on Main Street did important work for the people of the Yukon.

The paper has been a constant for 124 years.

Think about that for a moment — 124 years. It is incomprehensible that the journey ends today.

To the Pierce family, the longest-standing editor I know of (Jim Butler), Vince Fedoroff and all the current employees as of today.

To all the people who have come and gone over the years and to those who I have worked with, fought the good fight with: thank you to each of you.

We were all part of one big family.

We will always have that.

By RICK VanSICKLE