The Yukon lost one of its pioneers last Sunday.

Edmund Joseph Jacobs, former Whitehorse mayor, founder of the first machine shop in the city (Jacobs Industries), and a cancer survivor, died peacefully, leaving behind his son Bob and 13 grandchildren.

Jacobs was 91 years old and survived three of his children Allen, Donald and Susanne and their mother, Ina.

This morning, Bob said his father will be missed, not only by family but by a community he strove to serve.

'Everybody who knew him knew that money wasn't a big thing to him, it was about service to people.

'Not that he gave away money, he gave away a service or product,' he said.

Bob said that as a child, he always remembered his father helping people, either by giving them a place to stay, a job, or fixing something that nobody else knew how to fix.

'If he didn't know how to fix it, he would figure it out.'

Bob said there seemed to be nothing in the territory his father hadn't touched, including machinery in the Whitehorse Dam.

Born in Calder, Alta. to a family of 12 children, Jacobs left school in Grade 8 to help support his family and worked as an aircraft mechanic and welder in Edmonton until his arrival in the Yukon in the summer of 1942 with his brother, Andy.

He opened his first business with his brother, a gas station and welding shop in 1943 at the corner of Fourth and Jarvis, the same year Bob was born, and later opened his own station at that location where he sold cars, tires, gas and parts.

Jacobs sold a variety of makes and models of automobiles from downtown Whitehorse, including Studebakers, Austins and Morris'.

In the early 1950s, Jacobs brought the first oxygen plant to the territory and became the sole supplier of oxygen to the Whitehorse General Hospital for decades.

He later ran for office and was a councillor from 1959 to 1962 and mayor from 1962 to 1965.

Known to be industrious, Jacobs bought, enlarged and powered a river barge which could carry 80 tons of freight down the Yukon River between Minto Landing and Dawson City, a barge which is still in operation today by the Minto mine.

In the early 1980s, Jacobs built and erected the rotating support structure for the DC-3 which sits in front of Whitehorse International Airport and acts as a weather vane.

After being diagnosed with colon cancer in January of 2000, a year after his son Don died in his arms from an industrial accident, Jacobs underwent radiation, chemotherapy and surgery late that spring and lived without the illness until the time of his death.

Jacobs was recognized as the 2001 Transportation Person of the Year and inducted into the Yukon Transportation Hall of Fame.

Along with being industrious, said Bob, Jacobs was also a good friend to people, and an avid recycler.

'He didn't throw anything away, he used everything,' he said.

'People often called his shop the junk yard.'

His dad, Bob added, also had a head for detail and could recall events from decades earlier like they happened yesterday.

'He was a fantastic story teller. He had a great memory.'

Longtime acquaintance Netta DesRosiers said this morning that she and her husband, John, knew Jacobs over the 50 years they have been in the territory.

'John worked for him years and years and years ago,' she said.

She said later when her family continued to do business with Jacobs, there were never any contracts involved, nothing more than a handshake.

'His word was as good as gold. We did our business with handshakes,' she said.

Mayor Bev Buckway said this morning the city and its citizens will miss Jacobs, a man she described as a person who gave a lot to the City of Whitehorse.

'I remember Mr. Jacobs when he was mayor, I wasn't very old. He was probably one of the earliest recollections of what a mayor was,' she said.

'He was also a customer of mine when I ran the barber shop for those many years. He always had an opinion on things and never said anything bad about anybody.'

Buckway and her members of council commemorated Jacobs and his service at the beginning of their council meeting Monday.