Lillian Evanoff recalled that George enjoyed his summer jobs in Jasper:
He spent many summers working there, and was even in jail for one night. He had a free pass on the Canadian National Railway (CNR) because his dad worked for the CNR. So he and his friend took the train to Jasper, but they had no money, and since it was easy to get work the next day, they slept in the park under a bush. A policeman came by and told them, “You can’t sleep here.” They answered, “But we have no money.” So he took the two young kids and put them in the jail. The next day they got a job. These were George’s growing up years.
Times have changed; it was so easy to get work then, all they had to do was hop on the train with a free pass and the next day they got a job. Young workers had facilities in the Jasper Lodge, where they played tennis and went to the parties. George worked there for the railroad one summer; they would travel around and do the repairs, and they would live in the bunk cars on the train. During another summer, he worked for the Interprovincial Pipeline near Jasper.
Chicago and Toronto
After George graduated from high school, his younger brother took over his part-time butcher job at the local meat market. George got a job in an electrical shop in Edson, which was soon followed by a position in refrigeration with an Edson plumber. These work opportunities likely spurred him to take his first steps towards his eventual profession.
In 1950, George left Edson and travelled to Chicago to learn about refrigeration. He was there for between eight months and a year, and lived with his mother’s uncle. John Evanoff recalls that they had a lot of relatives in Chicago on their mother’s side. He enrolled in the Greer Shop Training School from March to June 1951, and earned a diploma in refrigeration. While in Chicago, George went to a lot of big-name musicals in his free time, and developed an appreciation of music, including classical, that lasted throughout his life.
Portrait of George Evanoff soon after his graduation in 1951.
Although he did not have a work visa in Chicago, George managed to get work in a butcher’s shop or fish market to help support himself. But the immigration department was soon after him, and he had to quit his job and leave the city. With his diploma from Greer in hand, he went to Toronto, where he worked in refrigeration for a little over a year. Little information is available about this period in George’s life, since he was away from the friends and relatives that lived in his hometown, and he had not yet met his future wife. It is known that George skied at Collingwood and other Ontario hills, as he later compared them with the dry-powder skiing that he relished in western Canada.
George did have one celebrated misadventure while working in Toronto. While making a delivery using the company service vehicle, George tried to take a shortcut by doing a U-turn. He accidentally took out all the boards in a picket fence. George, who was only nineteen years old, tried to make a run for it, but the owner caught him, and George had to make it right by paying for the materials and doing the work to rebuild the fence. There is one other tantalizing clue to George’s life in Toronto. His future wife, Lillian, notes that George must have partied in Toronto because “he came back with quite a wardrobe.”
Return to Edmonton
George’s parents moved to Edmonton in 1952, the same year George returned to Alberta. George switched careers after settling in Edmonton, and undertook a four-year electrical apprenticeship from 1952 to 1957 with Hume and Rumble, a major western Canadian electrical contractor for industry. George went to Calgary for 240 hours of courses each winter during the months of January and February at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. In the summers, he worked mostly on pipelines, installing industrial electrical equipment, and designing controls for new pumping stations. His electrical apprenticeship was entirely separate from the refrigeration work that he had done earlier, although undoubtedly that experience benefitted him. He had completed half of his apprenticeship with Hume and Rumble when he met Lillian on a blind date in Edmonton in October 1954. It was on Sadie Hawkins Day, an occasion popularized by Al Capp’s Li’l Abner cartoon two decades earlier, during which the girls ask the guys out. On this occasion, George and Lillian’s mutual friends arranged the dinner that they attended. George made an immediate impression on Lillian, who observed many years later that he was “a big city dresser.”
Marriage
Lillian Minailo was raised in a Ukrainian family in Wasel, a small farming community on the North Saskatchewan River about ninety kilometres northeast of Edmonton.4 Lillian’s parents had a mixed farm in Wasel, and Lillian was the second youngest of seven children, with two brothers and four sisters. As a child, Lillian loved to go outdoors, and from an early age she had a feeling for nature.
Apart from the usual movies, parties, and dancing, she also used to go out walking with George during their courtship. George and Lillian saw a lot of each other after that, or as Lillian put it, “George was at my doorstep all the time.” They were engaged after a few months, on George’s birthday, March 19, 1955, and were married less than five months later at St. John’s Ukrainian-Greek Orthodox Church in Edmonton on August 5, 1955.
George and Lillian’s wedding on August 5, 1955.
George’s younger sister, Mary, was engaged just before George, and she recalled that he had approached her fiancé to ask how he had proposed: “We didn’t realize what he had in mind until a week later, when he proposed to Lil; and then they were married a week after us.”
Tumult of Early Domestic Life
After his marriage, George still had two years to complete on his apprenticeship. He graduated as an electrician in 1957, shortly before his first child, Delia, was born. His final progress report from the Alberta Provincial Apprenticeship Board, dated April 1957 showed a 100 percent attendance record, a school rating of 92 percent, and significantly, an employer rating of 95 percent.5
George and Lillian lived in Edmonton for another seven years after George completed his apprenticeship. During their first winter together as a married couple, George and Lillian lived in a rented suite in Edmonton. The following year, George and his dad, Louis, built a duplex. George and Lillian moved into one half, while George and Louis worked on the other. George also continued to work for Hume and Rumble. After a year living in that home, they purchased a lot in a good neighbourhood in Edmonton, and eventually sold the duplex.
“Human Rumble” — George Evanoff, second from the left, with colleagues at Hume and Rumble in 1956.
George, again with his dad’s help, built a house on the new lot in the summer of 1957.
John remembers that both George and his dad were stubborn, and he could never quite picture the two of them working together. But Lillian said that she didn’t see any friction, and John admitted that “it seemed to work,” noting that George’s dad had the necessary experience to undertake the projects. John added that their dad was self-taught and meticulous: “It had to be done right or don’t do it.” This was an ethic that Louis passed on to his children, and it was evident in everything that George did in his adult life.
While the second house was being constructed, Lillian was pregnant with Delia, who was born in August 1957. With George working full-time, all of the work on the house had to be done in the evenings and on weekends. Nevertheless, the house was soon completed, and George and Lillian moved in before Christmas of 1957. Lillian remembered that the house was modern for that time, with a vaulted ceiling and beams. They continued to live there until they moved to Prince George in 1964.
Their first few years together were hard. Lillian described it as a survival period; the main problem was George’s