Siblings John and Mary
By 1999, Bob, along with George’s younger siblings, John and Mary, were the remaining members of the original Evanoff family in Canada. I spoke with John Evanoff in June 1999 during a visit that he made to Prince George a few months after George’s death, and a month later I spoke with Mary (Evanoff) Nixon at her home in Nanoose Bay on Vancouver Island.
John talked about George’s proclivity to build things from an early age. George had told his wife, Lillian, that as a youngster, he always kept leaving his dad’s tools out in the yard, and John affirmed that his elder brother was always getting in trouble with their father as a result of using his tools. “Once we built an aeroplane — like a swing, tied between two trees, cockpit and everything. Mary was the guinea pig. We tied her in — you had to have a safety belt in an aeroplane. Dad got home, and of course his tools were all over the place, and Dad liked to look after his tools, and George had to tear that aeroplane down right then.”
George Evanoff, right, with younger siblings, John and Mary, and mother, Mita — around 1942.
Mary was too young to recall the event directly, but she remembered her mother telling her about it later. “On the trial run, the rope broke, and I landed somewhere out in the field. My mother came running out, saying: ‘What have you done to Mary?’ And George replied: ‘She’s OK; we had her strapped in.’”
According to John, this wasn’t the only time George caught grief from his dad: “I remember we had done something bad, and Dad was mad and took off after us. It was probably something to do with the tools, or we had broken the windows in the chicken coop with our slingshot … I stopped and said go ahead; Dad was soft, and he didn’t touch me, but George took off right over the fence and Dad took off after him. George got a licking and I didn’t — it was the fastest I’ve ever seen him go.”
George Evanoff’s desire to build or improve things was a trait that characterized him later in life. Many times he discussed and demonstrated the importance of good tools and taking care of them, an ethic that he evidently learned the hard way from his father. There wasn’t much that George could not turn his hand to, whether it was in his electrical trade, plumbing, design and construction, building furniture, cabinetmaking, or improving and tuning outdoor equipment. Even when relaxing in camp in the mountains or on a canoe trip, he rarely sat still for long. He occupied himself with improving the camp, and was always ready to press anyone who incautiously appeared to be doing nothing into helping.
Mary, who was four years younger than George, didn’t always fit into her brothers’ ideas of play. “Where we lived in Edson,” Mary explained, “there were only two other families that had children in our age group, and they were all boys. I was the youngest, and I always wanted to play with them, which they didn’t really care to have me do, but I tagged along. In the summertime, we played ball, and I would always be out in the outfield. In the wintertime we played hockey on a creek, and I was always goalie.”
George and John grew up during the war years, and John related an incident that took place in a dugout they had made across the road from their house. John said they made two dugouts that were “not really deep, just enough that you could sit in them,” and a tunnel. The project came to an abrupt end after a neighbour’s horse fell into the tunnel: “We got scared and must have run for miles. We thought that maybe it had broken its leg or something, and we ran away somewhere close to town and slept in the bush. We hoped they wouldn’t think it was us; but when we got back the horse had got out. I guess it wasn’t as deep as we thought.”
John explained that their parents would sometimes go away and leave George in charge: “Mum used to go to Red Pass once a year. She and her friends would go up into the mountains every day, pick huckleberries, and bring them home to can them.” On one well-remembered occasion when their parents went to Edmonton, George made French toast for his younger siblings. “It was awful,” John said, “and he made us eat it.”
Craig Evanoff’s partner, Bonnie Hooge, was listening as John told the French toast story. She described the time in 1995 when she and George Evanoff had helped to guide an expedition led by Robert Lloyd George to the icefield and mountain named for his great-grandfather, Britain’s prime minister during the First World War, David Lloyd George.10 They were in the Kwadacha Wilderness of northern British Columbia, and it was George Evanoff’s turn to cook dinner. George was his usual efficient self, except that when the food was served, somebody complained that it tasted funny. Bonnie explained that “George, who was always in a hurry, scurrying around to get things done, had emptied the packages of desiccant that had been in the freeze-dried food containers to keep the contents dry, into the food, thinking they were sauces.” Their guests weren’t impressed, and dinner had to be redone.11
George Evanoff, second from the right, helps guide Robert Lloyd George on the Lloyd George Icefield in northern British Columbia in the early 1990s.
George Evanoff’s desire to learn how things worked was established early on; he once cut open Mary’s doll to see what made it cry. The eviscerated doll seems to symbolize Mary’s early childhood association with her rough-and-tumble older brothers, but there was another side of George’s relationship with his younger sister. John explained that “George built Mary a cradle for her birthday. It was a big surprise. Maybe it was in payment for the doll, but he liked to build things.”
John noted that his brother read Popular Mechanics, and kept a stack of 1930s issues in a little cabin, six miles south of Edson on the McLeod River, near the hill that they skied on: “We all devoured those magazines, and we liked to build things such as bows and arrows. We used to go to watch a hockey game, and if we got a broken hockey stick, we were in. Hockey sticks made really good bows. George was quite an archer; he used to do a bit of that with Paul Kindiak. We would get two hockey sticks, laminate them at the handle, and shave them down to make a round bow. Then [for arrows] we would buy Port Orford cedar.”12
George Evanoff with his bow, along with his younger sister, Mary.
Bob Evanoff remembered introducing Paul Kindiak to bow shooting. According to Bob, Paul became such a skilled archer that he won several provincial tournaments in the “instinctive” style of shooting.13
Neighbours
The Kutyns were the Evanoffs’ friends and nearest neighbours; both the adults and children were close. Mary Kutyn was a good friend of George’s older sister, Luby, and the Kutyns had two sons who were about the same age as the Evanoff boys. John Kutyn was about George’s age; he died tragically in a plane crash when he was in his early twenties. He had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in Edmonton on January 28, 1952, as a flight cadet, following a path that was similar to the one his older brother, Michael, had taken during the war. John Kutyn died on January 22, 1955, at the age of twenty-two. He was the navigator of a City of Edmonton 418 Squadron Mitchell bomber that crashed on a training flight.
Michael had enlisted in Edmonton in June 1941, the year that his family moved to Edson. He flew many operations as a navigator with No. 10 Squadron during the Second World War, and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in April 1945.14 When I spoke with Michael Kutyn in December 2005, he was eighty-three years old, and sounded much younger. Life had treated him well, he said.15 Michael Kutyn remembered George