Unbeknownst to the younger boys, this respect worked both ways. Michael Kutyn described a visit to Edson while on leave one Christmas. George and John Evanoff and John and Joe Kutyn had built a ski jump on the hill down to the creek that ran between their respective properties. They had gone to a lot of trouble to get the ski jump ready to show him, Michael said, and they enticed him to give it a try. “I was scared stiff,” Michael Kutyn said with emphasis. “I’d have sooner gone on another mission than gone off that ski jump, but I couldn’t let them down since they looked up to me as a hero, so I went down it.”
Joe Kutyn was about Mary Evanoff’s age, and was a good friend of John’s. Joe told me that his family had moved to Edson in 1941, and they stayed there until after their high school graduation. They lived about three blocks closer to Edson than George Evanoff’s family, although in those days, Joe noted, there were no blocks.
Two other boys, Eddy and Bobby Jenson, who were about George’s age, lived across the street from the Evanoffs. According to John Evanoff, the Jensons spent a lot of time with the Evanoff and Kutyn boys, swimming, fishing, and hunting in the summer and fall. He recalled that during the winter months they “held ski jumping competitions with the Kutyns and Jensons,” and on the creek nearby they “used to clear an area of snow and flood a section of the creek to make a small ice rink” where they skated and played hockey.
Edson
Mary recalled their early family environment: “We listened to the radio a lot, and we used to play Monopoly as kids when we were a little older. Our family, so far as I remember, did not sit around and talk. George had a bit more of a rapport with my dad, being the eldest son. Because my parents were European, George was the number one son, so he was looked upon with favour because of their upbringing.”
Despite the challenges of being the youngest girl in the family, Mary remembered the positive aspects of growing up on the edge of small-town Edson: “We really did have a great childhood because we used to roam all the time. We spent a lot of days just walking in the bush, or walking to the river to swim. During the wintertime, the closest riverbank was three and a half miles away. We cross-country skied there, and we took pork beans and wieners to cook for our lunch. We were much freer than kids are today; we were always outdoors.”
From Mary’s recollection, the population of Edson was between 1,500 and 2,000 when she was a child. Mary described the industry in the area: “The railroad was big. My dad worked on the railroad, and there was a lot of farming around. There was also some part-time trapping, although Dad only did that when we were younger. Later, the pipeline came through in the early 1950s; I think that was when Edson had more of a boom, although we left in 1952, so we weren’t there to see what long-term effects it had.”
Home Life in the 1930s and 1940s
Mary recalled that after their dad bought the family’s house on the outskirts of Edson from his brother, he added on a long kitchen and a bedroom at the back:
I had a bedroom to myself after my sister left, when I was about ten years old. George and John shared the bedroom off the kitchen. The furnace was in the dugout basement and heat was piped up to all the rooms; before that we just had the wood stove in the kitchen and a pot-bellied stove in the living room. We were also the only ones in Edson to have a brick barbecue before barbecues were in fashion. Because we had a well in the back, and didn’t have electricity, my mum stored her homemade butter there. We very seldom bought bread — Mum did all her baking. When we were coming home from school and were three or four blocks away, we would smell doughnuts and run home, knowing they were just coming out of the oven. George quite often baked powder biscuits.16
When I asked John about their mother, he simply said: “She was always there.”
Mum used to make the pies on Saturday, and we’d both be working on Saturday. George would be in the butcher’s shop and after work he would go to a movie or something, and he would get home about ten or twelve o’clock. There’d always be a bunch of pies made, and by morning there wouldn’t be much left. We always brought a lot of kids home; the house was always full; everybody was comfortable there. George would bring friends home and they would be sleeping all over the house, some on the floor. It was the same in Edmonton.
Lillian added, “George’s friends were all welcome. His mother was quite happy. She never said anything; but as long as we were happy, she was.”
John expanded on their early home life:
Maybe it was just being there; maybe that influenced George. Where he grew up probably had a large influence on him; he had a stable family and a stable home. They never entertained us, like you have to do nowadays, driving the kids hither and yon — we made our own fun. They just didn’t have the time; it was a different lifestyle, we were just left on our own, as long as we didn’t get into trouble. We had lots of chores as well; we had to get the water, feed the chickens, clean out the cow’s barn, and I used to build fires in the morning.
The biggest chore came each fall when Louis cut and sawed a huge pile of logs that his sons had to split. I recalled helping George split gnarled, dense alpine fir on several occasions at his ski lodge in the 1980s and 1990s. Because of its age and the small size of the growth rings, it was some of the toughest wood to split, and I remember that my axe would often barely make a dent in it, or would just bounce off, whereas George would swing the axe for hours, with sure, effective strikes. When I commented on George’s splitting skills, John explained that he had a lot of practice:
We split wood the first couple of weeks in September. We had to split all that wood, and then we had to take it into the woodshed and stack it for the winter. It seemed like that woodpile went on forever. We were one of the few houses with a furnace. It was just convection, no forced air. But Dad had built this out of a forty-five-gallon drum, with a plenum out of strong mud, and we just ran the ducts right out of the basement into the bedrooms. It was just a dug basement, and it was cold — that’s where Mum used to store all her vegetables.
Their mother had a big vegetable garden, and while George and John did some potato hoeing, their dad loved to do most of the garden work.17 As a child, George preferred to be fishing, but the outdoors could not continue to dominate his time outside of school and his chores — as he entered his teenage years, the drive to earn money, expand his horizons, and search for a career began to shape his life.
A Young Man Blossoms
Chapter 3
When George Evanoff was about thirteen years old, he went to work part-time in the butcher’s shop in Edson. His brother, John, recalled that George worked because he wanted spending money: “There wasn’t much money in those days; Dad was just a section hand, a car man; he didn’t make that much money — there were four kids, and he had to raise a family. Mum didn’t work; although of course she did, she worked hard in the home.”
John remembered that George’s first job was to deliver meat on his bike: “I think that was the first bike that George had. He had to buy it, and he had a big carrier on the front, and another big carrier on the back. We would load it up and wheel it around town delivering the meat — in the winter it was a little difficult with the snow. George did that for a couple of years, after school and all day Saturday. He probably started doing some butchering after a while.”
Despite their new responsibilities, John noted that he and George still made time for outdoor activities, especially on Sundays: “That’s when we went out in the bush, we and our neighbours, the Kutyns. On Sunday mornings when they went to Mass, we would wait until eleven o’ clock before we could do anything.” John added that he and George never went to church at all, even though most families were religious at that time. (George Evanoff’s evident spirituality later in life is discussed in the Epilogue.)
Anyone who hiked with George Evanoff in later years quickly realized that, for a man of apparent average build, he could out-walk almost anyone. Apart from his obvious fitness and determination in the outdoors, he had