Stories

When Sunwapta Broadcasting first produced local television in Edmonton in 1954, CFRN aimed daytime programs at the homemaker audience. Laura Banks was the popular face of this programming from 1955-1968, under the stage name Laura Lindsay. Decades after her death, she remains well-loved by women who tuned in for her sewing and cooking demonstrations and celebrity interviews.

By 1935, there were fifteen Chinese gardens "strung out along the North Saskatchewan River valley from Beverly in the east to Government House in the west." A commentator in the Edmonton Journal enthused about “a veritable Chinese tapestry worked out in rectangles of harmonious greens, sea green, sage green, olive green, and the delicate apple green of lettuce beds."

"But I do remember, as a younger girl, going for a summertime ride with my James Dean lookalike uncle, in his baby blue convertible, to see the mine where some of our Polish relatives worked."

The most recent and maybe the greatest sign that the land was once lake or marshy lakeside was the visit of a female moose and her calf to the Belgravia Art Park in May 2016. McKernan’s Lake may be lost, but its memory is alive.

The Alaska Highway, built in fear and haste by the U.S. army in eight months, provided evidence that North America was secure from invasion and demonstrated a feat of unparalleled cooperation between two countries. But it also disrupted Indigenous peoples, wildlife and habitats, and exposed the need for study and consultation. It also led to an ecological consciousness of the north, of its environment and populations and, ultimately, an understanding that wilderness is finite and fragile.