close your eyes and hope for the best

George Hunter 1945. (click image to enlarge)

Tapiti rushed over to the mance, found us all unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning and had dragged us outside into the -40°F fresh air. All I remember is that I had one terrible headache that lasted a week. Tapiti had saved our lives.

As a photographer with the National Film Board Stills Division from May 1, 1945 through April 30, 1950, I kept suggesting assignments in Western Canada to be able to work out of my Winnipeg home for as much of each year as possible.

In February of 1946, after covering the Manitoba Music Festival, I received a telegram from Ottawa with cryptic instructions: “Contact M.D. 10 at Fort Osborne Barracks re photographing Operation Muskox.” I learned this project was to be a test of heavy-duty tracked vehicles traversing muskeg and tundra under severe Arctic weather conditions. It would be a joint venture by Canadian and United States armed forces. The rugged machines arrived in Churchill by rail and were to cross the Canadian High Arctic to arrive in Yellowknife by late March. The Iron Curtain was still a threat at that time. My assignment was to photograph the vehicles as they were being made ready for the expedition and to cover their departure. I would not be travelling with the moving contingent.

Thomas Tapiti - 1946. (click image to enlarge)

A week after I received the telegram, I caught a flight to Churchill aboard an un-insulated
Dakota, a troop transport similar to the faithful civilian DC-3. How I didn’t freeze to death in the -20°F temperature on the flight that took forever, I will never know. At Churchill I was bunked in army barracks along with arriving reporters and photographers from the agencies and larger US and European newspapers. Operation Muskox was really going to be something!

After shooting every angle on the machines being prepared for the trip there was little to do around Churchill other then drink beer at Pop Reid’s, the only hotel in town at that time. This establishment had only a small overused outhouse so it was a mighty chilling to use the great out-of-doors in a blizzard at -40°F. We all survived, however.

I became buddy-buddy with Wallace Kirkland, a photographer from Life magazine’s Chicago office. Kirk was the live wire of the group. Each evening we overheard him dictating telegrams to the CN Telegraph operator for transmission to his office. He would end each message with the phrase, ” … and we rubbed her knees with gin”. It was his signature.

Kirk and I remained good friends over the years, despite the fact he was twice my age. I would visit him each time I passed through Chicago and he would introduce me to Life photographers who were heroes to me. On one visit, I met Frank Schershell who had just designed and set up a company to produce light stands for holding flashbulb reflectors. This was in the days before strobes. Frank’s stands were not on the market yet but he gave or sold some to photographers at the office to get the ball rolling. Three chaps, Frank himself, George Skadding and Hank Walker each gave me one and each had his name scratched on it. I cherish these souvenirs and have used them all over the world. I use them to this day for my lighter strobe units.

Kirk would send me New Year’s cards each year featuring an attractive young lady with a gin bottle close by. I still have glossy prints from one of his assignments featuring otters. In the group is a family of otters cavorting in his hotel room bathtub. The stories Kirk would narrate were always an inspiration. He died within months of retiring from Life. This tells me I should never retire.

Winnipeg Tribune reporter Val Werier and I were the only two to bum a flight to Baker Lake where they had a landing strip marked out on the ice. We were anxious to catch the Muskox convoy as it passed through the area. Before leaving Churchill, and in order to ensure my cameras were working o.k. in the severe cold, I shot a couple of test sheets in the Speed Graphic and a roll in the Super Ikonta B. Kirk would have the Life lab process the film and was to send me a telegram on the results. A few days after his return to Chicago, and not knowing where I would be, he addressed it to my home in Winnipeg.

When a C.N. Telegraph operator called the house, my mother asked as to the nature of the message to determine if it could await my return. The operator explained “… it is of a highly personal nature and it cannot be divulged to anyone other than the intended recipient”. My good mother suggested the operator call the radio room at M.D. 10 to have it forwarded as they would likely know where I would be. The M.D. 10 operator knew only that I was somewhere in the Canadian High Arctic so he fired it off to every settlement in the Northwest Territories. The message, read to me at the radio shack at Baker Lake, mentioned the exposure as being generally o.k. with the last few on the roll a little overexposed, likely due to shutter freezing up. The message ended with Kirk’s usual, “… and we rubbed her knees with gin”.

We hung around Baker Lake a few days awaiting the moving force. They were almost the last days of my life as were the lives of Val Werier and the Anglican minister, Reverent James. The minister’s right-hand man, Thomas Tapiti, observed from his home that no smoke was coming from the chimney of the mance as there should have been on a Sunday morning. Val and I had been sleeping on the floor in our sleeping bags. Tapiti rushed over to the mance, found us all unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning and had dragged us outside into the -40°F fresh air. All I remember is that I had one terrible headache that lasted a week. Tapiti had saved our lives.

Before leaving the Arctic I heard stories about the Hudson’s Bay Company supply ship, RMS Nascopie, that visits all the HBC posts in the Eastern Arctic each summer. I was fascinated. Upon returning to Winnipeg I sent a telegram to the NFB office in Ottawa suggesting I cover the following summer’s Nascopie sailing. The office apparently liked the suggestion and replied they would book me onto the ship. I heard later that the other photographers were up in arms, fighting to have me replaced. They all wanted the trip but I am glad management honoured their original commitment.

Looking back, I think the Nascopie trip through the Canadian High Arctic was the best assignment of my entire career. Not only that; the following year the Nascopie hit a rock near Cape Dorset and sank. The ship was never replaced, the settlements henceforth being serviced by several smaller freighters and by aircraft. Two and a half month’s of sailing through the Canadian High Arctic and photographing a way of life that will never be witnessed again was certainly the trip of a lifetime.

Pangnirtung Nunavut Canada. (click image to enlarge)

I carried on with other assignments in the West before proceeding to Churchill in early July when RMS Nascopie arrived from Montreal shortly after the ice broke up in Hudson Strait and in Hudson Bay. We would be visiting every HBC post in the Canadian Eastern Arctic. The settlements I remember best were Eskimo Point, Chesterfield Inlet, Arctic Bay, Pond Inlet, Clyde River and Pangnirtung. Speaking of Pangnirtung, I met up with another life-threatening incident while making photographs of two young ladies.

I was kneeling on the ground to photograph the post manager’s daughter, Wendy Anderson with her Inuit playmate and a Husky puppy. As I began shooting, the little girls let out a piercing scream and I impulsively jerked my head and camera up and backward. A mad sleigh dog’s teeth clamped over my flash gun’s reflector with a loud clang. Those teeth were apparently meant for my throat. I learned recently that sleigh dogs sometimes attack men who fall on the ground, although they don’t attack women or children. Apparently they take revenge on men as it is only men who beat them. I still have the heavy-metal reflector with the dents from the dog’ teeth. My life was saved once again; this time by my two little photogenic subjects.

Now about the title of this piece: there were no harbours back then so the Nascopie would anchor off the coast and the tender would take us ashore. The ship’s purser would generally accompany us and make introductions to those awaiting the ship’s arrival. When the name Hunter was mentioned, and seeing the cameras, the general exclamation was, “…Hunter! You’re a photographer. There was a message last winter, no”? Then I would be asked, “Whose knees were being rubbed”? They had all heard the forwarded CN Telegraph message from Kirk with the closing salutation, “And we rubbed her knees with gin”.

© George Hunter

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 10:27 am and is filed under George Hunter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.