Yukon who is who

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Alec F. Berry (1896 - 1982)
	
Alec Berry was born at Nelson, British Columbia. His father had immigrated to Canada from Oxford, England. He married a Russian lady and they grew fruit trees. When the crop failed, Berry went underground in a Nelson moly mine at age sixteen. In 1914, Alec volunteered to serve in the First World War. He returned to the mine after spring thaw, but a bad leg ruled out working underground. He turned to assaying and then came to the Yukon as a wet-drill salesman for Ingorsoll Rand in the early 1920s. When Treadwell Yukon’s ore was near exhaustion, Livingstone Wernecke negotiated a ten-year lease with the Guggenheims to get enough millable Sadie-Friendship ore to feed a proposed 100-ton-a-day concentrator. The mill was completed in January 1925 and Berry was hired as chief assayer and mill superintendent. Treadwell Yukon closed in October 1941, after Wernecke's death, and all ore prices except tungsten dropped during the Second World War. During those hard years, Berry stayed in his Keno Hill cabin. In 1945, Berry met Dr. William Smitheringale and worked as an assayer for his optioned property at Mt. Nansen. In 1947 both Smitheringale and Berry started working for Fred Connell's Conwest Exploration, a co-sponsor of Keno Hill Mining.((Jane Gaffin, “Alec Berry: Conwest Exploration’s Super Sleuth.”  Website: http://north-land.com/ypa/berry.html))

In 1948, the office relocated to Whitehorse and Smitheringale and Berry  travelled the Yukon looking for good mineral prospects. They went to Lower Post and negotiated with Vic Sittler on his asbestos claims. The Cassiar Asbestos Corporation was Conwest Exploration’s most ambitious development. Between 1952 – 1957, Alec Berry was elected to represent the Mayo riding in the territorial government for one term. By 1957 he was back to mineral exploration and told Smitheringale about another asbestos prospect on Clinton Creek. Berry had already talked to Dawson grocer Fred Caley and his son Bob who had grubstaked prospectors Art Anderson and George Walters. In 1967, the deposit became Canada's most northerly open-pit operation, and the Yukon's first asbestos producer. Alec Berry was appointed a director of the Prospectors and Developers Association (PDA) in 1957 and served a long tenure to 1976 when Al Kulan replaced him on the board.((Jane Gaffin, “Alec Berry: Conwest Exploration’s Super Sleuth.”  Website: http://north-land.com/ypa/berry.html))
	
In the 1960s, Berry often occupied a special place at Cal Miller's Capitol Hotel bar in Whitehorse. A lot of people in the mining industry gathered there where mining prospects were appraised, and deals were struck. Berry would often sit alone pretending to listen to his radio while actually listening in on conversations around him. After his death, an Alec Berry Memorial Fund was established with the Yukon Foundation. The fund supports mining-related projects and studies in mining and geology. Alec Berry was inducted into the Yukon Prospectors' Association's Honour Roll in 1988.((Les McLaughlin, "A CKRW Yukon Nugget." Hougen Group webpage: http://www.hougengroup.com/yukonhistory/facts_year/1890s.aspx?year890=1896))