Curley Graham (1920 – 2012)
	
Curley Graham was born in in the east and moved west and then to Atlin with his family in 1935. [His father was a minister.] Curley come up to Whitehorse when the Alaska Highway was being built to see what was going on. He and a friend had work with White Pass. They left Atlin on 1 July 1942 but their boat broke down on Tagish Lake and they were a day late, so the jobs went to someone else. They were hired instead by the Bennett and White company that was building the Whitehorse airport. Curley was working on equipment maintenance. The company also had jobs at Aishihik and Teslin, and Curley had to go back and forth to look after equipment at those jobs as well. Then he worked on the equipment for a company moving freight along the highway until the fall of 1943. After that he started a shop in Whitehorse. He worked on lots of jobs, some for Jacobs, and some on equipment at the airport until they got their own staff.((Alaska Highway Project Jukebox. Stacey Carkhuff interview with Curley Graham, 7 November 2008. 2019 website: https://jukebox.uaf.edu/ak_highway/Graham_Curly/Assets/transcript.html)) 

Don Frizzell knew Curley Graham in the 1980s and remembers that Graham took his trucks to Edmonton for a few years and then returned to Whitehorse. Graham helped build the road from the Alaska Highway to Mount Nansen to open up the Brown McDade mine, and he later pushed the road through to Carmacks. He built a road from Transport, at mile 687 on the Alaska Highway, to the Liard River for an exploration company. His first shop in Whitehorse was where City Hall is on Second Avenue and he lived where the sternwheeler //Klondike// is parked. He moved many buildings around Whitehorse and liked to remember their original locations. He was instrumental in building some of the streets in Whitehorse and Porter Creek.((Don Frizzell, //Moccasin Telegraph,// digital newsletter, 29 August 2012.)) 

Graham mined in the Burwash area and had some big equipment up there for a few years. He did quite a bit of flying and was going to start an aviation company, but his partner was killed in an unrelated airplane accident, so he gave up that interest. When Frizzell knew Curley in the 1980s, he was always working on some project in his big shop on #1 MacDonald Road. He had a fire that gutted the interior and he lost tools and manuals, but he just kept going. He was always repairing things instead of buying something new. He wanted to rescue a few machines from around the territory and start a museum at his shop.((Don Frizzell, //Moccasin Telegraph,// digital newsletter, 29 August 2012.))