Vernon Bookwalter (d. 1975)

Vernon Bookwalter learned to fly with the U. S. Army during the First World War and then flew as one of the first U. S. Airmail pilots in California. In 1933 he was flying for Clyde Wann’s Skagway Airlines. The winter of 1933-34 there was a lot of bad weather in the White Pass, but Bookwalter made dozens of successful fights through to Carcross, Whitehorse, and Dawson. White Pass & Yukon Route perceived this as competition to their Yukon monopoly. In May 1934, White Pass announced air service between Skagway, Carcross, Whitehorse, and Dawson and they hired Bookwalter as the base manager for White Pass Airways. Brookwalter stayed as the only pilot with Merritt “Pasco” Boyle as ground crew and maintenance and sometimes co-pilot.¹⁾

Bookwalter landed the first White Pass plane, a Loening Keystone Commuter, nicknamed “The Duck”, in Whitehorse in 1934. He piloted scheduled runs to Dawson and Mayo and carried men and freight to Atlin. He flew tourists up and down the coast and thrilled them by skimming the glaciers. White Pass soon enlarged the Whitehorse airport to accommodate the growth of their division. In 1936, they built a new hanger, lengthened the main runway and added two more making Whitehorse the largest airport north of 60. They also built strips in communities across the territory. In 1938, Bookwalter brought in the new Curtis Condor CF-BQN for the company. It carried eighteen passengers and a crew of three and was the newest and largest plane in Canada at the time. It was painted orange and black and was named The Cheechako. It flew from Skagway to Dawson twice a week in a trip that took just over two hours and cost eighty-six dollars each way. The cost dropped dramatically in 1939 when a fare war between White Pass and Northern Airways drove the price between Whitehorse and Dawson to five dollars. Finally, an agreement between the two companies set the price at fifty dollars. White Pass went five years without an injury to passenger or pilot but in 1930, a pilot and plane were lost over Lake Laberge. He thought he was descending into fog but instead he dove right into the lake. In 1940, a fire destroyed the White Pass hanger in Whitehorse and in 1941, two men fell to their deaths when the engine on their Fairchild 82 cut out on a cold day in January. Soon after, White Pass announced it would sell its aviation division to Yukon Southern.²⁾ Bookwalter was contemplating retiring because of failing health and he resigned from British Yukon Navigation as superintendent of the air service when the sale went through in December 1941. He retired to the south, and died in Nome, Alaska.³⁾