Geordie Dobson (1929 - 1981)
Geordie Dobson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England. Too young to serve in the Second World War, he lied about his age and signed up on a Norwegian freighter. The ship was in a munitions convoy off West Africa when it was hit by a German torpedo. Ignoring the captain’s orders, he and a few others launched a lifeboat and survived when the freighter exploded. He travelled the world by working on freighters after the war was over.1)
Geordie's British Merchant Marine ship was off the coast of Japan when the bomb went off in Hiroshima. He heard two men talk about free airfare on a DC3 to work in a mine called Keno and his steam fitting skills gave Geordie the skills to work as a plumber in the MacKeno mine in the early 1950s.2) Geordie arrived in Keno in 1952 when the population was down around 100 men. He began working at United Keno Hill's Elsa mine and over the years worked at Calumet, Comstock, and the Bellekeno. He purchased the Keno City Hotel in 1959 and began to rebuild it. He worked ten hours at the mine and then another eight hours on the building, and opened the hotel in 1963, several years before the mine closed.3)
Dobson was one of the Yukon's better story tellers. He told of two ghosts who live in the hotel that in 2001 he was only opening in the summer. One ghost was a Japanese man whose wife and children were killed in a fire when his hotel burned down. Friends put him in room twelve in Geordie's hotel and he shot himself. The other ghost was Frank White who worked himself into a grave in 1958. He appeared by the pool table and was recognized by a wide-brimmed hat and a coat with tails. 4) In an early reuse program, Dobson cemented 32,000 stubby beer bottles to the outside of his house for insultation. The project took four years to complete (1965 – 1970).5)
In 1992, Dobson received an exemplary service medal from then Governor General Ramon Hnatyshyn in recognition of his twenty-five years as a volunteer fireman.6) Tony Massil made a film documentary about Dobson and Frank Erl in 2007 called Forty Men for the Yukon. It showed at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Montreal World Student Film Festival in 2008.7)