Bill Hakonson (d.2011)
Bill Hakonson emigrated from Norway with his family when he was a small child. They settled in Alberta shortly before Bill’s father died. His mother remarried and his stepfather mistreated him, so Bill ran away when he was twelve. He learned about the Klondike at age fourteen when he was working as a bellhop in the Hotel Vancouver.1) In the early 1940s, he drove a truck for the United States Army. He met his future wife, Fran, in Whitehorse.2)
Bill moved to Dawson in 1943.3) Fran joined him in the spring of 1946 and worked for him, driving taxi.4) Bill worked in a casino, cooked for a cat train, managed a hotel, built and ran his own hotel, and mined for gold.5)
Fran and Bill ran the Dawson City Wholesaling, selling groceries, and Fran ran the front desk renting rooms in their Eldorado Hotel.6) Bill’s brother Albert Fuhre moved to Dawson around 1964.7) Another brother, Les Hakonson, was a crane operator and cat skinner in Dawson.8)
Bill Hakonson built the Top of the World golf course in 1990. It is a nine-hole course with a pro-shop, driving range, and power carts. It lost money almost every year. Before his death in 2011, Hakonson asked that the course be turned over to the citizens of Dawson, provided the Yukon government would clear any encumbrances.9)
The transfer ran into trouble when the territory asked that anyone remotely connected to Hakonson be barred from the operation and management of the course until 2032. The list included Mayor Peter Jenkins who, twenty years before, was married to Lenore, Bill’s daughter. Bill’s son, Greg Hakonson, thought the clause was rooted in his history of resigning from the Yukon Energy Corporation after he learned that Premier Dennis Fentie was negotiating to sell Yukon’s power infrastructure to private firms [ATCO] at a severely reduced rate.10) Bill Hakonson served on the Yukon Energy board before Greg, when ATCO seemed to be unduly profiting from the Yukon operations, and he took a strong stance against the Alberta firm at that time.11)