Paul Sanson White Jr. (1929 - 2011)
Paul White was born in Toronto, Ontario.1) His parents were Helen Orvis and Paul Sanson White.2) He spent his first few years around Huntsville, Ontario where his grandfather owned a hardware store and hotel. When he was five, he and a sister moved to Montréal with their engineer father. Paul interrupted his schooling to serve with the Royal Air Force Transport Command during the Second World War. On his return, he became a construction labourer and surveyor's helper.3)
Paul went to Labrador in 1949 as a prospector for the Labrador Mining and Exploration Company and then worked for two years on the pioneer survey for a future Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway. After upgrading his schooling, Paul was accepted at the University of Toronto as a mining engineering student in 1951. After one year, he transferred to the University of British Columbia and graduated from there in 1956. During the summers he had worked around Yellowknife as a metallurgical researcher, assayer, and tramp miner. After school, he became a contract miner and he moved freely from one partner to the next.4)
The 1957 mining recession took Paul back to northern Ontario and then to a Texas oil company in Calgary. He became a registered mining engineer for the Alberta Association of Professional Engineers and went north to do field engineering and locate oil wells. He also apprenticed as a land surveyor with a friend whom he had worked with in Labrador. In the early 1960s, he was commissioned as an Alberta Land Surveyor and worked in the territories at exploration projects in the early 1960s. He reached an accord with Dennis Hosford to set up a small survey company in Grande Prairie. His first paycheck paid for a ticket to Whitehorse, and he arrived to open for business as White & Hosford.5) [The firm was White Hosford & Impy in the 1960s and ‘70s.]
Paul White worked with New Imperial Mines to survey Aubrey Simmons' one hundred old Whitehorse copper belt claims. New Imperial Mines was organized in 1957 from Imperial Mines and Metals, a company based on Aubrey Simmons Whitehorse copper claims acquired when prices were low.6)
Paul White’s entrepreneurial spirt involved him in ventures and adventures in the iron ore fields of Labrador, aerial surveys of the arctic, and gold and silver mines in the Yukon. He was a master wordsmith and story-teller of considerable skill.7)