Lucile Hooker, nee MacKay (1892 - 1999)
Lucile Hooker was the only child of Adam MacKay and Annie (Urquhart). Mackay went to the Klondike in 1898 and Lucile and her mother followed in 1899. They lived at Last Chance at Hunker Creek where MacKay mined and then they moved to town where MacKay operated his own dairy.1) Lucile started music lessons at age 10, first on the piano and later on the violin. A concert program for Caledonian Entertainment is dated 24 May 1910. It features an eighteen-year-old Lucille playing duets and in the orchestra. On the same program, Lucille is listed as performing the Highland Sword Dance, an Irish jig, and a double Sword Dance with Archie Black. She played in a Yukon orchestra for years with John Dines. She sang in the Presbyterian Church choir with her mother and played the pipe organ.2) [The newspaper says the organ was in the Anglican Church but the only pipe organ in town was in the Presbyterian church.]
In 1910, Lucile was engaged to a local miner, William Alexander Aiken “Billy” MacMillan (1863 – 1931).3) He was working in the gold mines and unsettled, so in 1912 Lucille and her mother moved went to Vancouver and Lucille took a stenographer’s course. She worked in an office until her fiancé was more established. MacMillan joined her in Vancouver and they married in 1915. The couple returned to Dawson where MacMillan was the superintendent of dredges for Yukon Consolidated Gold Company.4)
The family lived in Joe Boyle's house at Bear Creek where Lucile gave birth to four children: Patrick, Mary, Alan, and Kathleen. The family left Dawson in 1931 and moved to Vancouver where Billy became ill with rheumatism and died at age 68. Lucile worked as a stenographer in the city for several years.5) She married [James] E. “Jimmy” Hooker in Vancouver. Hooker had been a friend of the MacMillan family for years and had also been employed by YCGC and worked on the dredges.6)
Jimmy died in 1962 while the couple was on a cruise to Britain.7) Mrs. Hooker lived to be the oldest member of the Vancouver Yukoner’s Association, and she held the lifetime title of Honorary Vice-president. The Yukon Archives holds six of her panoramic photographs of convention banquets held in Vancouver in the 1937, 1939, 1948, 1950, and 1954.8)