Marny Ryder
Marny Ryder arrived in the Yukon in 1959 as a new nurse. She worked in Whitehorse for a year before she was posted to Watson Lake in 1961. She was twenty-three, and the only nurse from south of Lower Post to Whitehorse. The workload was too much and so she packed her things and moved back to Ontario that fall. Ten days after she arrived, Northern Health Services called and offered her a job in Dawson, so she turned her car around and drove back. She still had a huge area, from Dawson to Mayo and Pelly Crossing, but this time she had institutional support.1)
Marny stayed for her term of two years and then returned to Ontario to get her nursing degree at Queen’s University. After she graduated in 1965, she drove back north. In 1969, she became the zone nursing officer for the Yukon and parts of Northern British Columbia and was in charge of medivacs. She met Lloyd Ryder, one of the medivac pilots, and they married and raised two children. Between 1971 and 1984, Ryder taught nursing assistants at Yukon College and was the Dean of Business and Applied Arts until 1992. She then spent ten years doing staff development and performance management for the Yukon Public Service Commission and the Workers' Compensation Board. After retirement, she became the chair of the Yukon Hospital Corporation.2) In 2004, the Whitehorse General Hospital Ladies Auxiliary Board, with Ryder as chair, was raising $10,000 a year for general purposes around the hospital.3)