Yukon who is who

Valentine Scheck (1928 – 2018)

Val Scheck came to the Yukon in 1942 with his father and six brothers. They cut wood to burn on sections of the North Canol Road to keep the glaciers from closing the road. Val and Ed Edmunson erected the top steel on the Duke River Bridge, and he worked on the bridges at the Donjek and Slims rivers. He worked for contractors and both the United States and Canadian Army and he drove construction and transport equipment all over the Yukon. He had a contract to clean up the equipment and material left by the United States Army on the Canol Road. He worked in airport maintenance for Bennet & White at Snag when the coldest temperature in the Yukon was recorded. When he started to drive, he was so young he had to sit on one foot to get the height to reach the pedals.¹⁾

Scheck worked for Ed McIsaac hauling bridge timbers from Teslin to the Cassiar Highway when the bridges were being built. He was back-hauling a dozer with a 10-ton Mack truck when he stopped to check his tires and the airline broke at the compressor. The truck began to pick up speed and he could not hold it back with the transmission. He was going very fast when he approached the bridge where another truck was just coming off and toward him. He had to cut into the ditch to make a corner and the trailer hung off the edge. He made in onto the old wooden bridge with the truck rocking back and forth and the TD 14 blade touching the tires. The truck was jumping around on the rough bridge deck. Val always wondered how he made it across without the truck engine blowing up, the bridge collapsing, or the truck jumping off the bridge into the lake.²⁾

Val met his wife Winona in Haines Junction in 1950 and they were married in Destruction Bay. They moved to Whitehorse in 1958 and Scheck drove truck for White Pass for five years. In 1963, he bought a carwash business to wash the Westour busses, and named it Steel Street Carwash. He sold the business in 1968 and bought a few trucks to start Val Scheck Trucking, later renamed Pioneer Transport Ltd. He bought a lot on Galena Road and in 1973 he built a new shop (now the Recycling Depot) and took over the Texaco Bulk Plant. He also started Valco Home Heating to deliver home heating fuel. He ran these businesses until 1979 when he was forced to retire after being crushed under a vehicle he was working on. He sold the trucking business to Points North Transport in 1981.³⁾

Val Scheck built the first Yukon, and maybe the world’s first, tri-axle truck and tri-axle pup tanker. Scheck was named the 2014 Pioneer of the Year and inducted into the Yukon Transportation Hall of Fame in 2020.⁴⁾