Erika Sherk
Northern News Services
Monday, July 23, 2007

INUVIK - Gordon Campbell shows his years in some ways - the worn, cracked brown workboots, the faded plaid shirt, the white hair and weather-battered skin.

Gordon Campbell is shutting down operations in Inuvik after 30 years of operations with North Star Service and Construction Ltd. - Erika Sherk/NNSL photo

His eyes, however, still glitter with laughter and a deep intelligence - the kind that only 77 years of experience in this world can bring.

Campbell, 77, is shutting down his company's operations for good. After 30 years in Inuvik, North Star Service and Construction will be gone.

He and Bertha, his wife of 51 years, are going to Yellowknife to help their daughter with her little ones, he said.

He sidesteps the question of how it feels to close the doors on a company that has been his life for so long.

"It's been petering out for a while now," he said.

Campbell, sitting on a dusty black chair in the shop he is preparing to rent out, started the business in 1965 or maybe 1967, he said.

Operations began with a service shop and a sports store and then things just snowballed from there, he said.

"I started by buying old vehicles and repairing them," Campbell said, "then we started hauling gravel."

Things began taking off and by the 1970s they were doing maintenance on the highways between Inuvik and the border in the summer and did all the maintenance on the ice roads to Tuktoyaktuk and Aklavik in the winters, said Campbell.

"We had a lot of work then, working for the oil companies" he said.

With about 100 men, multiple heavy machinery, and 10 trucks running full time, North Star was flying.

Then the Berger Inquiry on the proposed Mackenzie Gas Pipeline came through. Pipeline activity in the Mackenzie Valley was halted and things ground to a halt for North Star, said Campbell.

There was no work to be had. The men were laid off. "We sold what we could," he said.

They managed to keep afloat, getting small contracts, but "nothing like we had before," he said.

It was a terrible time, Campbell said, and things were never the same after that.

The company kept on going though, until more bad news came along.

"I got cancer," he said, "and we had to pretty much shut down."In the mid-1990s, Gordon and Bertha had to travel to Edmonton for Gordon to undergo 36 cancer treatments.

When they returned, North Star kept going, selling pop out of the shop and running one truck.

And now it is all coming to an end.

Though at first glance it might seem a sad story, Campbell is a tough man. He shows no bitterness towards the past.

"You don't let it bother you," he said, of his company's boom and bust history. "If you let it bother you you're not going to last."

This strength of spirit comes from a past that is miles away from what today's generation experiences.

Growing up on a farm boy near Lloydminster, Alta, Campbell was driving an eight-horse hitch in the fields by the time he was 14.

He left the farm at 16 and travelled around Western Canada. It wasn't a holiday. He worked driving horses in logging camps in the bush, constructing the St. Mary's Dam in B.C., and later toiled in open pit mines.

He was welding in Hay River when he met his beloved Bertha. They moved to Inuvik in 1963 "and forgot to leave," he said.

Now, he is leaving behind his town and the company that has been his life for over 30 years, but he is not "retiring".

"I'm never without work," he said, "there is always stuff to do if you want to work."

True words from an indomitable spirit who, 77 years in, is still not willing to quit.