NNSL (Aug 02/99) - With all the hubbub about the City of Yellowknife spending money to repave Franklin Avenue, Mike Vaydik has his own take on just what's at the bottom of all the digging.

"It's Mayor Lovell looking for kimberlite pipes," he says with his characteristic smile. For anyone who doesn't know what a kimberlite pipe is, it's a type of rock known to host diamonds. And for anyone who knows Mike, they know about his sense of humour.

Mike Vaydik was born in 1946 at the Con hospital before the Red Cross hospital was built. The foundations are still there behind the Con rec hall. You can still see the concrete footings.

Mike's dad Chuck came North in 1945 as part of a staking rush for gold.

"My mother had to wait until he could find a place to live so she waited at a boarding house in Edmonton," Vaydik said.

Vaydik's father worked for Giant for a few years, prospecting in summer and doing surface work at the mine in the winter. But he soon went independent. He would often be out prospecting for months on end returning at freeze up.

Vaydik's parents met in Montreal where his mother Kay grew up. During the Second World War, his father flew airplanes across the Atlantic. The aircraft -- Mitchells, B-26s and lots more -- would then go into service.

The Vaydik's first house in Yellowknife was a log cabin on the road now called Ragged Ass Road, in Old Town.

"My dad was six feet, four inches. The cabin wasn't tall enough for him to stand up in, so when he got home, the first thing he had to do was sit down."

The Vaydik's -- Chuck, Kay and Mike -- lived in the "cabin" until Mike's sister Mary Lou was born. Then they moved across the road.

When the family grew, "we needed another house. We didn't have any excess capacity," Vaydik said.

Kay Vaydik was the morning commentator for CBC. She interviewed people from all walks of life.

"Life then was a lot of picnics out on the rocks," Vaydik said as he flips through old photos.

Today, Vaydik lives on 50A Ave., but when he was a youngster living in Old Town, 50A was bush.

"We used to go up there to get away from it all," he said.

"When I was growing up, it was a small town, only 3,000 people. Everybody knew everybody and everybody knew what you were up to. With so much daylight, it was hard to raid gardens. There was no cover of darkness."

Vaydik admits to raiding a few gardens but other kids in the neighbourhood probably raided his parent's garden, he said. "It probably all evened out."

Vaydik said his younger years were "pretty much normal."

But when he turned 14, he his summer job was a bit different from most. He worked in the Barren Lands and the along the Arctic Coast prospecting.

"I used to leave town the day after school was over and come back the day before it started."

The first company he worked for belonged to Jack and Earl Curry. Then he worked for Precambrian Mining Services, owned by Norman Byrne. John Parker, who would go on to be NWT commissioner, was also a partner in Precambrian.

Vaydik then head off to university for a few years and later took a job in the oil industry. In the late 1960s, he took a job with Calgary-based Riley's Datashare, a small computer company with the country's second most powerful computer that provided electronic analysis of oil-well information.

"The 8K computer we had wouldn't fit in this room," he said, referring to the NWT Chamber of Mines offices. Vaydik is currently the chamber's general manager.

Back in the 1960s, Vaydik said interesting things were happening in Yellowknife so he came home and took a job with the GNWT in the highways division of public works. Most of his work was in smaller communities helping residents with community planning.

In 1976, Vaydik went to Grise Fiord to be the community's settlement manager where he filed a report with the regional director in Iqaluit once a month.

"We used to make our own fun," he said. Some of that fun was the occasional joke over the radio. One such joke involved a singsong.

"Between Resolute, Nanisivik and Grise Fiord, the next thing we knew two Twin Otters full of people showed up in Grise Fiord for this singsong."

Golf also made its way into the mix.

"Later, we started talking about the Grise Fiord Open Golf Tournament. We had all these rumours circulating." Terry Jesudason, who still lives in Resolute and runs an outfitters there, called up Vaydik asking when the course would be ready. Her parents had come up and brought their clubs and were ready to take to the links. Ted Grant, who owns Simpson Air, and Vaydik, and an unsuspecting helicopter pilot, spent the night getting a golf course ready in Grise Fiord. And the next day, three Twin Otter loads of people arrived at Grise Fiord ready for a round of golf.

"Goofy things happened."

After Grise Fiord, Vaydik worked for the GNWT in Rankin Inlet, Fort Smith and Cambridge Bay.

Next he moved to Yellowknife and was in charge of the government's sale of public housing. In Yellowknife, Mike and his wife, Kathi, started a family. Jill and Ian were both born in Yellowknife. But Mike wasn't too keen on working out of head office, so one Tuesday night in 1996, he told his wife Kathi he was going to quit his job. "She said go ahead."

The following Wednesday morning, Vaydik quit. Friday he had a goodbye lunch with some office staff. And as it happens, then Chamber of Mines president Doug Bryan walked by and asked "what's happening here?"

Vaydik said he'd quit his job and Bryan told Vaydik to come by the chamber office. Between Wednesday and Friday, Vaydik received three job offers and hadn't even told anybody he'd left government. He took the general manager's job at the NWT Chamber of Mines. That was three years ago.

"My dad was the guy who took the notes at the first organizational meeting of the chamber. That's kind of neat I think," Vaydik said.