ENTERPRISE - Just days after getting married, Karl Mueller, a well-known Enterprise elder, died on May 12 at the age of 82.

Anne Leskiw and Karl Mueller - two well-known elders from Enterprise - were married on May 7 at H. H. Williams Memorial Hospital in Hay River. Mueller died five days later. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo

Mueller suffered a massive heart attack at Hay River's H. H. Williams Memorial Hospital, where he had been a patient in long-term care since 2007.

Mueller and his long-time partner Anne Leskiw, 73, were married at the hospital on May 7.

Family spokesperson John Leskiw Sr. - Anne Leskiw's son - said his mother and Mueller were very happy after their marriage and to receive well wishes from friends and hospital staff.

Leskiw said Mueller's passing was a shock to everybody, noting he had planned to go to lunch at Winnie's Restaurant in Enterprise on May 12 with other residents of long-term care before deciding to stay at the hospital and have lunch with nurses.

"I guess about an hour later while he was sitting down having lunch, the nurses said he just had a bit of a cough, collapsed and that was it," Leskiw said.

Leskiw said his mother and Mueller had a wonderful wedding.

"They planned it basically for a long time and it finally came to being," he said.

The family had not even finished telling everyone about the wedding, he noted. "And now we're giving them different news."

Enterprise Mayor Allan Flamand called Mueller an icon of the North.

"Karl was a valued member of our community and will be missed," said Flamand.

The mayor said Mueller had served on community council over the years, and was a concerned and involved citizen.

Interviewed just after the wedding but before her husband's passing, Anne Leskiw - who now uses the last name Leskiw-Mueller - said the hospital's staff seemed to like the idea that she and Mueller were getting married there.

"I think that they were quite proud that we were going to do that," she said.

When the just-married couple was heading back to Mueller's room from the hospital chapel to cut their wedding cake, a staff member showered them with confetti.

The ceremony, attended by Leskiw-Mueller's sons and a grandson, was the second marriage for both the bride and groom.

Leskiw-Mueller said, in her eyes, she and Mueller were married even before the wedding ceremony.

"I've been living with him for about 27 years," she noted.

The wedding was the first at the hospital in at least the past 20 years.

Mueller was in long-term care because he was unable to walk. Leskiw-Mueller said the reason for his inability to walk had not been discovered, although she noted he had five back surgeries.

In a 2008 interview with News/North, Mueller described arriving in Canada from Austria in 1954 with a suitcase full of clothes and $10 in his pocket.

Mueller would go on to spend most of his life in Canada's North.

"If you want to work, the opportunity is here," he said in the interview.

Mueller said he was attracted to the peacefulness of the North and its many interesting and nice people.

In the North, he initially worked at a mine in the Yukon and then on a Distant Early Warning site in Cambridge Bay.

In 1957, he first came to the Enterprise area to help build a road from the south to Fort Providence. Afterwards he moved to Fort Smith to build a sawmill and then opened a garage, which he operated until leaving for Enterprise in 1970.

There, he opened Karl Mueller Construction Ltd., which was involved in work such as road construction and sewer line installation in many NWT communities.

During his times on Enterprise council and even when he wasn't involved in municipal politics, Mueller was often a vocal critic of community affairs.

"If there was anything wrong, I spoke up," he said in the 2008 interview. "I did not shut up."

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