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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Ken Carson is on his sixth or seventh Ragged Ass Road T-shirt. He wears them until they're thin, to his wife's chagrin.

Joe Maduke, co-manager of Ragged Ass Road Apparel, a promotional product and souvenir shop in the Yk Centre, holds up a Ragged Ass Road T-shirt on Monday. A passenger on a WestJet flight was asked to take his Ragged Ass Road T-shirt off or cover it up during a flight from Vancouver to Edmonton on Sunday. - Katherine Hudson/NNSL photo

But Carson, of Gibson, B.C., said of all his Ragged Ass Road clothing, he never got a reaction to his current blue Yellowknife souvenir T-shirt like he did on this past Sunday's WestJet fight.

Carson said he was getting on a usual flight he takes for business, from Vancouver to Edmonton, wearing his Ragged Ass Road T-shirt, his "lucky T-shirt," when a flight attendant told him to either wear it inside-out, or cover it with his jacket because "this is a family-friendly airline and that T-shirt's not appropriate," according to Carson.

"I couldn't believe it," said Carson.

"I thought he was joking."

He said the incident also upset him because of the ignorance shown of Yellowknife, a city where the airline flies regularly, where Ragged Ass Road is about as popular as Ice Road Truckers or Bullocks, or musician Tom Cochrane's 1995 solo album by the same name.

Carson said he tried explaining the T-shirt's significance, that it wasn't crude but the name of a historic street in Old Town, but the flight attendant wouldn't back down.

"I wasn't about to make a big deal about it. I fly all the time. You don't make a scene in the cabin of an aircraft, it's a really foolish thing to do," he said.

Instead, Carson "zipped up my jacket to my collar and that's how I flew all the way to Edmonton."

"I felt completely humiliated. This was done in front of other passengers," said Carson.

Carson said the airline will have to coax him to fly with them again, to apologize to him and recognize that they were out of line. Interestingly, Carson's employer booked him with Air Canada on his way back to Vancouver tomorrow.

Joe Maduke, co-manager of Lake Awry, runs the tourists' one-stop shop for anything Ragged Ass Road. The store in the Yk Centre on Franklin Avenue sells mugs, T-shirts, hats and replicas of the famous street signs. He said once in awhile he'll hear from parents that they bought a shirt for their child and the child was told to cover it up or take it off at school.

"I don't think it's their policy. It's probably one person's interpretation of it and going a little overboard," said Maduke of the WestJet incident.

"I got a chuckle out of it ... The T-shirts are our biggest sellers."

A spokesperson for WestJet said the airline does not have a dress code policy for passengers.

"We rely on our Westerners to use their best judgment for the comfort of all guests on board," stated Jennifer Sanford, WestJet's media relations adviser, in an e-mail.

Sanford acknowledged Carson's incident on Sunday.

"As many of our flight attendants come from all parts of our network, the crew was not aware of the significance this road has in the Yellowknife community ... We apologize for this unfortunate incident."

In response, WestJet uploaded a picture on its Instamatic site of the door to president and CEO Gregg Stravinsky's office, which displays a Ragged Ass Road street sign.

"Every day we are pleased to welcome guests on board wearing items that represent where they have been or where they are going, including Yellowknife's landmarks. We apologize for asking a guest to remove a Ragged Ass Road T-shirt," the website stated Tuesday afternoon.

Ragged Ass Road was at first an alleyway where people cut wood for barges that went back and forth across Great Slave Lake before there was a road, said Mayor Gord Van Tighem.

"They weren't really well off. They coined the phrase and it caught on and became the street name. The city put up street signs and they kept getting stolen. If you go down on the street you'll see street signs, but they're screwed to houses," said Van Tighem.

He said four years ago he got a package from a community in Manitoba which contained a Ragged Ass Road sign attached to a two-by-four, along with a newspaper article about how street signs were being stolen from the famous road.

"They said, 'We found one of your stolen signs and here it is back,'" chuckled Van Tighem.

And eight years ago, Van Tighem received an article in the mail from a community in Ohio stating a county had banned these Northern signs from being put up.

"It has its different effects, depending on where it is," he said.

Hal Logsdon has lived on Ragged Ass Road for 30 years and has a street sign drilled into a huge boulder with cement because the signs are such a hot commodity. He said he sees about two tourists a day wandering the street and stopping to pose for a picture with the sign.

Logsdon was shocked when he heard about Carson's T-shirt ordeal.

"I just have one word to say about it: seriously?"

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