Claudia Blair Smith and Graham Smith have clocked uncountable hours as volunteers and as workers.
Today they are both retired, still volunteer and enjoy doing projects around their Tyee Lake home.
Born and raised in Quesnel, Claudia spent summers at Tyee Lake where her parents purchased property even before she was born. Her dad wanted his children to enjoy the outdoors so the family spent summers at the lake.
Later she and her sister built homes on the property so they could to live there full-time and eventually their parents sold their property in Quesnel and also built themselves a home at the lake.
Through her working life, Claudia held a variety of jobs.
She was an ICBC insurance adjuster and later worked for unemployment insurance. While employed by the Downtown Business Association (DBA) in Williams Lake, she worked on a revitalization program when the old courthouse was removed and Spirit Square was built at the corner of First Avenue and Oliver Street.
After the project was completed, she left the DBA.
“Hugo Stahl, Carol Taphorn and Karen LeComte hounded me to come and work for the chamber,” she said. Finally the trio succeeded and Claudia agreed in 1986 to try it part-time. During that time, the city’s tourism bureau was on Broadway Avenue South where Andre’s Electronics is today and Hugo told Claudia part of her job was to work at the bureau in the summer months.
“Hugo loved tourism and knew a bureau was something that had to stay in Williams Lake.”
Another responsibility of hers was to coordinate the Stampede Parade every year with Clive Stangoe. Stangoe and his wife Irene had moved to the lakecity in 1950 after purchasing the Efteen. “Clive was absolutely fabulous,” Claudia recalled. “He and Irene treated me so well. He taught me everything he knew about event planning and putting the parade together.”
Soon after she started working for the chamber, she met Graham and together they did the parade for years along with some other volunteers such as Hugo and Jean Grieve. Graham was also on the Stampede Association for 20-plus years,
including as vice-president. Chuckling, Graham explained how they would organize the parade while he was also in charge of the music at the rodeos. He’d start the day early at the announcer’s booth getting the PA system going. In those days they also volunteered at Bingos during Stampede weekend as a fundraiser. Lucky’s Bingo Hall was where the Salvation Army Thrift Store is today on Borland Street and volunteering there was a “smoke and choke,” experience.
Graham Smith and Claudia Blair Smith enjoy new chairs on their new deck at their Tyee Lake Home. (Monica Lamb-Yorski/Casual Country 2024)
“At the end, they’d give you a big bag of money — cash — and I would truck that down to Marg Bublitz at the Stampede office,” he said, laughing. “What an opportunity that would have been to get robbed.”
Bingo was a good way to raise money because lots of people attended, Claudia said. They also ran casinos in the curling club or at the Overlander Hotel and local volunteers were trained to run different games such as Black Jack. “We’d be at the curling club until 2 a.m. and wouldn’t get home until dawn,” Graham said.
They also took the costume and float to many other communities. In 1988, he was the director of the Winter Games and they were both on the board for the 2002 BC Winter Games.
They volunteered at the 2010 Olympics in Whistler as well. Graham was in
the media centre during the medal ceremonies. Claudia was a driver and worked with the military. “We would show up every day at the site, they would tell us what dignitaries or medalists we were going to pick up,” she said.
Growing up with a father in the Armed Forces, meant Graham lived in various communities across Canada.
He finished high school in Courtney, B.C. and graduated from electronics at BCIT in 1973. His first job after graduation was with Pacific Communications in Vancouver, travelling around the province installing professional sound systems in hotels, arenas, schools and ball rooms.
One day a BCIT roommate and friend, Rick Rhodes, called him about a job opening with BC Tel in Williams Lake.
“At the time I was living in Burnaby and commuting to North Vancouver for work. Even in those days I couldn’t wait to get out of there, so I moved to Williams Lake.”
Starting out as a toll repeater man, his job involved going to outlying communities in the Cariboo Chilcotin that were connected by copper wires strung on telephone poles with equipment shacks placed every 50 kilometres that needed servicing. Graham spent many hours driving up and down Highway 20 for work.
People living west of the Fraser River had crank phones up until about 1986, except in Alexis Creek and Bella Coola. Anahim Lake still had an operator, Hazel Mars, who would answer and ask who the caller wanted to be connected to.
“If that person wasn’t home, usually Hazel knew where they were,” Graham recalled. He also worked on expanding the long distance service from Williams Lake west. “It meant three people could call Williams Lake at one time instead of just two.”
After three or four years, the open wire system was starting to be replaced with microwave radio links to connect
communities. BC Tel sent Graham to its school in Burnaby every year because of the constantly changing technology.
“We started building these microwave relay stations and changing equipment out.” Some of the stations were on mountain tops, with road access that was sometimes more like a trail.
“I’d plow my own road up to Puntzi Mountain, it was six-and-a-half miles one way,” Graham said.
On bigger mountains, like Timothy Mountain, BC Tel had a Snowcat parked there all year. Occasionally he would be flown into remote sites by helicopter.
“I got into radio microwave a lot more and in the mid-1980s there was a big expansion of the microwave network in the north-south direction, from Kamloops to Prince George.”
During that time period he worked the most at Potato Mountain by Big Lake Ranch.
“We built the northern inter-provincial radio system. There was already one across Canada that was built in the south but we needed more connectivity for the north.” It took many years to continue the expansion.
In the 1990s, before fibre optics were viable, digital radio was introduced. The beauty with digital transmission was no loss of quality as long as the signal wasn’t lost, he explained.
“You could be talking to someone next door or across the country and the quality was just as good.”
For people living in remote areas, subscriber carrier options became available in the late 1990s, which
meant telephone service was provided wirelessly. After taking a course in Montreal for two weeks, Graham was kept busy installing subscriber carrier systems at Mahood Falls, Nemiah Valley and the West Chilcotin. Because of his training, he became an expert in the subscriber radio system, which involved installing a box on the side of a house with an antenna on the roof. The phone plugged into the box, for which the resident provided 12-volt power, and it picked up a signal from a repeater.
“To the customers it is what we call POTS - plain old telephone service. They plugged their own phone in and could have all the features.”
A Canadian company invented the system and sold
it all over the world, he noted. Graham said it was a less expensive way to provide telephone service to rural customers than “poles and holes.” They had a low power consumption and a small solar panel could power it. “That was the beauty of the whole system - it was very efficient.” His expertise led to going around the province training other people and installing the system, which he said people are still using in many places.
Through Telus he also worked at some big broadcasting events such as the Commonwealth Games in 1984 and the World Track and Field Games in 2001 in Edmonton.
“I got to work on some pretty big projects where we were behind the scenes. We had the Queen come to the Commonwealth Games. President Bill Clinton was at the Asia Pacific Economics Conference.”
Graham retired from Telus in 2009, and continued doing some contract work part-time. In 2016, his old
boss at Telus called and asked if he’d like to come back to work part-time. “I went back to work and did my old job again but not to the same extent. In the years since I retired there had been a lot of changes. This community used to be stitched together with multiple radio links now its all fibre optics. Fibre optics are “super” reliable and require very low maintenance.”
Thinking back to when he first started, he said there were more than 100 people working for BC Tel in Williams Lake part-time and full-time, mostly doing maintenance and checking systems.
He worked for Telus up until July 6, 2024, retiring officially for the second time.
“I had a wonderful career,” he said, adding he enjoyed mentoring and training. He did not, however, necessarily love the phone calls in the middle of the night from the national dispatcher telling him something had failed at Potato Mountain.
Graham Smith and Claudia Blair Smith stand with the 1947 Willys Graham is rebuilding. (Monica Lamb-Yorski/Casual Country 2024)
“You’d go there in the middle of the night hoping you had the parts you needed.”
For 20-plus years he also had a TV repair business and was the local warranty service guy for half a dozen TV brands. His shop was at their house and after stopping for dinner, he’d be in the shop until 11 p.m. or later. Equipment he could not fix in people’s homes he’d bring home to the shop.
In their retirement, Claudia enjoys gardening and camping with Graham when they can get away.
Between them they share four children and eight grandchildren.
Travel has taken them to Europe about five times, to South Africa, Cuba, Panama, Mexico, Costa Rica and various areas in the U.S. They drove their truck and camper to the tip of the Baja once and in 2019 went all the way to Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Ocean.
Recently they purchased some bright, red chairs to sit and enjoy their new dock.
As they posed for a photograph sitting in the chairs, they both said they wonder how they ever had the time to do all the things they did.
