On the all-important mining front, the decade of 1987 to 1997 was a mixed bag for Flin Flon and area.
On the one hand, costly new operations such as the Tartan Lake gold mine and the HBM&S zinc pressure leach facility opened.
On the other, workforce reductions at HBM&S would lead to population decline – though nowhere near the economic devastation some feared.
At the time, these were not necessarily top-of-mind issues for Natasha Ward. For her, Flin Flon was just a fun place to come of age.
“Phantom Lake was really busy and hopping,” she recalls. “I remember Trout Festival being amazing. There was always something going on. The Flin Flon Skating Club was really big. All the ball diamonds were full of adult players playing baseball as well as kids, and soccer was huge. I remember it just being very busy.”
Ward grew up on South Hudson Street, where she and friends would often go on candy runs to Eddie’s Family Foods – the old pre-fire building, not the larger one that stands today.
Down the hill on Third Avenue, the Candy Bar was another popular destination.
“I remember the Candy Bar always had really amazing candy,” Ward says. “You would go there just to get candy. They had this cool paper candy that was delicious.”
As a teenager, Ward and her friends enjoyed going to the Big Island Drive-in and swimming at Little Cliff Lake or Phantom Lake. “The Hoop,” a section of old highway outside Flin Flon, was a common teen gathering spot.
When she was 14, Ward got her first job working as a waitress at RJ’s Motel and Restaurant, now The Prospector Inn.
RJ’s was part of a wave of new businesses to open during this decade. Others included Mike’s Ice N Burger Hut, Rex Video, Doe Doe’s Pizza and Subs, and Subway.
Flin Flon had a way of drawing entrepreneurs eager to capitalize on retail trends. One example was the hockey card shop that opened in the basement of the Candy Bar; another was a short-lived comic book shop in the uptown area.
One of Ward’s favourite businesses, however, was a well-established one. Stylerite was a clothing store at the corner of Main Street and First Avenue, where Pioneer Square is now located.
Ward would descend the store’s staircase to visit the large sewing department in the basement. Her hand would grip the elegant handrail on the way down.
“I still remember the feeling of the handrail,” she says.
Ward enjoyed her time as a student at Hapnot Collegiate in the late 1980s and early ’90s. The school sports teams, the Kings and Kweens, were renowned for their talents, particularly in volleyball and basketball.
In terms of the performing arts, Hapnot’s dinner theatre “was always huge,” she says.
High school students would often hang out at the nearby A&W and Gateway restaurants, or grab a quick ice cream or milkshake from Mike’s Ice N Burger Hut between classes.
Ward was never one to cut class to enjoy such treats, but, she adds with a laugh, “I’m sure it was happening” among other students.
In class, some of Ward’s studies involved green-screened computers that are laughably primative by today’s standards. Think floppy disks and no mouse.
Outside of school, arcade games were hugely popular. Ward and her friends would bring fistfuls of quarters to “the pizza place,” as it was known, on Main Street.
She took particular delight in Space Invaders, in which a player shoots at aliens from a spaceship.
“Loved it. I still love it,” Ward says.
Ward recalls Phantom Lake as “an exceptional place,” though it was during this decade that the once-popular summer destination began to fade.
The Reminder appeared to take note of the decline of Phantom Lake in an August 1990 report that began by reminding readers, “Phantom Lake is still out there.”
After Ward graduated from Hapnot in 1992, she, like nearly all of her friends, embarked on post-secondary studies. She studied business administration in Brandon and then hotel and restaurant management in Winnipeg.
In 1996, Ward found herself back in Flin Flon, working as an advertising saleswoman for The Reminder, then published five days a week.
The position gave her new insight into her hometown as she worked to help business owners succeed and communicate their message to the public.
Today, Ward herself is a business owner and proud to call Flin Flon home.
Showtime for the choir
Crystal Kolt was relatively new to Flin Flon when, in 1996, she was asked to organize a choir to sing at a funeral.
Choral music seemed like a fitting way to honour the life of Murray Davidson, who had been an active member of the Flin Flon Glee Club, a theatre group.
Kolt and her husband, Mark, both musicians, gladly accepted. As they assembled a group, they found a number of singers in the community who were interested in performing together as a choir.
No one knew it at the time, but this would mark the beginning of the Flin Flon Community Choir.
The choir went on to perform its first major piece, Schubert’s “Mass in G,” to much enthusiasm. In 1997, the choir’s first musical theatre production, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, upped the bar even further.
“‘Joseph’ was this amazingly pure collaboration of people just completely trusting each other and the process without really knowing anybody,” Crystal Kolt would later recall.
Word of the choir’s proficiency continued to spread. It wasn’t long before the prestigious Brandon Chamber Players were traveling to town to join the fledgling group for a rendition of Handel’s “Messiah.”
Today, having brought numerous high-level musical productions to life, including Fiddler on the Roof and Grease, the choir has become a northern institution.
“I won’t say that this couldn’t happen anywhere else, and it probably has happened in other small communities somewhere in North America, that things really take off and all of sudden you’ve got way more activity musically and artistically than statistically you’d have any right to expect,” Mark Kolt once observed. “But right now this is our own little miracle and we enjoy it as such.”
Action taken on health concerns
Throughout Flin Flon’s initial decades, air pollution from the HBM&S copper smelter was viewed as a part of everyday life.
By the late 1980s, however, residents were becoming less forgiving of the toxin-laced emissions.
At an April 1989 meeting of the provincial NDP caucus in Flin Flon, residents put forth concerns around sulphuric acid, mercury, lead and arsenic in the air and soil.
Later in 1989, a local committee known as Concerned Citizens Against Pollution pressed city council candidates to support pollution-reduction measures at HBM&S, now part of Hudbay.
Concern for residents particularly sensitive to smelter emissions, including children, the elderly and people with lung and breathing disorders, began to take on a new prominence.
Government officials and HBM&S took notice.
In 1993, the company commissioned a new zinc pressure leach facility, resulting in a steep reduction in particulate emissions as it led to the shutdown of the zinc roasters and zinc fuming plant.
The new facility also addressed the wider issue of acid rain, a major environmental worry at the time. Acid rain is rain that has become acidic due to atmospheric pollution.
HBM&S would later say its mid-1990s environmental investments reduced greenhouse gas emissions by about
30 per cent compared to levels recorded in 1990.
Health concerns also prompted a shift in how the community viewed cigarette smoking.
In 1989, city council passed a bylaw to prohibit smoking in public places. Restaurants and bars were excluded but would later be covered by provincial non-smoking regulations.
As The Reminder reported at the time, the “non-smoking revolution” had reached Flin Flon, with council citing the determination that “tobacco smoke adversely affects human health.”
In 1990, the board of directors of the Flin Flon General Hospital followed suit, approving a policy that declared the hospital smoke-free.
“As a health care institution, we should be leaders in the promotion of good health in the community,” hospital administrator Effie Avison said at the time.
