Jack McDonald <> Jack's father came to Rossland in 1898 to run the newly formed West Kootenay Power And Light Company, and jack was born in 1915. As a young man at the University Of BC he also worked for Famous Players Theatres, and often, when the theatres were empty, played the Wurlitzer pipe organs in both the Orpheum and Capital Theatres. After the war Jack and his wife Berva moved back to Rossland and Jack went to work at Cominco. In 1964 Jack and Berva started a project to record voices from Rossland's history. Jack was one of the driving forces at the Rossland Museum from it's founding until his death in 2003. His audio collection contains about 65 hours of recordings, with voices going back to folks who arrived in Rossland in 1893. Jack told me that if I could do anything to make his archive more available to the public, that would be his wish. And so I digitized his entire collection ... about half of it, so far, is online here now.
Memoirs <> Voices from Jack McDonald's collection, spanning the 1890s to later years. The tracks are arranged alphabetically by last name.
The Best Of Memoirs <> These are particularly interesting Memoirs tracks, edited for sound clarity.
Jack's Organ <> Recordings of Jack playing his pipe organ which he built, as well as Jack playing the Capital Theatre Wurlitzer in Vancouver in 1948, and Reginald Foort playing the restored Orpheum Theatre Wurlitzer organ
Berva McDonald Recording Co. <> Jack and Berva playing with their new tape recorder. There's some delightful exchanges with a lot of hamming it up, including Shakespeare, a travelogue of their 1964 holiday road trip, and more
Norman Brewster <> Stories about the CPR and places along the CPR mainline, and mountaineering, and more