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The Balmoral Hotel on Livingstone Street was a Yorkton landmark for almost 90 years. It was owned in the early 1900s by Harry Bronfman, whose family later owned the vast Seagram empire founded on the production and sale of liquor. Their booze business started primarily at the Balmoral during prohibition from 1915 to 1924, leading to stories about tunnels, Studebaker Whisky Six cars, a blending and bottling operation housed next to the Balmoral, and much more, as we talked about in the previous podcast. 

In 1950, the Balmoral was sold to Emanuel and Marj Balacko and friends from Winnipeg, with the Balackos taking sole ownership a few years later. They owned and operated the hotel until their retirement in 1980, and lived in a suite in the north wing. Their son Ron, a toddler when they took over, grew up in the hotel. We talked to him about his parents, the hotel, and, of course, those tunnels.

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From 1928 to the early 2000s, the Seagram corporation was one of the giants in Canadian industry. Its primary business was making and selling alcoholic beverages – it owned such distinguished product lines as Crown Royal, Chivas Regal Scotch, Captain Morgan rum and many more, including the distribution rights to Absolut vodka.

But that wasn’t the whole story, or the full extent of Seagram’s business assets, which spanned the globe and included investments in oil, fruit juice, entertainment and more. 

Not bad for a company that had its roots in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, specifically in the Balmoral Hotel on Livingstone Street, where the Cornerstone Credit Union parking lot is now located. 

Not bad for a young man whose father bought the hotel in 1905 for Harry and his older brother Abe, who did not stay here.

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A community fridge opened in Yorkton in mid September 2023. It's a place where someone who has no food to eat, and at the time doesn’t have the means to buy it, can go anytime day or night, every day of the year, and find food for themselves and their family. 

It's also a place where those who would like to help people who have little or no food can drop off donations of food, also anytime.

It's a mutual aid project operated by a working group of volunteers who want to help solve problems -- in this case food insecurity in the community -- through collective action rather than waiting for someone else to come to the rescue. 

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Most Yorkton streets are named for people who were part of our story going back to the founding of York Colony in 1882. Mayors, council members (called aldermen until about the 1980s, then councillors), prominent business owners and others who were deemed worthy of the honour have all lent their names to local roads. But that doesn't account for all streets and avenues, and some have an interesting (and sometimes surprising) history, as we explore in this podcast.

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We answer questions about podcasting for those who may be interested in contributing ideas, starting their own podcast, or who may just be curious about how this all works. After hosting a workshop for Yorkton Culture Days 2023, the idea of putting all that information out there for all to hear seemed like a good idea. And we conclude this podcast with another good idea -- a co-operative podcast umbrella or hub for Yorkton where we broaden our look at our community today, and places, people and events from the past.

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To the people of Yorkton back in the late 1940s and 50s, a young man who was born and grew up here, Stan Obodiac, was a bit of a puzzle. He was a really good athlete, and a sometime-writer for the Yorkton Enterprise weekly newspaper. He played hockey, baseball, golf, softball, bowling and soccer. He wrote at least 10 books, several of them while living here as a young man, several of his later ones best sellers. But the local coffee row didn't quite know what to make of him -- did he have a real job? There is much about him worth telling. There are many sides to the man, and to his life. 

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Anna Gertrude Ingham of Yorkton was the subject of a cable television documentary called The Quiet Rebel in 1993, which told the story of why and how she developed a revolutionary program for teaching grade 1 kids to read. Why a rebel? Her methods did not always meet with the approval of education authorities, but she persisted because it worked, the kids liked it because it was fun, and the parent had high praise for it because many of their children in grade 1 were reading after only a few months of school. We talk with Shirley George, her daughter and collaborator. Shirley was involved in producing the book called The  Blended Sound-Sight Method of Learning which was published in 1967, and worked with her mother in conducting workshops for teachers in western Canada. We talk about her mother, about the Blended Sound-Sight program which which she herself taught in Edmonton for several decades, and about teaching it to other teachers.

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Our years of reading about food from many cultures, collecting recipes from family, from our own time in the food business, and being graciously given recipes by other restauranteurs, allows us to explore some of them in this podcast, and tell you some of the stories behind our favourite foods.

Questions or comments? Please get in touch. We'd love to hear from  you.

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