Word: val
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Pierrette of Val...
Haircuts & Gold. The first traces of gold were found in the Val D'Or area, in the heart of Quebec's wild northwestern bush country, as early as 1909, but the town of Val D'Or itself was not really born until 1933, when a peripatetic barber set up a stool on a flat rock and started to work on hairy prospectors. In 1934, the year the Selfs arrived, the town's official population was five...
...while Val D'Or lived, as boom towns do, at a dizzy pace. In 1936 it had a population of 4,000 and was a hell-roaring mining camp in a valley in the middle of nowhere. Prospectors got there by plane, dog sled or canoe until a road was built. Beer was $1 a bottle. A town census registered 46 different nationalities. Shady characters prospered like green bay trees. In 1936, the first year that Val D'Or had a police force, Chief Leo Therien led a raid through the town's 300 unpainted board...
...town today (pop. 7,500) is still mushrooming-4,000 of its inhabitants work in its mines, and there are hundreds of untested claims. But now trains of the Canadian National streak past its back doors. Val D'Or's rowdiness is gone...
Shoppes & Sodas. A shrill curfew whistle sends Val D'Or's moppets kiting home at 9 p.m. The town's Third Avenue (the main stem) has nine hotels* (including a Ritz and a Continental), sandwich shoppes and beauty salons, four furniture stores, taxis, even such accouterments of civilization as a nightclub and a stock exchange (one recent day's business: 27,000 shares, representing $50,000). Val D'Or's drug stores sell barrels of pop. Miners get ice cream sodas at the Splendid Sweets...