noise to signal

Taffy and 60th Anniversaries

This is Taffy, an adorable little dog that was staying with her owners, the Burketts, in the hotel in Victoria.

They were there celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary, and were a great deal of fun to talk to. (Mr. Burkett: "Yep, we're celebrating 60 years together... as you can see, you have nothing to look forward to.")

Their story is a classic movie setup: Mr. Burkett was a soldier in the US Army during WW2, in the signal corps. His unit was building a phone line across northern Canada, following the AlCan up to Fairbanks. Mostly they were putting towers up, 30 to a mile, but every so many miles they'd build a repeater station, which meant they'd stay somewhere for much longer.

One of those repeater stations was situated just outside a tiny town in rural northern Alberta -- as Mr. Burkett said, "it wasn't even the middle of nowhere, it was outside of there." He described the town as having board sidewalks, dirt roads, and false-front stores -- a cliché Western movie set. And, as you've probably figured out by now, he met Mrs. Burkett there. They got married, moved to the US after the war ended, and then moved back to Canada a few years after that.

Mr. Burkett, originally from Chicago, told me that "if you had told me when I joined the army that I was going to meet a girl in the middle of northern Alberta, marry her, and be married to her for sixty years, I would have told you to get your head examined. But here we are, miserable as ever." That last, of course, with an affectionate wink towards an eye-rolling Mrs. Burkett.