Jared Abrahamson is proud to have come of age in Flin Flon in the late 1990s and 2000s.
He spent his adolescent and teenage years both “above the hill” – as they say – on Bellevue Avenue and later “below the hill” on Windsor Avenue.
Abrahamson was part of one of the last graduating classes at Parkdale School. In 2005, three years after he left Parkdale, the school closed for structural reasons.
For him, the best part about Parkdale were the friendships he forged.
“These guys are all like my brothers still, you know,” he says.
Abrahamson remembers his later youth as “a wild time” full of brawls and partying at houses, garages and other hangouts.
When their stomachs growled, he and his buddies would often hit up Pizza Hut Express, located in the now-defunct Donut King, for some late-night grub. It was, after all, open 24 hours a day.
“That’s where everybody would go, like after a party or after the bar. That place was always packed,” recalls Abrahamson.
Technology evolved rapidly as Abrahamson approached adulthood. The internet was well established in the schools and becoming increasingly customary in residents’ homes.
Parents of the era feared the internet would isolate youth to their bedrooms and basements, but Abrahamson never saw this happen.
“It didn’t really affect us that much yet, I feel like, because there was always [other] things going on,” he says.
For Abrahamson, those “other things” included an amateur boxing scene – a new Flin Flon fad he and his buddies launched in a friend’s garage.
“We’d just round up a bunch of the guys and then we’d have everybody over and watching,” he says. “We’d have different fights set up and guys would box it out. You’d have like four or five fights in a night.”
Abrahamson’s first job was working for local contractor Pat Spiller on projects ranging from landscaping to asbestos removal.
“That was kind of on and off throughout high school,” he says. “If Pat had a job, he’d bring on the boys.”
Abrahamson spent some of his free time going to the movies at the now-defunct Hapnot Theatre in the winter and the still-thriving Big Island Drive-in in the summer.
Another destination was “The Hoop,” a section of old Highway 10 outside Flin Flon that became a seasonal party spot.
“That’s like history for us, for my generation,” Abrahamson says.
“Everyone would be out at The Hoop and it was just crazy times.”
Abrahamson was a student at Hapnot Collegiate as Flin Flon’s retail sector underwent a major evolution in 2002, 2003 and 2004 – the openings of Walmart, Canadian Tire and Extra Foods at the Flintoba Shopping Centre.
He remembers a lot of people in his age group finding jobs at what was known as “the mall site,” but it was a particular incident involving Extra Foods that makes him smile.
Around 2004, the freezers at the grocery store broke down, prompting staff to toss all of their ice cream. Abrahamson and his friends caught wind of this and raided the still-frozen ice cream from the store dumpsters.
“It was like a gold rush,” he says with a laugh.
“We filled up everybody’s freezers. All my buddies’ deep freeze [units] at home were filled to the brim with all different kinds of ice cream. You’d go to a house party and people would have all this [ice cream]. It was hilarious.”
Abrahamson graduated from Hapnot in 2006, picking up a crucial credit from alternative high school Many Faces Education Centre, then located in the former armoury.
He was part of the last Hapnot graduating class to include non-French immersion Creighton and Denare Beach students. Starting in 2007, Creighton Community School would begin graduating its own high school students.
Abrahamson was never in favour of a separate high school.
“I thought we should of kept it all one [school],” he says. “Have [Saskatchewan students] come over [to Hapnot]. More people. More personalities. Gotta mix things up.”
After high school, Abrahamson landed a job at Stittco Energy Ltd. before taking off to Alberta to try to land work on the rigs. At the time, many young Flin Flonners were doing the same.
Abrahamson later worked in mining back home. He is now a professional actor who splits his time between Vancouver and Brooklyn – but based on his love for the community, he’ll surely always be a
Flin Flonner at heart.
Business changes
Times were a changin’ for the Flin Flon area business community during this decade.
The most significant evolution was the opening of the Flintoba Shopping Centre on the outskirts of the city.
The “mall site,” as it was called, began with Walmart in 2002 before adding Canadian Tire in 2003 and Extra Foods in 2004. Extra Foods would close seven years later.
“This is a historic day for Flin Flon, no two ways about it,” then-Flin Flon mayor Dennis Ballard said at Walmart’s grand opening the morning of November 14, 2002.
Other changes in the commercial landscape were far less welcome.
Fires consumed a handful of key businesses, including Rex Video in 1998, Eddie’s Family Foods in 2000 and the Mr. Ribs restaurant and Northern Rainbow’s End building in 2006.
Eddie’s and Northern Rainbow’s End would later reopen, as would Rex Video – under a different name.
A major adjustment for restaurants and bars came when Manitoba banned smoking in enclosed public spaces in 2004 and Saskatchewan followed in 2005. At least two local businesses reported a notable, negative impact on their bottom line as a result.
The Reminder changed its business model, too, going from a daily paper to a tri-weekly in May 2005. The newspaper also abandoned its approximate 14-by-9-inch format, with the page size enlarged by nearly 40 per cent.
Evolution at HBM&S
HBM&S, now part of Hudbay, underwent an evolution during the decade of 1997 to 2007.
Rough times came early on as the company and its workers attempted to find common ground on a proposed 15-year ban on lockouts and strikes.
HBM&S argued it needed the assurance of labour peace to move forward, but many workers viewed the ban as an unfair ploy.
After a tense period for the community, the deal was signed.
In 2003, HBM&S’s Callinan mine, situated between Flin Flon and Creighton, was decommissioned after more than six decades of operation.
While there was some sadness among workers, there was also a sense of amazement at how long Callinan lasted. The mine’s roughly 220 workers transferred to 777 mine.
Development of Flin Flon’s 777 mine had begun in the late 1990s. With its headframe casting a shadow on the Perimetre Highway, the mine entered full production in 2004.
Another major development came in late 2004, when a little-known junior miner out of Ontario called OntZinc Corp. purchased HBM&S from mining giant Anglo American PLC.
OntZinc billed itself as “an emerging global producer,” but such self-generated confidence could not allay skepticism within Flin Flon. Worries persisted that OntZinc did not have sufficiently deep pockets to take over HBM&S.
Such concerns were common among residents and company workers at the time, but as HBM&S carried on as it always had in the following months, the new ownership became a non-issue.
After completing the $312-million purchase, OntZinc promptly changed its name to HudBay Minerals Inc. Later the company would be known simply as Hudbay, headquartered first in Winnipeg and later in Toronto.
High metal prices saw company profits soar in 2006 and 2007, the same year the company discovered the sensational Lalor deposit near Snow Lake.
