TRANSCRIPT

Interview of Eddie Duke by Marlene Gamble July, 2003

Albert Kokotow and his brother, his younger brother Irving or "Issie" as some people called him, came to Kirkland Lake, I think mostly from, they had been in Timmins earlier. They had an uncle in Timmins and they came into Kirkland Lake in the early thirties looking for an opportunity actually, and I think Albert first started selling wood. He was selling cordwood, delivering it, and he also was selling flour and delivering it, and he was trying to, he was wholesaling hay and oats, and from the hay and oats he got into flour, and then eventually he started bottling soft drinks.

The early bottling plant was very rudimentary. I remember Albert telling me about it. How he had to work with both hands and one foot and begin to tramp on something to put the caps on and had to use both hands to move the bottles along and get them into the right place. But he described this. And eventually it became quite a modern bottling plant. I remember when they got their bottle washing machines. They would show me through the place very proudly, even though I was just a kid at the time.

And his business grew and eventually he got into the lumber business and at first he was just selling large logs of lumber as firewood. I remember we used to buy lumber in loads of lumber, which came up by train, and we would burn them in our furnace on top of the, at first put in a load of coal, and we'd throw in a few of these logs on top of the coal, and they would last all night, you know, until eventually we did get a stoker.