Had her husband been born 20 years later, Anne Flanagan is convinced that, instead of making his name as half of Canada’s most successful mineral exploration team, he would have been an astronaut. “Terry has always wished he had been born in time to qualify for the American space program,” says the woman who became Terry Flanagan’s other partner when the couple married in 1961. Indeed, Terry’s former classmates say he had the brains and the ambition to succeed in outer space. But it was not to be. Instead of rocketing toward the stars, the young Flanagan cast his eyes downward and pursued that other source of glitter — minerals. Today the names Terry Flanagan and partner Jack McAdam are virtually synonymous with the Chibougamau mining camp of northwestern Quebec. Not a bad trade-off.
Perfect scores in nine out of his first 11 exams made Flanagan the outstanding performer in a University of Toronto geology class, in 1951, that included Leon La Prairie (now president of Vedron Ltd.), Bill James (chairman of Falconbridge Ltd.) and Pete Chmara (environmental services manager, Mines Accident Prevention Association of Ontario).
“Everyone wanted to do their homework with Terry,” LaPrairie recalls. “It was even rumored that he had learned to read by the age of two.” La Prairie claims poor eyesight may have encouraged Flanagan to retain much of what he read in case his eyes eventually failed him. “Without his trademark spectacles, Flanagan couldn’t see a thing.” While poor eyesight, which necessitated thick wire spectacles, and severe asthma plagued Flanagan during his early years, he was clearly a force to be reckoned with both in and out of university.
No slouch with a mouth organ, his musical ability made him a shoe-in at most of the student parties and he gave a rousing rendition of MacNamara’s Band during his own wedding celebration. “You simply had to tap your feet and whistle a tune and then away went Terry on his mouth organ,” says La Prairie who organized most of the group’s social activities.
The son of a Bourlamaque, Que., hotel owner, Flanagan caught the mining bug at an early age. Since his Irish father catered to prospectors who visited the area (now incorporated into Val d’Or) during a mid-1940s mining boom, Flanagan was often invited to visit some of the local properties. “These guys were looking for strategic minerals and there were all kinds of shafts being sunk,” he recalls. An impressionable 12-year-old, Flanagan fell in love with the frontier lifestyle of the prospectors and geologists who seemed to be getting paid just for camping in the woods. “After that I decided I wanted to be a geologist and look for orebodies.”
He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the Univeristy of Toronto in 1951 and subsequently worked as a geologist in United Keno Hill Mines at its Yukon base metals project. In 1953 he completed a 2-year Masters degree in just one year at the University of Toronto before going on to work in New Brunswick for the M.J. Boylen Association. The hottest promoter of his time, Mr Boylan was responsible for discovering a number of mining operations, including the Brunswick mine near Fredericton, N.B. That operation put Boylen in “the big leagues” among mining promoters, after which time he claimed a 30-mile area of favorable locations in central New Brunswick and farmed them out to more than 40 companies. 1500
It was while heading the drilling operation on one of those properties (Boylen’s New Larder U) in 1953 that Flanagan met Jack McAdam. A no- nonsense Scotsman who still retains some of his native brogue, McAdam grew up on Montreal’s south shore after his family immigrated to Canada in 1930. The son of a Glasgow machinist, he flew in Lancaster bombers during the Second World War before being discharged at age 20. Soon afterwards, in 1951, while working as a summer helper in the Chibougamau forests, McAdam decided to pursue geology.
He found he was slightly older than his McGill University colleagues. Classmate Don Pollock (now vice- president explorations at Seabright Resources) remembers McAdam as a laid-back guy with a dry sense of humor, who played floor hockey most evenings with “the rock heads” before retiring to a student drinking hang-out called “The Shrine.” (At age 62, McAdam still plays ice hockey in an Acton, Ont., oldtimers league.)
The more down-to-earth member of the Flanagan & McAdam exploration team, McAdam is not a man to tolerate puffery, according to both friends and colleagues. Clearly uncomfortable with the trappings of success, he works out of a spartan corner office decorated by family photographs and a mounted speckled trout.
While neither Flanagan, 58, nor McAdam claim to know what exactly sparked their 30-year-partnership, they are more certain about what has kept it together. “We are both explorationists at heart,” explains Flanagan who admits to being more of a promoter than his more practical partner. “We are both risk-takers and if we like the look of something, we will decide in seconds,” adds McAdam who was president of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (pdac) from 1981 to 1983. “It`s never a case of one guy dragging the other guy along.”
From almost the beginning, they both agreed that, when the time seemed right, they would branch out on their own and share whatever they earned on a 50/50 basis. After working on a number of projects together, they handed in their resignations at the Boylen offices in May, 1955. With no money, no contracts and no properties with which to work, the partners went prospecting in a pickup truck which belonged to McAdam’s brother Bill. “My parents thought I was nuts,” says Flanagan who likens he and his partner to a couple of moose trudging through the bush together. Flanagan McAdam & Co. earned its first paycheque from a uranium mapping contract in Bancroft, Ont. That was followed by an electromagnetic surveying contract which brought them to Chibougamau in time for the exploration boom and established the partners as a constant presence in the camp.
“We fell right into this,” McAdam says. With contracting as their bread and butter, the partners operated out of a log cabin 12 miles outside Chibougamau. It was rented from the local tourist camp. “Neither of us was married then, so we could go wherever the action was,” says McAdam who married a nurse named Shirley McKeown in 1955. She lived in a Montreal suburb before McAdam brought her up to Chibougamau in 1956. Since most of their early work consisted of electromagnetic surveying and geological mapping, Flanagan and McAdam spent much of their time in a small canvas tent which failed to shelter them from temperatures which often dipped below 68 degrees C. The only thing which prevented them from freezing to death was a small metal stove which had to be turned down at night in order that the occupants wouldn’t suffocate. “The big question every morning was: who should get up first to light the stove,” McAdam chuckles. “In those conditions you didn’t bathe too often.” 3000
Eventually they built their own headquarters along the road at Walburn and worked from there before taking over the air base at Cache Lake. Both men lived at Cache Lake with their young families before moving to Toronto in 1969. While recalling that life in Chibougamau represented a stark contrast to the tropical climate and golden beaches of her native Bermuda, Anne Flanagan managed to make the adjustment. “Our only source of heat was an oil heater in the living room; and when the temperature dropped to between -30-40 degrees C and -30-50 degrees C, we could scrape the frost off the walls with our finger nails,” she says. “But regular visits from geologists meant there was always something going on.” Both families were members of the local curling club and frequently played host to the various prospectors and geologists who visited the area.
“You wouldn’t think of going to Chibougamau without looking up Flanagan and McAdam,” recalls Al Storey, president of Storimin Exploration. Storey was a geologist with Conwest Exploration
when he first met Flanagan. They met in the old Savarin Bar at Bay and Temperance Streets, around 1959 when a group of young geologists were comparing notes on their activities. Storey asked Flanagan why he had decided to go it alone, after having worked for a big, secure mining outfit. (“After all, owning a little company in Chibougamau in 1959 seemed like a rather dicey situation,” Storey says).
“I always like to think that the greatest security I have is myself,” replied Flanagan. “That’s why I have always worked for myself.”
However, before the introduction of flow-through share financing which gave junior exploration companies easier access to financing, Flanagan and McAdam earned a livelihood from royalties on claims sold to the major companies like Noranda and Rio Tinto. “That kept us alive for years,” says McAdam who eventually joined the pdac, principally to lobby for changes in a system which clearly favored the giants of the industry.
Since gold prices were fixed at $35(US) per oz, most of their early targets were base metals. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that copper figures prominently among an impressive list of discoveries which includes the Devlin copper deposit (one million tons of 2.45%) at Corner Bay. Like similar deposits at Frotet Lake and Perch River, it must wait for copper prices to rebound before being considered for exploitation. Shortly after forming the McAdam Mining Corp. (now Flanagan McAdam Resources) in 1961, the partners discovered what they claim is the Western world’s largest asbestos deposit. But McAdam expects the 200-million- ton monster, at Roberge Lake, east of Chibougamau, to remain untouched because of the fibrous mineral’s association with various lung diseases. Low production costs in Brazil means that a major iron deposit at Lake Albanel, Que., will likely suffer a similar fate.
To focus almost exclusively on copper explorations, the partners formed Muscocho Explorations in 1963. However, since the mid-1970s, its emphasis has shifted to gold as the Montauban mine, 50 miles west of Quebec City, and the Magino project, near Wawa, Ont., have come on stream. With interests in the Mishibishu Lake gold property, in northern Ontario, and the Gwillim Lake mine in Chibougamau, Flanagan McAdam Resources has also switched to gold.
But while the yellow metal is now their number one mineral target, a recent farm-in deal with Toronto- based Greenstone Resources demonstrates that Flanagan and McAdam’s allegiance to their prospecting roots remains intact. After buying a large Chibougamau land package including a former producer called the Gwillim mine, Greenstone Chairman Jim Anthony was looking around for possible partners to farm in on the properties. Because of their impressive record in the Chibougamau camp, Flanagan and McAdam made the top of his list. 4500
So when a Mr Flanagan called one morning in March to ask for technical data and contract terms on the Gwillim property, Mr Anthony felt an understandable twinge of excitement. Both he and President Ian Park had already decided that to earn a 50% interest, future partners would have to spend $2 1/2 million to match previous expenditures on the former producer after paying $150,000 cash up front.
A meeting was arranged with Flanagan, McAdam and exploration consultant Duncan McPhee on March 25 in their Toronto offices on Adelaide St. East. Not knowing quite what to expect, Park and Anthony had prepared themselves for a marathon question-and-answer session with all the legal procedures that usually accompany a multi-million-dollar farm- in agreement.
But when they entered the sixth floor offices which serve as headquarters for Flanagan McAdam Resources, Muscocho Explorations and Chesbar Resources, it was obvious that Flanagan and McAdam had other ideas. After a 15-minute meeting in which Flanagan politely spelled out his terms while McAdam and McPhee nodded solemnly in agreement, a slightly bewildered Anthony and Park found themselves back on Adelaide Street. The following day, a 6-page letter of intent and a cheque for $150,000 arrived at Greenstone.
“It was clear they knew a lot more about the property than we did,” says Anthony. Three months after the meeting, a second letter arrived at Greenstone’s plush Toronto offices. It contained the results of McAdam’s first drill hole. A 38-ft barn-burner assaying 0.376 oz gold per ton, it was one of the best holes ever pulled from Chibougamau. “Nowadays when deals get into the hands of lawyers, it seems to take forever to get things moving,” explains McAdam who claims that too many companies are basing their decisions on the opinions of lawyers. “There’s no need to mull things over for months when you can make a deal on a letter of intent and then do a formal agreement later.”
“If possible, you might as well go while the weather’s still good,” he adds. While their deal-on-a-handshake business style has won them respect in the industry (Anthony admitted later that the Gwillim deal is the only business agreement which he didn’t have to change), their legacy will lie in an exploration record which makes them the world’s leading experts on Chibougamau. As they prepare to become significant gold producers in that region, major discoveries like the Coulombe Lake lithium deposits are still waiting for market factors to turn in their favor. But if recent experiments persuade the British to combine lithium and aluminium to make the fusilages of their aircraft lighter and stronger, Terry Flanagan says he may yet get into outer space.
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