Mining’s `Queen Bee’ has close call but still a driving force for

Had an interesting phone call recently from a petite, colorful and outstanding Canadian mining enthusiast the industry came very close to losing recently — Viola MacMillan. “Mort Brown,” she said. “I want to thank you for saving my life.” I thought she was kidding. But let me explain.

She did suffer a serious heart attack, passing right out while going to her hairdresser’s in downtown Toronto. Rushed to hospital, she was deemed clinically dead for four minutes. When she regained consciousness, there were three heart specialists working on her who said another 60 seconds and it would have been curtains. They installed a pacer and she now feels fit as a fiddle.

“Wonderful, Viola,” I said, “but I wasn’t the one who called the ambulance.”

“But if you hadn’t invited me to sit at the head table at the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame dinner, I would have been in Florida when it happened, and would certainly have died,” she said. And she meant it, heaping praise on the marvelous ambulance and medical facilities Toronto enjoys.

Mrs. MacMillan, I might point out, was invited to sit at the head table in recognition of her $l.25-million cash donation that enabled the mining industry’s drive for funds to acquire the fabulous Pinch mineral collection to reach its goal. Purchased by friends of the mining industry as a gift to the people of Canada, it is probably the finest private mineral collection in the world. It will be housed in the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Ottawa in what is to be named the Viola MacMillan Gallery. Hopefully, the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame will find a permanent home close by.

But her contribution to Canadian mining extends far beyond her role in acquiring that famed collection. A mining booster almost from day one, her most notable claim to fame was putting the Prospectors and Developers Association (now PDAC) on the map. She headed the association for 20 years (1944-64), its formative and growth period. Membership is now well over 4,000, a real industry force.

Something of a born politician in her own right, when at the PDA helm she knew every mines minister in the land on a first-name basis. The country’s leading bankers, too. And she could talk the language of both groups. She was also deft at picking big-name speakers for the association’s annual dinners, including some from the U.S. Few would turn her down.

She was popularly known as the Queen Bee, a tag picked up back in 1936 after a successful staking bee with husband George in the Hislop area which led to their first real money. Their Porcupine Quarter Syndicate staked four separate 4-claim lots including the Poulet Veteran group which was sold to Noranda and became its highly successful Hallnor mine headed by the renowned J.Y. Murdoch. It came into production in 1938, paying more than $50 million in dividends.

Indeed Hallnor was the turning point from rags to riches for the prospecting MacMillans. “We were never out of money since that happy day,” says Viola. After that came Violamac Mines (British Columbia’s lead- silver producer), Lake Cinch Mines (which received $2.5 million from Eldorado for cancelling its uranium contract), and Kam-Kotia Mines, a Timmins area copper-zinc producer. The latter two were eventually taken over by Dickenson Mines.

And of course there was that Windfall affair which, in my book, was way overblown in the euphoria of the big Texasgulf- Kidd Creek discovery. Her sin, if any, was to say nothing — absolutely nothing. She was completely exonerated of wrongdoing by a Royal Commission into the Windfall, but was rapped for what was considered at that time a minor infraction of Ontario Securities Commission regulations — wash trading in shares of Golden Arrow Mines, another of her companies.

But she certainly didn’t always have it good, for she was the 13th in a family of 15 children raised on a farm in the Muskoka Lakes district of Ontario.

She is now writing a book about her experiences in the mining industry. This should make good reading, for she calls a spade a spade and was frequently at loggerheads with the bureaucracy at The Toronto Stock Exchange. Nor was her job as head of the PDA always clear sailing. So there could be some interesting revelations on both those scores. Yes, any book by Viola is bound to be interesting.

She is still very much in love with mining.