There are still a few mining industry old-timers out there who remember the annual exhibition hockey games at Maple Leaf Gardens pitting the Prospectors All Stars from Toronto against a team from Vancouver consisting of employees from what was then known as Teck Corp., or simply Teck. Teck footed the $500 bill for the arena rental. The stands would be empty, but there was always a hockey celebrity or two sprinkled among the miners, including Bobby Orr, who was hired one year to be a linesman. The games, while friendly in intent, were fiercely contested with industry bragging rights at stake. Teck’s commitment to victory was evidenced by the number of Keevils on the roster, including Norman, currently chair emeritus of the company. “Norman was never the flashiest of players, but he was definitely enthusiastic,” a former opponent recalled. Keevil eventually hung up his skates, but his enthusiasm for being at the centre of the mining industry action proved enduring. Today, he is nearing his 90th birthday and Teck Resources Ltd. is front and centre after a blockbuster deal was struck with Anglo American PLC to create a $70-billion copper mining giant known as Anglo Teck Ltd. As a key Teck shareholder and board member, Keevil is in favour of the deal, so, quicker than you can say Maurice Richard, a Canadian family mining dynasty has entered its sunset phase after 60 years in the game. How the family truly feels about this is hard to say since Keevil has declined multiple interview requests over the years, as have several family members who answer the request with a singular refrain that boils down to: if Norman is not talking, neither am I. The sole outlier was Keevil’s younger brother, Harold, a fellow alumnus of those long-ago hockey tilts, a former company director and a prospector at heart. He was famous for being a gentle soul and somewhat of a wiseacre who liked to joke that his true calling would be to open an Ontario cottage country store, Harold’s Fine Art and Live Bait. His time at Teck coincided with the company’s mine-building years that were highlighted by notable copper projects in Chile and Peru as well as the Elkview coal mine in British Columbia. Harold succumbed to cancer in July. In August, on what would have been his 80th birthday, his loved ones reunited him with what his obituary described as his beloved Temagami, a lake northwest of North Bay, Ont. For anyone hunting for clues as to what makes a Canadian family mining dynasty tick, it’s as good a place as any to dip into. Lake Temagami is home to more than 1,200 islands. Members of the Keevil family return there each summer to enjoy its waters and idle by the lake. The inner family circle shorthand includes a numeric code — 1114 — which is the number of the island Norman Keevil Sr. built a cottage upon. The island today is a bit of a touchy subject amongst the family, but how Keevil Sr. came to be there is essentially the story of how Teck came to be. Had the gears of American bureaucracy been better greased, the Keevil name would be associated with the Manhattan Project — a.k.a. building the atomic bomb — instead of mines. Keevil Sr. was a brilliant academic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with expertise in radioactive dating, but his recruitment by the United States government to work on a top-secret project got hung up by the fact he was Canadian, and it would take a year to get security clearance. Instead of sticking around, he headed home to Canada and eventually made his way to Temagami. Legend has it that he went there to sniff around for copper using an airborne magnetic gizmo that was employed during wartime to detect enemy submarines, but he applied it to find mineral deposits. His eldest son, Norman, offered a slightly different spin on his father’s initial attraction to Temagami when he related the story to a reporter in the late 1970s. “The lore is that a large magnetic anomaly brought my father to Temagami, but I think it was just because it’s a really nice lake,” he said. The lake of many islands included one that was home to a high-grade copper deposit. Keevil’s Temagami Island mine produced 80 million pounds of copper and made the family a lot of money. Its centrality to what followed is evident in Teck’s current shareholder information, where the Keevil family holding company is listed as Temagami Mining Co. The younger Norman was also a keen academic and was poised to take a university job in Utah, but after being asked several times and saying no to his dad’s offer to come home and take a job with the company, he finally said yes. “You wonder what would have happened had I gone to Salt Lake,” he once said, speculating he may have become a “competent skier.” But it turns out, he possessed other talents. The Keevils in the 1960s went from a copper mine to hunting for oil and gas, thereby learning that oil and gas just wasn’t their thing. What emerged as a core strategy that would transform Teck into a global player and, ultimately, a takeover target was zeroing in on discoveries that were unwanted and turning them into working mines. “It is a matter of recognizing opportunities,” Keevil said in 2013. What you need to know about Anglo American's deal for Teck ResourcesTeck strikes deal with Anglo American to create $70-billion copper producer with headquarters in Vancouver In 2025, he is pushing 90 and not saying much to the media (though one family member described him as “seemingly immortal”). But after decades of stickhandling the company through its growth phase as chief executive, prior to presiding over it in recent decades as a board member and controlling shareholder, the deal with Anglo American will mark the end of the Keevil family’s control over a mining industry icon that started on a nice lake they still come back to. • Email: joconnor@postmedia.com