EPISODE 252 A ROCK FELL ON THE MOON … by Alicia Priest …magnetic
alan skeoch
Feb. 2021
I WILL BE LATE TODAY EPISODE 252
Story is intricate….fascinating at least to me…very global as well, i.e. Russia in time of Stalin and
persecutions of 1930’s when people ate grass, dead animals and worse…a marriage…two
little girls one of whom became an author just months before she died…and a father
who had a grand scheme…and a trial in Mayo Landing in Nov. 1963 where it was so cold
lawyers dare not turn of their car engines…defence lawyer Molson (beer family fame) had a brand
new 1963 Pontiac which was scrap at the end of the trial…ran day and night…
45 degrees below zero…lower than that…coldest place in North America…Mayo Landing
where the lawyers and jurors drank double O.P.’s
in the Chateau Inn as we did in the summer of 1962..while Gerald Priest was stealing sacks
of silver ore (if true)…hidden in the bush we were surveying that summer…and where a third man escaped prison because his
jailed associates never ratted on him. Honour among thieves.
And the question of who owned 70 tons of silver ore…Was it from a ‘rock that fell on the moon.
or was it stolen from Keno Hill ? How do you steal 70 tons of ore?
I must have seen, maybe talked to, Gerald Priest in the summer of 1962. Maybe I even noticed
Alicia playing with Caesar, her dog, on a gravel road in the lonely mining town of Elsa where
we bought our food and had ice cream cones. Alicia may have had an ice cream cone on a day
that Bill Scott and I had ours. We were there often.
Alicia’s story is magnetic…like the Galena ore hidden on the trail near Keno Hill.
We were there….Bill Scott and I…while one of the great thefts in Canadian history was happening…and no one knew.
Why did I never hear about this crime (if it was a crime) until 2013? Simple. President John Kennedy was shot in November
1963. All other news fell by the wayside.
alan
EPIODE 252 A ROCK FELL ON THE MOON
alan skeoch
Feb 2021
Alicia Priest was 10 years old in 1962. I was 23 years old. We never met although we may
have seen esch other. She lived in Elsa and her dad was the assayer for United Keno Hill Mines,
a silver and lead mine in the centre of the Yukon Territory, Canada. She was a happy little girl
living in a nice pan abode house provided by the mining company. Alicia and her older sister
Vona loved the wilderness in which they lived Her mom was a German born Mennonite who
just barely escaped the purges of Joseph Stalin after World War Two. Her daughter becameMrs. Preist …
met Gerald through a lonely hearts club… through love letters exchanged before they met physically. Gerald was in a dead end
job in Elsa…OR he felt he was. He was a genius who had a plan that was as big as the moon.
Too bad he failed in the end. Lots of people were rooting for him…i.e. all the miners except one in
the Keno Hill mine at Elsa. Even some lawyers. All the citizens in Mayo Landing many of which
had been our employees and friends in 1962.
I wish he had succeeded too.
etc.etc.