Found 50 years later: 13-year-old on the front page of The Citizen in 1974

The Prince George Citizen Throwback Thursday put a call out to see if we could catch up with Kathy Hart who was on the front page of the Citizen on Feb. 25, 1974. The shot shows her 13-year-old self lying on a mountain of snow with a snowshoe raised over her head after a record snowfall.

Hart said she was either at Carrie Jane Gray Park or Lheidli T'enneh Memorial Park when the photographer caught her in action.

“It got me some really bad attention because it caught me skipping out of school,” Hart laughed.

“I was taking the looooong way to school and the Citizen photographer was like ‘hey, can I take your picture?’ and it ends up on the front page and my parents are like ‘how did you do that?’ I was only 13 so it got me a lot of press – at home.”

Hart remembered the tuque on her head was one she had snatched off her friend Darrell’s head.

“Because that's what we used to do back then – you’d just take someone else’s tuque and wear it for the day,” Hart laughed.

Her family moved away shortly after the photo was taken and she spent most of her high school years in Saskatchewan and then moved to Carcross, Yukon.

“I built cedar strip canoes and lived in a teepee,” Hart said.

“I came back down south again and worked in Medicine Hat and then hitch hiked over to BC for a long weekend and never went back.”

She met her husband in Prince George and had two children and raised them here.

“So I’ve been back here ever since,” Hart said. “I travel and go on holidays but this is home base.”

Her career path was always health focused. She was a dental assistant for a few years, worked at a health food store downtown for 25 years and then retired from that to be a yoga teacher and will soon retire from her part time job as manager of a little health food store in the Hart. Yoga will then be her focus and the breath work that comes with it.

“We just need to keep everybody moving and healthy,” Hart said.

Friends have recently reached out to her to let her know they saw the Throwback Thursday piece in the paper.

“People keep telling me ’you still look the same’,” Hart said. “I guess that’s not a bad thing, 50 years later.”