There has been an outpouring of sympathy and grieving from the community as it learned that John Kohut Jr. passed away on Tuesday morning.

John, who grew up in Drumheller and played a crucial role in the success of Hi-Way 9 Express, is remembered as a friend, leader, mentor and family man by those who knew and worked with him.

What started out as business relationship between Tony Lacher, former manager at ATB, and John, soon grew into a strong friendship.

“I got to know John through Hi-Way 9 and seeing his passion for the business and how he mentored so many along the way,” recalls Lacher. “He taught me so much about the trucking industry, and I taught him a lot about banking and finance. We grew to be strong friends out of that relationship.”

“John achieved so many milestones in his personal and professional life, and I like to think I was one of his biggest cheerleaders on the sidelines. He was the kind of guy that would achieve anything that he would set out to accomplish. There was always a flame there.”

Lacher describes John’s leadership style and ability as collaborative.

“He was a good listener, he always had time for people. He would weigh his own opinion against the input of others and from that come up with a direction, a guideline which he wanted to follow,” said Lacher. “He has a big business network on his own and it was never about him, it was always about, what can we do? Where can we go?  How do we move this forward? He connected with a lot of people to figure out those answers and he would go down that direction.”

“He listened to what you would say, weighed it, and it was maybe not his way or your way, but it was a combination of the two.”

The first time that Doug Lovsin, president of Freson Bros. met John, it was a situation where there was a problem, and they found a solution.

“I was in Hanna managing our store, it was in the late 80s. The first time I met him he was a young guy with high integrity and character. I will never forgot the first meeting because I had an issue that I thought needed to be solved, and John solved it,” said Lovsin.

In 1991, Freson purchased the Drumheller location and Lovsin moved to the valley. He got to know the Kohut family, and especially John.

“We would have discussions in the morning when he would pop down on the way to work to pick up a piece of fruit or yogurt. We would talk about business in Drumheller and throughout Alberta, recalls Lovsin.

He felt a kinship with John.

“I always admired John and I respected him. John and I are very similar; we come from a family business. There’s three boys and one girl, that is the same as our family. We had some kinship there, I really enjoyed my relationship with John,” said Lovsin. “We shared a lot, being second generation business people, in businesses started by our fathers. I certainly respected him in what he did to grow the company with the support of everyone in his family. Drumheller lost one of its finest businessmen.”

Rav Lal worked with John at Hi-Way 9 for nine years, starting as payroll administrator, and working his way up to IT and Quality Administrator. He has fond memories of John.

“John attacked everything in life with 100 percent passion. He treated all of his friends and employees as family. He knew every employee, their spouses, and kids by name,” said Lal.

“He was an inspirational leader and visionary. He was extremely generous with his time, advice, and praise. He believed everyone was capable of excellence and he would encourage all of his team to achieve that. He often believed more in his people than they believed in themselves. John was one of a kind we were all extremely fortunate to know him and have him in our lives. He has left the world a better place for all of us.”

A service for John Kohut Jr. will be held Monday, August 29, at 1 p.m. at the Badlands Community Facility in Drumheller.

Last Tuesday, palaeontologists from the Tyrrell museum were excavating the rare fossilized remains of a ceratopsian from a bonebed about halfway up a valley wall near the Tolman Bridge when they found that the rock, a jumbled and mingled mass of fossilized bones weighing up to 300 pounds, was much too heavy to haul over 700 metres up to the prairies and back to their trucks.

The plaster casing and burlap used to protect the fossils, known as a jacket, was necessarily heavy as the palaeontologists were safeguarding the remains of multiple arrhinoceratops’, one of the rarest horned dinosaurs in North America that until recently was only known through the study of two skulls. The team had found a rich bonebed containing the remains of at least five individuals ranging from babies to adults – a palaeontological gold mine of information on a little known and rare specimen, from a bonebed containing evidence of hip bones, jaws, and ribs all mixed and piled together. 

Palaeontologist François Therrien said the team was dealing with a cumbersome excavation up the hillside through narrow passages to prairie level, and then almost a kilometre to their vehicle, when by coincidence he spoke to two colleagues working on the museum’s flood mitigation program, which surveys Red Deer River valley by boat for flood damage to potentially significant sites.

“We asked if there was any chance they were going out on the river anytime soon and they said they were actually going out that day,” Therrien said. “I said ‘you’re kidding, you’re my new best friend.’”

They coordinated a rendezvous point and time and six palaeontologists carried the burlap jacket 50 metres down the hillside and loaded it onto the boat and easily shipped it back to the museum for study. 

Therrien said it’s a rare occurrence to excavate a fossil by boat as palaeontologists typically transport specimens, if they’re small enough, by hand or backpack to their vehicles. 

“Most of the time we are in the badlands where we’re not close to the river or can access the badlands by road. Sometimes we’ll ask landowners, many are farmers, to use their ATVs – it’s whatever method that is at our disposal and is most convenient. If a block is too heavy we’ll even call in the cavalry and get a helicopter in,” he said.

In a way, the excavation harkened back to the young days of palaeontology, the days of which Drumheller’s history as a centre of dinosaur studies began, where early scientists set off by boat down the Red Deer River from Red Deer in search of the big discovery that would give them a name, anchoring their barges to set up prospecting camps on the shore before moving on down the river to the next stop.

“In those days that was the easiest method. Sometimes they’d have access to horses with wagons and use those to haul jackets out of the valley and to the nearest town or train station,” Therrien said.

And just how does today’s excavations compare to then?

“We were joking about that on Wednesday when we were carrying another jacket up the valley. We keep saying palaeontologists in the early 20th century had it hard compared to us, having to do everything by hand, but the truth is they had their boats and horses and we don’t. We rely so much on trucks now that we’re limited in terms of how close we can get to the badlands via surfaced roads. In reality we actually carry those jackets a farther way than the early palaeontologists were doing, so we had a chuckle over that.”

“Using a boat was definitely a luxury… and now that the boat is out of storage and we know how to use it, it is definitely going to be a method we use more often when it’s convenient,” Therrien said.