Forming company creates apprenticeship

Unable to find a tradesman willing to train her, welder hires one herself

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Meet Calgary's iron lady.

Irma White-Patmore has a will as strong as the products of her Mohawk Welding and Consulting Services.

She thrives on starting from scratch.

It looked like all the strikes were against her when she started in 1986.

In a year when falling oil prices shattered the local economy, she was an Indian on welfare. She was a single parent in a strange city, after the marriage to a roving military man that had brought her to Calgary from Ontario broke up.

Eight years later, she owns a home with a Porsche in the garage and owes no mortgages or car loans. She also indulges rich taste in education for her daughter. 20 -year old Annette goes to University in Sweden, to study languages.

Among ambitious Calgary women, White-Patmore has the stature to be in demand as a role model for an employment program run by the YWCA for single parents striving to get off welfare.

She says she had one advantage. While being born a Wahta Mohawk did not put a silver spoon in her mouth, it suggested a career and gave her the nerve to try it.

She comes from a tribe renowned for rearing skilled and fearless iron workers.

Her grandfather, Joseph White, and her father, Mitchell, served on Mohawk high rigging crews that became famous for working on dizzying perches to erect the steel skeletons of skyscrapers from Manhattan to Calgary.

White-Patmore says the same goes for barriers against women and Indians in business as for heights: "We're just not afraid." She says the trait is bred into Mohawks by an ancient spiritual tradition.

"Our theory is not about dying - it's that we journey farther. If you have that attitude, you can do anything."

As a single parent on welfare, she enrolled in an ancestor of the current YWCA program to learn about the skills, training and formalities she would need to master to become self-supporting.

Obtaining the formal education needed to enter her chosen field turned out to be the least of the hurdles facing her. She cleared it with help from a provincial social services system that has always encouraged going to work.

With her academic credentials in hand, she needed a journeyman open to letting a woman into the male-dominated field by accepting her as an apprentice.

"I couldn't find anyone. It was really difficult. So I formed a company, Mohawk Welding. I used it to scrounge around for someone willing to be hired by it, on the understanding he would take me on as an apprentice."

The recruit - Les Patmore, a friend of one of her brothers, and a 20-year veteran of the trade - eventually became her second husband as well as her senior employee.

Both report rising demand for the firm's speciality and encourage other women to try the trade, but warn this is no field for fans of in-door comforts and reliable routine. "It's feast or famine," she says. And when the feasts come, they often arrive in the middle of nights, weekends and cold snaps as contracts to start right away on heavy work in remote outdoor sports.

Mohawk Welding's services have ranged from a year-long assembly of industrial equipment in southeast Calgary, through Saturday night repairs on distant oil drilling rigs, to patching bullet holes in the larger-than-life brass statue of a cowboy on horseback that commemorates early ranches at nearby Cochrane.

On the job, White-Patmore glows with warm feelings for metal work that she says Mohawks developed as Aboriginal blacksmiths, using coal and iron-ore outcrops of their home Canadian Shield long before Europeans arrived.

"I love it," she says. "The reward is that you have control of real things. There's nothing like a good sound weld. It's creative. When I'm behind that helmet, it's almost as I can be a god."