A prominent Whitehorse businessman and once a force du jour on the local basketball courts died Tuesday from leukemia.

Barry Bellchambers passed away at the age of 69, less than a week before his 70th birthday this Sunday.

Bellchambers is perhaps best known in recent decades for converting the old YWCA and former Fourth Avenue Residence into the High Country Inn, and eventually the Yukon Convention Centre, after purchasing the former Lions Pool next door.

For four decades, he and his partner, Maggie Holt, owned the Takhini Mobile Home Park.

And it was Bellchambers and Holt who were among the original founders of Atlantis Submarines, a submarine tourism business that started in Hawaii and expanded to the Caribbean.

But it was shortly after the Australian from Tasmania blew into Whitehorse back in 1968 that Ken McKinnon got to know him through basketball.

It was the beginning of a budding friendship of more than 40 years.

"Barry was one of the best, if not the best basketball player to ever hit the Yukon,” McKinnon recalled this week, noting the season Bellchambers played on the varsity team for Simon Fraser University.

"He immediately joined the road team. We played all over Alaska and the Yukon. He immediately became one of us.”

Bellchambers, said McKinnon, was the consummate practical joker, never mean, but effective.

"The stuff he pulled on us all of was classic,” he said.

"Beside being an incredibly smart businessman, he was our own Tasmanian devil, a whirling dervish.”

McKinnon said Bellchambers was the definition of entrepreneurship, from his early days running Barry's Tax Returns to moving onto Barry's Homes.

"Everybody saw a broken-down hostel and Barry saw the Yukon's next premier hotel,” McKinnon said of the High Country Inn project.

Family friend Carson Schiffkorn said as a kid growing up in Whitehorse, he always knew who Barry Bellchambers was.

As a friend and neighbour to Barry and Maggie for the last decade or so, he grew to know Bellchambers as a positive influence for many people.

Schiffkorn said he was not a "poor me” type of guy.

He was the kind of guy who remained upbeat and forward-looking, he said.

Schiffkorn said even after being diagnosed with his illness more than a year ago, he remained active. He still jogged, and just kept going ahead, and he was usually one step ahead.

Bellchambers, he said, generally had his finger on the pulse a few days before anybody else.

When he sought land a few years back for more mobile homes, he recognized the housing crunch was on the way.

It was Bellchambers who purchased the run-down Lewes Village housing project in the early 1980s, fixed up the individual townhouses and sold them privately, Schiffkorn pointed out.

"When you are in business, the name of the game is making money,” said Schiffkorn. "But again, being forward-thinking, he saw niches, but he was a humanist, and he wanted people to have good lives.

"I think he really understood that if you succeed and the next person succeeds and the person after that succeeds, then the town and the territory really succeed.”

Like McKinnon, Schiffkorn said there was no mistaking Bellchambers' love for levity.

"For people who knew Barry, he just had the wickedest sense of humour,” he said.

"Everything that just came out of that guy's mouth was hilarious. Maybe he wasn't known as funny in the business world, but in the personal world, he was a born entertainer.

"... He lived his life well,” said Schiffkorn.

McKinnon said some of the stories from those basketball trips in Alaska are still legendary.

"But you know what happens on the road, stays on the road,” he said.

Perhaps, said a chuckling McKinnon, he may have to bend the rule a little when he delivers the eulogy during the tribute to Bellchambers on Saturday, March 16 at the High Country Inn-Yukon Convention Centre.

Just look for the giant Mountie guarding the front door.

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