Today, Goldcorp and Glamis agreed to an $8.6 deal to merge the companies. This is an important story in the gold mining business.

I remember Ian Telfer from his days in Toronto 20-25 years ago. A fine gentleman, nice person to be around, and obviously a smart guy. When I next ran into him in Vancouver back in 2000, I had to stop and ask myself, who is this guy? People come and go from your life. Memories fade.

As to Glamis, I remember back in 1983-4 when the deal was starting, and Chester Millar would come into our office at Dean Witter, where my associate Tony Garson was the first research analyst to write up the company, and where one of our sales guys, Bruce Gordon, took Chester under his wing and proudly showed him around town.

Chester Millar was an operator, not a deal maker. Bruce Gordon was a terrific salesman. He put a lot of Glamis stock into a lot of accounts.

Bruce must have been Chester's one-man sales army at that point. He portrayed Millar as an old-timer who adeptly bulldozed some Nevada dirt around in piles that could be leached with chemicals that eventually floated out the gold. Compared to the high-cost underground hard rock mining at the time, we were amazed at the simplicity and the low-cost, high yield results. It was quite a story.

The market cap was under $100 million at that point, and old Bruce would tell us every day " over beers at Bardi's of course " that Glamis one day would be a multi-billion dollar company and $100 stock.

My daughter will not know this of course, but I moved out of the third floor of that building at 181 University Avenue in order to build out the top floor of the Toronto Stock Exchange tower, kitty-corner, for Canaccord Capital. She was about four years of age at the time.

This summer her company moved into the second floor of that building, right above that bar where Garson, Gordon and I spent so many hours with people like Chester Millar wondering about the future of Glamis. So I asked her if she knew Bardi's, and she laughed. Apparently the place is long gone.

And now $8.6 Billion later, so too is Glamis.

Time moves on.

btw, gold (Dec. futures) is up $7.20 this morning. But you knew that a couple days ago, right?

ADDENDUM:

At about 8:35 am ET, ROBTV ran an interview with the Goldcorp-Glamis management. The Video Replay is a must.