A friend of mine from the Haa Yaitx’u Saiani’s Kin Support Program asked me to speak at the Mudrooms at K̠unéix̠ Hídi Northern Light United Church at 7 p.m. Tuesday concerning love. I am not a big speaker…I am a big writer, large type and everything. So here goes:
My first remembrance of Juneau was as a young movie critic.
I was standing in front of the Capital Theater or the 20th Century, staring at a movie poster of the 1962 John Wayne classic Hatari.
It was either 1963 or ’64. I was three or four.
Hatari’s premise – A group of men trap wild animals in Africa and sell them to zoos. Will the arrival of a female wildlife photographer change their ways?
Ooooooo, there was John Wayne, strapped on front of some dust-kicking truck, grasping a long pole and lasso contraption with a rhinoceros all up in his face, his horn about to flip the vehicle into the African plains.
An inset photo shows Wayne, both hands cupped about his mouth, seemingly yelling something heroic.
I like to remember this moment because it reminds me of what Southeast Alaska was all about and continued to be.
I don’t remember why we had gotten on the newly christened M/V Malaspina and traveled to Juneau, I only know I would not stop crying until I was taken to Hatari. For four straight nights my father could only quiet my cantankerous nature by letting me stare at the poster outside in the cold, and then carry me inside through velvet curtains to creaky seats where my boots would fall off and slide under a popcorn-scented chair that could hardly contain my youth.
It was on one of these outdoor staredowns with Wayne that I noticed another small lad off to my left. I had my right hand connected to the mountain of my father and my left hand grasping a small package of licorice vines. I pushed the vines to the boy as if we were longtime art aficionados and he took them as such.
The boy’s left hand was in his father’s and he bit into the vines without looking at me. We did not speak. We just stared up at Wayne precariously perched on the truck’s hood with the beautiful Elisa Martinelli holding a camera in the open back between Red Buttons and Hardy Kruger who look on tensely.
Our exposed skin took the chill of rain and flecks of snow and then I was whisked away inside.
I will come back to this period on closing…
I was always a reader and scribbler.
My mother seemed to acquire every book available for purchase through our school system and various mail-order clubs, plus the yearly industrial-sized Encyclopedia Britannica, the monthly bright yellow National Geographic, the then all Alaskana-themed Alaska magazine and a few more that showcased the newest mechanical or scientific inventions. I had a vivid imagination fueled by “Cat in the Hat” volumes, comic books and Readers Digest. Our living room became the neighborhood library and if a parchment was not on the shelf it was brought up from the depths of our basement.
It was a Southeast upbringing.
We lived outdoors as much as in, our elders gathered and shaped the news at the local coffee shop-slash-eatery that always seemed to have a trail of wet footprints from front door to back.
Fishermen, loggers, business owners, teachers, parents and politicians — sometimes one and the same — disputed how our Vikings lads would topple the Wrangell or Ketchikan teams and then buck the tides north to defeat Juneau.
My father Harold left Sweden in the womb of my grandmother. He would achieve a fifth-grade education in Canada which ended when his own father passed in the great flu epidemic. Becoming the man of the house he brought his mother, sister and brother-in-law to Petersburg. He farmed foxes, milled lumber, was a territorial sheriff, became one of the few Alaska Telephone lineman for the bush and was retired much too late from an invaluable wrench-turning boilerman job that kept the town’s prosperous seafood plant operating.
Although not book smart, Harold read instructions well enough to operate machinery and his hands constructed what others could not. He built a log cabin and floated it to Petersburg and it still stands, he built the house I was raised in and my nephew now owns. He made each wooden skiff our family took out into the surrounding waters for picnics and beach-combing. He melted lead from discarded telephone cable to make anchors and trolling balls.
If someone needed a tool to borrow or had something broken to fix they knocked on our door.
Yet what I learned from my father was this — a handshake is your word.
From my mother I learned you open your house to all.
Patricia was a valedictorian at Queen Anne High School in Seattle and classmate Hank Ketchum of Dennis the Menace fame, put a cartoon in the school yearbook depicting “Patsy” hitting a softball into orbit. When her own mother committed suicide Patricia took over raising siblings, substituting marriage for college. She came to Petersburg with five children, a husband who drank more and husbanded less and left her. Patsy met Harold and birthed my older brother Jim and luckily — as they were approaching procreation age limits — myself.
My mother could cook, clean, laugh and had a voice that became known for reassuring pilots in marginal weather as well as scolding the town’s leadership when they strayed. Her nature was such that she would stand on our front porch and wave a white towel to greet passing Canadian steamships. This became a tradition at Hungry Point and on the ship’s as each captain would announce the wavings and passengers would line the decks.
On the retirement voyage of one captain, he docked his vessel at the Petersburg’s cold storage pilings and hitched a ride out to our house where he presented my mother with a set of the ship’s china. He wasn’t allowed to leave without a meal and I was sent running next door to fetch our neighbor who fetched another and another and soon there was a vast array of Scandinavian dishes that threatened to soil the blazing white officer’s uniform as unattached maidens fed him mercilessly.
So that was our house.
It was not uncommon to have the Governor of Alaska and a local cancan dancer in our kitchen at the same time, each taking turns sitting on the other’s lap. And in the background my mother might play the original piano my father had rescued from Juneau’s Red Dog Saloon.
I grew up playing little league baseball and getting homesick when the ferry required a week trip to the big all-star tournament in Haines.
We lads then shifted to middle school basketball and dreamt of playing against teams from the capital city while we traveled to Wrangell to face Stikine middle school or Wrangell Institute.
High school sports seemingly had us on ferries through the year and we seemed to turn out well-educated, seasoned in life and with a mailing list of lifetime friends.
I went to community college on a basketball scholarship and although I vowed to never be a commercial fisherman, in the summer of my first year, a stepbrother asked if I would take his bunk on a Norwegian halibut schooner. It turned into a 35-day adventure in the Gulf of Alaska and I was hooked, so to speak, on the lifestyle.
After four years of aimless fishing and traveling and life lessons a buddy suggested I help him lead a small four-year college to victory. I attended a small Christian school then walked on at Cal State Fullerton where I earned a bench seat and marveled at my friend who would play for the Philadelphia 76ers while I would only reach a brief 10-game stint of semi-pro play.
I resumed fishing and traveling in the off seasons.
In the early ‘90s my father took ill and I took a land job to be near. I became a press operator at the Petersburg Pilot, then a reporter as positions fluctuated about and I touched a dial-up modem computer and a darkroom for the first time.
My father passed in 1993.
Eventually I returned to fishing in the summer and freelancing for various national magazine publications and the Associated Press. In 2006 I received an invitation to cover the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy as an AP photographer.
That was my first trip outside the United States and my first day was miserable as an Italian taxi driver left my bags on a street corner, sans a camera, and I was jetlagged and teary-eyed.
I walked with luggage to a barber shop where my “get the heck out of Dodge” attitude was quickly adjusted in an old school barber’s hands as my broken Alaskan dialect mingled with his Italian version of English.
To me the Olympics were a huge high school pep rally and that was how I treated it: first name basis and ‘what’s your favorite song’ had athletes laughing.
While covering an Olympic ski event, a snowstorm stopped the competition and an Italian photographer dug a snow cave and shared it with me for a bit.
When I returned to the States I received an answer to my application for an AP job in Sweden, a job the Italian friend applied for me without my knowledge.
I used that interview to visit my father’s homeland. Unfortunately the interview was started in Swedish and turned to German, both languages my Italian buddy had implied that I spoke.
I returned to Alaska and fishing and free lancing and I helped care for my mother until she passed in 2008.
While returning from Bristol Bay in the summer of 2009 I was to help with photography at the Juneau Empire for a week. I jumped off the airplane in Anchorage to shop at the Gap because I had only fishing garb. Interestingly, a pair of purchased basketball shorts have lasted through to my current mountain outings.
That first week for the JE turned into another and another, then a month and another month. I was offered the only position available, that of cops and courts reporter and on that beat met another reporter and we still share the mountains together.
As my news coverage changed to sports and jumped from print to radio and online and back the intent has remained the same — to treat Juneau athletics like the community I have always known.
I grew up making friends through sports across Alaska. That small-town mentality traveled with me to college and overseas, and embraced all I met.
About a year ago I was talking about archaic hoop times with an old Tlingit friend of mine who played for JDHS back in our ancient days. He and I had met at coach Jim Hamey’s basketball camp as eighth graders about to become freshmen.
The Crimson Bears were the reason I went to the state basketball tournament my junior and senior years as the number two seed from Southeast. Yet each member of those JDHS teams, and our opponents across the Southeast Panhandle — those players, their cheerleaders, schoolmates and parents — helped form my early values of right and wrong. Watching their homes disappear on the horizon from the deck of the Malaspina, Matanuska, Taku, Wickersham, Columbia or LeConte and my own dwelling appearing on a Frederick Sound shore was filled with many emotional dualities one need experience firsthand to truly appreciate.
My Tlingit friend remembered his early Juneau days. He couldn’t afford going to the movies, but would stand with his father and marvel at the poster of the latest feature shipped into town.
He remembered wanting to watch John Wayne capture animals in Africa, and he remembered standing in front of the Capital Theater and another young boy handing him red licorice while the rain and snow fell.
• Contact Klas Stolpe at klas.stolpe@juneauempire.com.
