Legends of Alaska - The People That Made Me (and a few others)

In a previous blog I mentioned some people that have passed that helped to make me who I am as a person.  I hope this is mostly for the better and less than for the worse.  I thought I would take a moment to write a few recollections about some of the people I have known and continue to know and what they meant to me.  It is interesting I suppose that the majority of the people noted are father figures.  I think in the life of a young developing man male figures that pay them attention and give them a sense of worth are very important.  My father had a similar impact on the life of one of my friends.  With my father’s encouragement and guidance my friend made it through the university and found direction in his life.  I truly believe my father was critical in his progression.  Regretfully I am not sure I have ever held the same significance to a person in life aside from my son.  That said, often we never fully understand the role our actions play on the lives of others and few circle around enough in life with an urge to express them.

Ken Piper -

Ken was a giant of a man

Ken Piper

and for a small boy seemed uniquely huge.  He was an architect like my father and a professional friend.  My parents were friends with he and his wife Margaret (Marge) and I remember visiting their house in Anchorage numerous times.  Ken and Marge were Mormons and as a young child I had no idea what that meant.  I just knew he was huge and seemed to love me like I was his own child.  He would give me books and records with storybooks attached.  Ken loved classical music and I remember particularly a record/book he gave me of Tchaikovsky’s Peter and the Wolf.  It was Ken that first introduced me to the arts.  My father and Ken shared a bond in classical music buying and I recall them comparing various symphonies and admiring stereo equipment.  Both were constant visitors to Pyramid Audio and it’s owner Jim Boden where they would admire Bose and Macintosh equipment.  I recall Ken bought these speakers large enough for a homeless family to move into and had them anchoring his living room.

Eventually Ken and his wife left the state to return to their original home in Seattle but a need for work brought Ken back to Alaska.  He lived with us for a time would give me rides to school in the morning.  I can still hear his jolly guttural laugh as he would put peanut butter on a slice of bread, entice the dog to eat it and then stick it to the roof of the dogs mouth.  Watching the dog as it tried to pull the bread off would send him into hysterics as would his endless watching of the movie Under the Yum Yum Tree with Jack Lemmon.   I used to watch football with Ken.  He would last a few minutes and then fall sound asleep.  It was nice to have him near.  I was attending college in Oregon when my parents called to say that Ken had died.  His wife gave me his golf putter that I still have and aptly named the “Piper Putter”.

For me Ken was my family.  He introduced me to culture and helped me learn how to love and laugh.  He was a giant of a man that cared for a small boy and made me feel special.

Robert Douglas - 

Robert Douglas "Bob" Renaissance Man

Another friend of my father’s was a jolly bearded man with rolled up dress shirt sleeves and a deep Baritone voice.  At parties he would break into a rendition of “Old Man River” or delight everyone with a resuscitation of Old English.  It was hard to ever imagine Bob Douglas as a child because his intellectual and artistic depth seemed to defy the ignorance of innocence.  He was an opera aficionado that had been married numerous times and was still friends with all his ex-wives.  He was a teacher at the Anchorage Community College and I had the pleasure to be his literature student prior to commencing my first year of study at the university.  One special summer we and a group of friends shared a few weeks in Italy together at an historic Italian villa.  It was such a pleasure to be with an intellectual giant yet a man of incredible vulnerability.  Bob passed away from cirrhosis  yet there is not a single moment when I do not drink a glass of wine without an image of him flashing through my mind.  I can see him as clear as yesterday holding a glass of red wine as he opened a door for me between my world and a world of art and literature. 

Robert Tamburelli -

Bob Tamburelli was

Bob Tamburelli - Contractor/Alaskan

a contractor that built my house.  Well it was really my parents house, my father’s creation.  An enormous bearded man I will never forget him walking around half built houses, checking lightbulbs and upon finding them dead smashing them against the floor.  When you are a young man finding a person that will give you a little work is a gift that is heaven sent.  You can only get so much money out of your parents and for me it just wasn’t enough to pay my childhood bills.  Cars, maintenance, insurance and date money.  It is hard to find a part time job when you are young but Bob was willing to give me a chance.  I would work for him on weekends cleaning up job sites that he was working on.  I would listen to Seattle Seahawk games while working on Sundays and Bob would pay me in cash.  Bob taught me what it means to give a young man a chance.   

Max Morley

Yet another colleague of my father’s was a rotund man named Max Morley.  Max always seemed a bit overly serious yet there was a side to him of such warmth and sincerity.   I came to know Max as I desperately tried to keep my teenage cars running that in truth, truly had no business being on the road.  Max headed the Auto/Diesel Technology program at the Anchorage Community College and would graciously take in my broken down car as a project for his class to work on.  I suspect in the end Max was probably personally the one that was key in their momentary rehabilitation for the price of parts.  Just after I was married my wife and I moved back to Alaska and I worked for a truly horrible human being named Johnny Ellis in the Alaska State Legislature.  I really shouldn’t say horrible as I know Johnny is retired and quite sick now.  I hope he has realized what an awful personal human being he was at the point I knew him in life and seen fit to correct his misgivings.  Needless to say in the face of an overabundance of stress I left his employment and desperately needed a job.  I was 22 years old.  Max stepped in and let me become his department secretary.  It was a job I had no business doing but to this day I am grateful for his patience and acceptance.  Max taught me kindness and giving.  He was the father of two adopted black children that both turned out to be wonderful human beings in their own rights.   

Katherine Ostrosky

At some point, I honestly

Katherine Ostrosky 1959

don’t remember when, I had a job at an Adult Basic Education center in Anchorage.  It must have been during my senior year of high school because I met my girlfriend at that time while she was attending English classes at the center.  It was a simple place with almost no budget and piles of books and materials.  Wayward souls would wander through taking classes as they worked toward achieving a GED, learned English or fulfilled requirements for some government subsidy program.  One of the teachers was Katherine Ostrosky.  Katherine was in her 60s at the time and was a wonderful kind and giving person.  She represented a generation of Alaska that predated myself.  She was a legislator in her younger years and her life in Alaska spanned statehood extending back into territorial days.  

My time at Adult Basic Education and knowing Katherine helped me to understand that there was a world of people far less fortunate than myself.  People that struggled to get through life perhaps victims of their own mistakes or possibly circumstance beyond their control.  Working with Katherine helped me learn that I should accept them an not judge them.   There are good people and bad people but it was not my place to make that determination.  Instead, there was a deeper importance to just accept all as human beings and hope that somehow in a message of kindness the bad might become good and the good might become better..

Mai Wa Smallwood -

When I was in high school there was small nerdy Vietnamese girl that was amazingly smart and had a huge crush on me.  She had long black hair that extended down past her bottom and I always felt she was the real student and I was the joker.  I knew she came to America after the Vietnam War adopted by a white American family and she had a younger sister named Tuyet.  Mai Wa was brilliant.  She was smarter than I could ever dream of being and had she survived would have been a scientist solving the worlds problems.  She was always the one that would send me candy grams when there was school fund raising involved.  Mai Wa taught me what it felt like to feel loss.  This happened when she took her own life during our junior year.  She also taught me how important it is to express our thoughts and values when other humans are concerned.  I realized in the wake of her loss my own failings as a human being and how I should have done a better job reaching out to her and telling her that she really was important to me.

Irene Pan -

Irene was a Chinese American who I met while studying in Vienna, Austria, during my junior university year.  She came along my second semester when I needed a friend.  Many of my friends from my first semester had departed and I felt alone there as I started my second semester.  Irene was tiny and brilliant.  She spoke Mandarin and English.  For Irene I became a sounding board for her frustrations with an American boyfriend living in another place that seemed to have no respect for her.  As our friendship deepened we would get together once a week and cook or forage for dinner together.  When we left Vienna we stayed in touch as she returned to Boston and I to Oregon and then Alaska.  Our letters went back and forth until one day they didn’t.  Finally her sister wrote me and told me she had killed herself.  The news destroyed me.  Apparently she had lived with such depression and hopelessness she saw no future.  How could I have not seen this?  In her death Irene taught me how little I knew of a person I felt I knew so well.  It exposed my own failures in communication.  I felt so empty and so lost.  It taught me to try to be more aware of the people I am close to.  To try to better understand their thoughts, needs and frustrations.  Thoughts of Irene still elicit a tear as my heart desperately wishes I could turn back the clock and change the course of time.  

Today in a small wooden box I keep pictures of Irene and Mai Wa.  For as long as I live the light of their lives will not be forgotten.

There are a few additional people that are thankfully still with me.  Any reader of this will notice by this point that I have not noted any of my family.  The reason for this is simply that they are my family and are intrinsically important in my life and my upbringing.  They have a constant presence and obviously I embody each of them in my own way.  Some are gone now but each has left their mark upon me.

I think that there are others however that at times are lost in our memories yet in reality have had a huge impact.  A few of these people are still in this world.  I have unfortunately lost contact with some however it doesn’t diminish their importance in any way.

Peter Blewett

Peter Blewett taught

Peter and former wife Gayle with children

history at the University of Alaska with my father.  He was remarkably mechanically naive and I recall he once contacted my father after his Volkswagen Beetle that he had been driving for years broke down.  My father asked him if he ever changed the oil and Peter responded. “Your supposed to do that?”  Peter was the consummate intellectual so much so that I think his wife and children didn’t have a clue what he was saying.  This probably contributed to his first divorce.  I had the pleasure of taking Western Civilization with him as my professor.  During our classes he would throw out conceptual points concerning right and wrong, justice and strength for discussion.  Peter was a liberal in the Scandinavian model and he taught me that it was okay to believe in society.  That it was okay to be a liberal and care about things like individualism, the environment and human rights.  

Irene Steiner

Irene Steiner and Gatsby

Irene came to me as a friend late in life.  She is twenty years my senior and a Swiss/German.  Irene is a rational idealist who is always quick to realign my utopian visions of European society.  Our friendship started in 2007 and I pray will continue until our last days.  She is intelligent and beautiful.  She is cultured and strong.  I admire her in more ways than I have ever confessed.   Having lost my mother when I was only 32 Irene has filled my need for  motherly advice from time to time.  That said she has also developed into a true and loyal friend.  Irene is teaching me what it means to grow old with grace.  She is energetic and a cancer survivor that sees the world with frustration but also with optimism.  She is spending her years sharing her ability as a psychiatric nurse and living with gusto and life.  She travels the world and walks miles each day with her dog.  She appreciates history, culture and tradition.  Irene is who I want to be when I am in my 70’s.   She is remarkably kind and I love her dearly.

Ira Wald

Ira has been a friend since I reported to La Paz, Bolivia for my job in 1995.  He is much older than I am, in his 70s now.  Like Irene he is a cancer survivor.  Ira can be grumpy and curmudgeonly but he can also laugh until he cries.  I have traveled to some of the most distant places in the world with Ira and I admire his intellect and literacy.  He is extremely well read never ceasing to add new thing to his brain.  On the surface some might see Ira as gruff or impolite but I know underneath that patina is a heart of gold.  Ira has taught me what lies beneath is much more important than an exterior.  Like Irene, Ira is a model of growing old.  In his 70’s now and still battling to keep his cancer repressed he swims in a lakes and walks miles each day.  He still travels the world to visit me and his son and he is never intimidated by new challenges.  I am confident Ira would give me the shirt of his back if I needed it.  He is a master gardener that derives endless pleasure from observing the blossoming changes of day to day life.

Alfredo Arroyo

I met Alfredo about the same time as I met Ira when I was serving in a professional capacity in La Paz, Bolivia.  Alfredo immediately stood out as something unique in my career field.  Generally those that work in my profession are not the sharpest tools in the shed.  They tend to be conservative, quite narrow minded and far from intellectually curious.  There are of course exceptions and Alfredo is truly one of those.  He is a man for whom learning is his life’s passion.  He retired professionally so that he could study more.  He reads, he teaches he learns, he ponders.  Alfredo fulfilled a huge gap in my life.  He filled the whole of intellectual curiosity.  We spent hours talking over a coffee and a cigar contemplating all aspects of life from the mundane to the sexual to the intellectual.  We still exchange emails today an scarcely a day goes by when I do not find myself thirsting for his intellectual companionship.  Alfredo has a magnetic personality buttressed by learned military professionalism and the toxic combination of Spanish and German blood.  He is a true confidant of mine and his friendship has now spanned decades.  Alfredo guided me out of my hole and helped to make me a more curious and congenial person.  He has helped me to understand what it means to have a male friend that is truly an intellectual soulmate.  I have never had a blood brother but I can honestly say Alfredo is the brother biological life never gave me.

Of course I have many friends and each one brings something special to me and my life in their own unique way.  For me that is the underlying current of what has formed the friendship and bonded me to them.  I hope that in my own way while still with me, I express this to them and that they hear my words.  The people noted here just came along at a certain point in life when my mind was willing to absorb all that they had to give.  They taught me something unique and are my models for living my life.  We are all built upon the pillars of those who raised us.  Sometimes this can create a shaky foundation.  Other times it can make one as solid as a rock.  I suppose like most I am in the middle somewhere but I am indebted to those that truly knowingly or unknowingly left their mark.