Episode 21: Michael Marks; From Woodstock To Haines

A kid in Queens watches planes at LaGuardia, runs a small-time “slug” hustle on coin machines, and then gets stopped cold by a store owner and a furious mom. Years later, that same kid hitchhikes across America at 16, goes to Woodstock, and somehow ends up getting paid to draw Bert and Ernie for Sesame Street. Michael Marks’ story is one of those rare life arcs that connects real cultural history to the day-to-day work of building community, and it all lands in an unexpected place: Haines, Alaska.

We talk through Michael’s path from art school and CalArts to commercial illustration, then into teaching and arts education programs funded through grants. From there, he becomes Santa Clarita’s first cultural arts coordinator and helps build concerts in parks, public art, festivals, and the unglamorous but essential systems that make events safe and possible. He also shares what it was like during the 1994 earthquake, when “arts department” gear like canopies, chairs, and supplies instantly turned into emergency response infrastructure.

The conversation comes home to Haines: why he and his wife fell for Southeast Alaska, how fishing changed his idea of living well, and why he keeps saying yes to local boards and volunteer work. We dig into Elder Rock Lighthouse restoration and the push to open it to the public, plus the ongoing effort to keep the Chilkat Center active, from performances to a Steinway-focused concert, all while facing real challenges like travel logistics, film licensing costs, and even finding a piano tuner.

Subscribe for more long-form conversations, share this with someone who loves arts and small-town stories, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show.

Transcript

Welcome And Where To Listen

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Thanks for joining us for this episode of Doc Collection. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please like and subscribe. We're available if you want to watch us on uh YouTube or if you just want to listen to the podcast version on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And each episode goes live on Thursday morning. So I hope you enjoy this episode and we're happy to have you there listening. Welcome to this edition of Doug Has Questions. Today, my guest is Michael Marks, who I basically know as a professional board member and civil servant in Haynes because he seems to be on a ton of boards and always doing stuff in Haynes to help out the community. Welcome, Michael. Thank you, Doug. I'm so honored to be here. Well, we're honored to have you.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

And surrounded by all this great gear.

SPEAKER_02 0:50

All this great gear. We've got sunshine outside. Great day to be in Haynes. Jack is to the right. You just never know what you're going to get. Yeah, you bet. I can make a deal on some of this after the show if you want. I can't wait.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

Yeah. I already got 48 buoys.

SPEAKER_02 1:05

Got 40 buoys. When are we painting the buoys?

SPEAKER_01 1:09

March 15th. March 15th started. May 15th, May 15th, May 15th. I was going to say we missed it. May 15th at the Senior Center from 6 to 9, under the guidance of uh brilliant artist Colleen Adams.

SPEAKER_02 1:23

And so for people that don't know, Michael came in and wanted like a crab or shrimp pot buoy that was a neutral color, and they're going to paint them as a fundraiser for what? For the Haynes Shell of the Museum. For the museum. So you're going to go, it's going to be at the Senior Center May 15th.

SPEAKER_01 1:39

May 15th, 629. And it costs$90 to participate, but you get all the wine you can drink and hors d'oeuvres and snacks, and you get a buoy that's relatively cost good money. Nice buoy. And then we'll have all the art supplies to paint it and maybe some extra things to glue on them and things like that. And you'll leave home with a beautiful buoy you can hang in front of your house or use for fishing.

SPEAKER_02 2:06

And so it's it goes be. I was joking with you guys that you know I always buy them just painted red and white or yellow because then I would that way I don't have to paint them myself. But you guys are doing like decorators. Well we got white ones. You got white ones so people can paint a scene or something like that on it. Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Whatever their heart desires. And we got the idea from another city in the East Coast that's right on the water like Haynes. And they do a lobster pot Christmas tree by building all these lobster pots into a conical shape. And then they decorate it with all these buoys that artists paint. And at and they auction them all off.

SPEAKER_02 2:44

But these aren't going to be auctioned, these are people taking them home and they get to keep them. Right. You paint them, you get to keep them.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Paint them, you get to keep them. And we might do more in the future and come to you and say, hey, we need some more buoys and try it again. But we're doing this as a test case.

SPEAKER_02 3:00

Test case to see what happens.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Get buoyed.

SPEAKER_02 3:04

Are you signed up? I'll be there manning the glue guns. Oh, you're gonna be in charge of glue guns. I'm in charge of the glue guns. Alright. Have you been practicing?

SPEAKER_01 3:12

Well, I always got my glue gun handy. I'll have a thing with the on and off switch so it can get hot and cool and cool and you know, depending on demand. Demand. All right. Well, let's get started. So yeah, I am a board member at the Hain Sheldon Museum, and we're trying this fundraiser to uh raise some money. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:33

I hope it goes well.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

Yeah, no, fundraisers are tough.

SPEAKER_02 3:36

I look forward to seeing pictures of the buoys that you can. Yeah, I can't wait. Yeah, it'd be fun. So let's get started in the Michael Marx story. Absolutely. Let's go.

Queens Childhood And Airport Adventures

SPEAKER_01 3:44

Thinking about my life. That's the great thing about this. I go, well, I better think about my life. He's gonna ask me questions. So at least I've been thinking. You've been thinking? That's good. So where where'd you grow up? Well, I was born in Manhattan and I grew up in Queens. Really? Jackson Heights. Okay. I always thought you were a West Coast guy, but you started in New York City. Started in New York City, and I'm very lucky because I don't have a New York accent that I can really tell. No. Because my father married my mother during World War II. Okay. My father married a war bride in England. So my mother had an English accent. Yeah. And my father had a New York accent. And I tried not to listen to either one, and I got no accent. You got no accent. Practically. So what was that like growing up in New York City? Well, there's no place like New York City, that's for sure. And um So was it an apartment building then that you were in? Apartment building, but it wasn't a huge apartment building. It was only a two-story apartment building. And uh we were in walking distance to LaGuardia Airport. So me and my friends, we would hang out at LaGuardia Airport and um watch the planes take off in labs. Yeah. Absolutely. And the big thing was uh using those binocular things that they have, which you have to put a quarter in. Uh-huh. But in those days we use slugs. You are cheating the system. You were cheating the system back. Well, that's what a New Yorker does. So where do you get the slugs? You make those yourself or I've been thinking about that. I'm going, where do we get all these slugs? Because we had millions of them. I can't remember. A friend of mine must have had a dad who had all these little round things knocked out from electrical boxes or something. But we were just a wash and slugs.

SPEAKER_02 5:40

Yeah. So you'd be going, you got tourists waiting behind you wanting to look at these planes and you got monopolizing the whole dealer. Nobody else ever there ever there looking through those things.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

So we had it all to ourselves.

SPEAKER_02 5:53

So you you guys were just into aviation, or is it just the easiest thing to do for free with your Yeah, it was the easiest thing to do for free, and it was right next door.

SPEAKER_01 6:01

It was a big you know, uh excitement thing to go, let's go to the airport and you know, we sneak in and walk around all the places. You know, that was easy to do back in those days. You can't the security they have today wasn't anywhere close to that back then. So that was what it was. So I was uh living there until um the fifth grade, and at that time I was going to PS2, which is public school two, which was only a few blocks away, also, so I could walk there with my friends every day. And unfortunately, on the way home, we would all put slugs in the different machines on the way home, stuff like that. You know, for nuts or candy or gum and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02 6:46

But um So this was a this this was a refrauding the system, wasn't just at the airport.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

No, it was a whole racket, and I eventually I did get busted as a kid. And I'd how'd they catch you for throwing slugs in one of those things? Well, the owner of the store was knowing that we always were doing it, he ran out and caught us all and held us at the store until our mothers came and picked us up, and that ended my criminal career right there.

Slugs The Hustle And Getting Caught

SPEAKER_02 7:13

That was the end of it. In fourth grade, thank goodness. Fourth grade, mom got involved. Right, that was it. And it was done.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

And then dad, you know, but that same year, a major thing happened that changed my entire life. What was that? Well, if you can imagine a school in Queens, you know, there was no grass or anything like that. The whole playground was just a giant tarmaced place, maybe two acres or something like that, with big chain link fence around the whole place. And when they would let us out for uh basically going out into the yard, yeah, going prison yard or whatever for each yard. That's what it sounds like. But one day we went out and we I saw a whole bunch of my buddies around a circle, and we'd go out there, what's up? And lo and behold, someone climbed the fence that night and drew like a 30-foot nude woman on the tarmac of our playground in flesh-colored chalk and everything. Yeah, and that changed all our lives. We all said, we want to be an artist.

SPEAKER_02 8:21

There you go. Yeah. We could do stuff like this. Yeah, we get to go to face playgrounds with nude women.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Or no, it's chalk art on the ground. Chalk art on the ground. Anyway, so then after that, my folks decided that they needed to move someplace else to get a better life, get me away from slugs and stuff like that. And they moved to a place called Port Washington on Long Island, which was another twenty-five minutes away from Queens, let's say. And it was a town very much like Haynes. It was so more suburbia, suburbs, single single family homes, single family homes, right? We had and my my folk, my dad had bought a house, and that was the big thing. And then I proceeded um going to school out there. So, what what did your parents do for a living? Well, my dad was an accountant. And so then once you guys moved, was he commuting back into the city? He was commuting back into the city. Okay, and basically it was the first and only job he ever had. He graduated high school, went to college, and then went right into the army for World War II. As soon as he got out, he got this job at an accounting firm and he stayed there his entire life. Wow. Until he became a partner and all that kind of stuff. And my mother, you know, did like worked at the telephone company and stuff like that. But she was mostly a housekeeper and things like that, taking care of the kids. Did you have any siblings? I do. I have a sister named Erica, okay, and she still lives on Long Island. Yeah. A little further out in North Fork, it's called. And I mean, it is a beautiful place out there, but it's you know, cars and drive on the Long Island expressway is a nightmare and things like that. So just the two of you? Just the two of us. Just the two of us. She older or younger? She's one year older.

SPEAKER_02 10:13

One year older. Cool. Yeah. So now moving, so you're on you're living on Long Island now.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

Living on Long Island.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

No more slugs, no more slugs. Criminal life in the dad's train ticket, because every day he has to go on the train to New York. So when he's not working or on the weekends, I could use his train pass and go into New York City many times. So that was my whole thing. I would go into New York City and go to the museums, hang out, run around Central Park.

SPEAKER_02 10:45

So what what age are you going into New York City on your own?

SPEAKER_01 10:49

Oh I guess 14, 15, something like that. Okay. Yeah. Because I mean, we were used to riding the subway as kids. Yeah. Because there was if we had a dentist appointment, my folks would take us to the subway, we get on the subway and go to a dentist and stuff like that. But um, yeah, so I was used to riding trains. And um there's no place like New York City, you know, FAO Schwartz, you could walk around, or a restore, and all that great stuff. So that's you know, so I'd go to the art museums and the science museums and hang out and till I got a little older, and then I had an interest in going to uh Fillmore East or something like that to see rock concerts and stuff like that. Okay. So what was it what was your first concert? Oh probably The Grateful Dead, of course. Really? Correct.

SPEAKER_02 11:43

Oh, cool.

SPEAKER_01 11:44

What else?

SPEAKER_02 11:45

Yeah, like what year would that be that you were seeing the dead?

SPEAKER_01 11:48

Oh 68, 69, something like that. Early on. Early on. Well, so I got into the arts and I had talked my folks into letting me hitchhike across the country when I was 16 with a friend of mine, uh-huh, who was also an artist, and we told my folks that we were going to paint our way across America. So we hitchhiked across to California, came back, and then went straight to Woodstock. You were at Woodstock? I was at Woodstock. No way. I still have my Woodstock tickets. I should show you. Yeah. Because by the time we got there, they should be.

SPEAKER_02 12:28

I think you're the only person I met that I know of that was actually at Woodstock.

SPEAKER_01 12:32

Yeah, I got to go with my buddy who I hitchhiked across the country with, and my sister and her boyfriend, who and my grandmother lived right down the block from where Woodstock was. So that was another thing. Really? Told my folks, oh my, I'm gonna stay with grandma's. What can go wrong? What could go wrong? Yeah. And I probably had more food at Woodstock than anybody in the whole world. Because my grandma would stock us up every day we would go there.

SPEAKER_03 13:00

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

And like we'd be sitting in the middle of the crowd, and I'd be opening my backpack, and people would be looking at me like, whoa, baby, where'd you get all that stuff?

SPEAKER_02 13:10

Were you like selling it on the side to make spare money?

SPEAKER_01 13:12

No, it was peace and love. We were giving it giving it away, you know, stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02 13:17

So you're there the whole weekend? Whole weekend. Well, what besides having all the food, right? Like one thing that just keeps popping up that was the coolest thing at Woodstock.

SPEAKER_01 13:29

Well, all the music was just mind-boggling, but uh the biggest thing was my grandmother wanted us to come home every night. And that was really difficult.

SPEAKER_02 13:39

How old were you? 16. You were 16 at Woodstock. Grandma wants you home every night. Right. You're seeing the party going on, you're like, yeah, I don't know if I want to go home.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

Well, it it never stopped. Once it started, it was still 24-7. Right, but then we'd run out of food, we have to run back and get some more food to come back. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, of course, it was the big thing. It rained at the end, and everybody was soaked, and the sleeping bag was weighed 100 pounds, and you know, but it was the greatest experience.

Museums Concerts Hitchhiking And Woodstock

SPEAKER_02 14:08

So it that that's that's just mind-boggling for me that a seminal moment kind of in American history, cultural history, all just the amazing musicians that were there.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

All you do is one of my favorites.

SPEAKER_02 14:23

Yeah, do you still consider yourself just really lucky to have that experience?

SPEAKER_01 14:27

I do. I do. And I keep meaning to sell my tickets for a million dollars, but I keep holding on to them. What can I say? I wish I had the poster, but the poster got torn up and you know, pins holes in it from the wall and all that stuff. Yeah, yeah. Posters usually don't last that long. Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 14:44

That is really cool. Who's your who's your favorite artist that you saw there? I mean, it's kind of hard because there's Of course Jimi Hendrix, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

But everybody was great. That is so cool. That so you know, I would love music.

SPEAKER_02 15:01

At 16, you're at Woodstock. That's gotta be hard to top the rest of your life. And it's any concert you go to, you're like, yeah, well, it wasn't Woodstock.

SPEAKER_01 15:12

I mean, it could be amazing, but well, there's pretty good concerts. We just had a great concert two weeks ago here in Aynes that I worked on with uh this group from France that was fantastic. So I did develop a love of music from that point on.

SPEAKER_02 15:27

Have you have you ever played an instrument, or do you just like to listen?

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Oh, I do just like to listen, but I I did take up the saxophone for a little bit and play it in a band and stuff like that. That was the toughest thing in moving to Haynes, leaving my band buddies behind. But there you go. I thought I'd bring them up to Haynes, but they never came. They could have come with. They could have come, well they could have visited. They can still come happen.

SPEAKER_02 15:49

They can still show up. They can still show up. It's a beautiful place. It's a beautiful place. Uh and we could rent the Chilcat Center. You can rent the Chilcat Center, you can have a gig, rock out, great great acoustics at the Chilcat Center. Oh my gosh. They don't know what they're missing. I don't know. Yeah. Well, I told them all about it. So af after Woodstock at 16, going back to school, are you because you said you developed a passion for the arts, for art and everything. Are you concentrating on that in high school at any level, or was that just a side thing that you were doing at home on your own?

Art School And Moving West

SPEAKER_01 16:22

Well, no, I was concentrating on that in high school. I started taking all the art classes I could take and became good friends with my art teachers and hung out with them maybe after school. They would have extra classes that you could attend and stuff like that. And um and my friends were artists, and some of their dads had been or were artists, like uh working in the advertising world in Manhattan, New York, and stuff like that. And um and then we decided that we were all going to try to be professional artists and go to college as an artist. Go to art school. What what what college did you go to? Well, I went to um well, first off, I did apply to a school in California, which was the school that uh was started by Walt Disney, California Institute of the Arts. So I applied to that when I was still in high school, but then I didn't get accepted. So I of course I went to the next school that accepted me, which happened to be Carnegie Mellon University. And uh that was a great experience, and they had you know a great theater department and a great music department and a great art department and art architecture and all that kind of stuff. And um there was even a guy in the music school who had the same name as me, Michael Marks. And they would get our grades mixed up, and my folks would go, hey, you know, I thought you were going to school for art. So you're taking up the tuber or something like that. That's when I found out there was another guy. There's another guy.

SPEAKER_02 18:04

But um and then What what was that like when you're surrounded by all that artistic talent?

SPEAKER_01 18:13

Well, you have a great time, what can I say? It was, you know, experimenting with different uh art techniques, you know, they had glass blowing, which I didn't take because I heard it cut years off your life, but other things, um, you know, sculpture, painting, ceramics, things like that. And then I took a year off from that school and got a a scholarship to go back to New York to a school in Manhattan. So I had a year in back in New York City to go back home, and that was another great experience. Uh the school was run by the Whitney Museum of American Art, and um they gave you your own little studio in Manhattan with all these other students, and it was in an old bank that had been donated to the city of New York, and we had our studios in the basement of the bank, and the bank even had a bowling alley. Only had two lanes, like the one here, but that was still. Two lanes, two lanes is plenty to bowl on. Yeah, so that was a great experience. Then I had to go back for my last year, and at that time, then I reapplied to the school that I really wanted to go to, was the California Institute of the Arts. And I got accepted at that time, and that's what brought me to California, the West Coast, and that's where I remained until I came to Aynes.

SPEAKER_02 19:36

So when you were going through this, like you said, you were experimenting with all the different art forms. Did you already have an idea what you wanted to do, or were you, hey, let's try this and see if I like sculpting more than painting, or where where were where was your passion at that time?

SPEAKER_01 19:52

Well, I didn't it was anywhere, you know. I was just interested in doing any old thing, but at the same time, you know, everybody was trying to find something that was their own personal expression of visual arts or something like that. So I was doing kind of crazy stuff, which I don't have any examples of today, which are all on slides or something like that. But um, but I got into both painting and sculpture, okay, and um and from there, as I was because at California's the arts I was when I was getting a master's degree, and that was when I was realizing, well, now you know college is coming to an end. Now I have to go out into the real world. And um that's when I started to say to myself, well, maybe you better start trying to practice doing some commercial art. So maybe you can get a job doing that. So I started experimenting with trying to do stuff that looked normal, and um by the time I graduated, I had made a portfolio of normal pictures that I could hopefully show and maybe get a job as a graphic artist.

SPEAKER_02 21:11

So you were looking at the at that time, you were looking at this more what people were gonna commission you to do rather than I'm gonna sit in a studio and I'm gonna come up with these paintings and take them to a gallery and see if they're gonna exhibit everything for me.

SPEAKER_01 21:27

Well, no, I had had shows of art.

SPEAKER_02 21:29

Are you trying to do both?

Commercial Art And Landing Sesame Street

SPEAKER_01 21:31

Well, I had shows of artwork and sculptures and stuff like that, but you know, no one bought anything and it was too weird and all that kind of stuff. And I knew I was never gonna survive on that. So that's when I started secretly trying to do commercial art because my friends found out they'd kill me. So so I put together a portfolio and then went around to a couple of places and started getting um some little jobs. paint illustrations for this, that, or the other. And um and then eventually since my dad worked in Manhattan, you know, I would go home and use his office and then go around to different businesses in Manhattan and try to get jobs. Okay. And then that's how I eventually went to Sesame Street or the Children's Television Workshop and showed my portfolio there and then got hired by Sesame Street to be a graphic artist for them. Okay. And uh that totally changed my life because then I found someone like, oh man, they're gonna pay me to do all this stuff. Yeah. The only problem was I had to draw Bert and Ernie and uh the count and you know all that kind of stuff. Yeah. But over and over and over. Over and over and over again. But it was a great experience and we got to meet Jim Henson and all that kind of stuff. Oh cool. The puppeteers and I wish I was doing that kind of stuff instead of but and after about ten years um I probably got worn out from doing all that stuff and was kind of running out of steam. Yeah. You know, using every trick in the book and every this that and the other until you know I go oh my god you know can't do this anymore.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

And um then I got into uh the next job that an artist might do and that's teaching or to other people something hit me here before you get into teaching you're at Woodstock right then you're working on one of the most iconic television shows for kids ever with Sesame Street working with Jim Henson.

Teaching Kids And Arts In Schools

SPEAKER_01 23:56

You've got like these touch points here on some very significant historic cultural moments in people in our country that is really really cool no I I have to say if I look back I have the world's greatest life and I can't complain about anything at all. So I was just had some great opportunities and uh what can I say so um so my friends at the time we got together and we said hey look let's apply for some grants and and go to a school district and say hey look if you give us this type of funding the state of California will triple that and then we can come in and do art programs or music programs and dance programs in your school so um myself and two or three other friends became artists in residence with the California Arts Council. Uh-huh and then our role there was to um do innovative arts programming in schools which was pretty much elementary schools so that was when I just would take all the things that I had learned while I was going to college and applying it with children and trying to make art exciting to them too and um that lasted for a few years and then I went on to were you mainly in the like you had your hometown and you're in schools there. Were you traveling without throughout the state did you did you guys hire more people how was that program working well we were very lucky um the town that I moved to when I went to college for California was called Newhall and it was kind of in a rural area about 30 miles from Los Angeles and we had a school district another 10 miles up the road called Castaic which was a single school school district and one of my friends I think knew someone there so we approached that school so we applied all that stuff to this particular school one room well I mean one school school district which was K through K through eighth grade and it was such a cool school they even had their own cattle on the school grounds and they would butcher the cattle every now and then for the school lunches for the school lunches they're raising their moose here when they get a roadkill moose they bring it to the school for the kids. And you know there was uh you know horses was into play there and all the kids you know they had and this is 30 miles from LA right 30 miles from LA wow and there was a giant dam right above the school which you know with earthquakes everybody was a if the dam busts you know what do you do? But it never did bust thank goodness so we spent many years there and actually it was three years there and then I just got a a different teaching job and taught at a place called Bel Air Prep School Bel Air Bel Air actually Beverly Hills Prep School Beverly Hills Prep School sorry sorry a very small school with only very wealthy children and that was a great job and then that particular guy who ran that school decided to go big time and he rented a a giant other building and called it Beverly uh no Bel Air Prep School and it was right next to Tower Records on Sunset Strip and um we were really good friends by that time and he said I'm gonna give you the best classroom in this whole school building that was an old Catholic school and it was like on the third floor looking out over Los Angeles and it was the greatest experience there too.

SPEAKER_02 28:07

So how how did that go from doing your own art to teaching was there did you feel there's something missing that because or are you still doing your own artwork on the side while you're teaching yeah I was doing my own artwork on the side and having little exhibits in Los Angeles and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

But you know my art career wasn't really going anywhere because everything was kind of weird but um but yeah it worked out perfectly and um you know so I just took some of the innovative programming that we did at this other school and just applied it to these other schools and became a great thing to tell you the truth they just had their 50th anniversary of that school and over this last summer they called me on the phone I got a call saying hey man are you Michael Marks from Bel Air Prep School I go yeah we're having our 50th anniversary want to invite you to Los Angeles to come to our anniversary I said I can't come but we did a Zoom thing and I saw some of my old students and it was totally insane. Oh that's crazy.

SPEAKER_02 29:12

Yeah so how long were you there then?

Building A City Arts Department

SPEAKER_01 29:15

I must have been there about six years six or seven or eight years something like that. Yeah and then from there I got my dream job which was the town I lived in in which was Newhall was rebelling against the city of Los Angeles and had a referendum to uh you know break away from Los Angeles become its own city and so it took the four towns in our area Newhall Canyon Country Saugas and Valencia and became a a city called the city of Santa Clarita okay and I saw a job opening for a cultural arts coordinator and I got my application in and had some interviews and got the job as the first cultural arts coordinator for the city government in Santa Clarita Santa Clarita.

SPEAKER_02 30:18

So what does a cultural arts coordinator of the city of Santa Clarita do?

Earthquake Response And A Cowboy Festival

First Trips To Haines And Moving North

SPEAKER_01 30:24

Well no one knew so you had to make it up right no one knew no one knew but luckily all my past experience you know Sesame Street or teaching and whatever I mean eventually I did teach at uh USC for two years. So and that was you know that all helped you know get this job. So basically they wanted to have a cultural art program of some sort to help build up the quality of life in the city. Because being a suburb of Los Angeles they thought if we had a really nice city with culture that people would move here and uh live here or businesses would move and set up you know their factories or whatever there and and want to have a place nice safe place to uh raise their family so we began by just doing concerts in the parks the city had you know we had like 10 parks and we would hire performers to play at each park every week and we'd do arts and grass fairs and we had a theater company that was a spin-off from students from our call California Institute of Arts and we would hire them to do Shakespeare in the Parks and things like that and each year it got bigger and bigger and they wanted more and more and you know we started doing blues festivals and marathons and all kinds of things and then eventually our city manager came to me well then we had the earthquake in 94. So by that and by that time we had the city had trained all its employees to be um emergency preparedness workers too as if everybody knew that we were going to have a big earthquake in California. So we've been we were trained and was that was that standard in California that all the city employees and stuff were pretty much trained in that emergency preparedness right so that was pretty much standard and you know so we knew how to do everything how to run a shelter how to do you know CPR everything in the whole world and just before the earthquake I'm sorry if I'm going off on a tangent here just before the earthquake well by that time I had an enormous equipment depot of all our equipment for the arts you know we had sound gear we had gazillions of canopy tins and tables and chairs and garbage cans and toilet paper because I had to stock the parks with toilet paper for the every concerts and water and everything and they were designed reconfiguring our warehouse for the city and I had to move out so and actually my office was in a city park which was a beautiful park like 17 acres and it used to be part of an old cattle ranch so it had some beautiful trees all lined up in great patterns. Anyway so I got to move all my equipment from there to uh containers like you have outside here big uh roll-off containers at my park and then like three weeks later the earthquake happens and I'm supposed to report to my park and everybody in the neighborhood all comes to the park because they're afraid to be in their homes and I'm sitting there going oh my god well I I got everything here. I got canopies and I got chairs so and I you know I had a team of workers that you know worked for me so we I said hey guys let's set up everything up because basically we had to set up um portable toilets outside for everybody and places for them to get out of the sun and you know give them water and set up tables and chairs in any way anyway so I turned my whole park into this great uh rescue zone and um and we had a swimming pool there too. So you know eventually we used the water from the swimming pool to flush the toilets and things like that and kept the thing going and then we eventually put up you know giant sheets of plastic on you know like tents for everybody and next thing you know we're getting deliveries of food everywhere and we're delivering food to the people because basically everybody just camped out in our park and you know they'd come up to the building and get toothbrushes and combs and shampoo and soap and it was to the point where um no one wanted to leave. You were running wanted to leave yeah and um at that point my our city manager had this goal that he hadn't told anybody about that he wanted to do a cowboy festival. So he had scheduled himself to go to this giant cowboy festival to learn about cowboy music and stuff like that. So at the tail end of the earthquake he comes up to me and he goes I can't leave during the earthquake so I'm gonna send you in my place to this cowboy festival because that's gonna be your next project you're gonna be running a cowboy I want a cowboy festival in my town. Yeah and I said well you got to be crazy cowboy festival and in those days you could take an airplane ticket with someone else's name on it and still go to the airport and get on the plane and um so actually I took my my wife with me too we went to a place called Elko Nevada and uh they have the National Cowboy Festival and um I had a whole list of people I was supposed to meet and talk to and sign up and because my uh my boss in my department had already been cooking up this cowboy festival and um so I had all these musicians to talk to and tried to act like a cowboy. Anyway so so I returned from this festival and next thing we know we're supposed to do a cowboy festival. So I spent 10 years after that doing a cowboy festival if you can believe it. And we were lucky enough because in our town we had a place called Melody Ranch which used to be owned by Gene Awtry where he filmed all his cowboy movies. And it was I hadn't I didn't even know it was in our town but it was only a few blocks from where I lived and um so is that where you had the festival so yeah I I I was sent to to them to uh rent the place and walk around and see how we can turn this cowboy town into a festival grounds and then uh each year the the owners of the ranch got were doing so many movies they started building more sets and stages and eventually we had a thousand seat theater that we'd use at this movie ranch. Okay and um so it sounds like the city manager's idea paid off that a lot of people started coming for this it did pay off it was the Santa Crita Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival okay it was called and the whole idea was that they wanted to have regional events to bring people to our community which you know had no beach had nothing to speak of but if we put on a great event that people would come here and stay in our hotels go to our restaurants and eat food kind of like your uh father with his Eagle Festival and it was during that time that um me and my wife would beat the heat in California and come to Alaska to cool off and drive around we'd fly into Anchorage and take rent a car and drive all around stuff like that and then during right after 9-11 my wife said hey look and we were getting Alaska magazine and stuff like that and you know I'd see an ad for Bell Seafood and Hotel Housing Land and you know it didn't register in my mind but my wife said hey we could take this ferry from Bellingham to a place called Haynes that we've seen in the magazine and we could stay at this hotel called Hotel Housing Land this historic hotel and I said fine let's set it up and um that's how we first came to Haynes.

SPEAKER_02 39:20

And what that so that was 2002?

SPEAKER_01 39:23

2002 right okay and um we didn't know anything and then Jeff from the Hotel Hustling you know we'll all pick you up at the ferry terminal and you know we're waiting there and everybody disappears with their cars and we're going where is this guy? But then he shows up at the end takes us there and you know he had the world's greatest restaurant. Oh that's fabulous and we walked around the fort and saw all those interpretive signs that yellow with the history and went to the AIA and saw them carving totem bowls. We were only here like three days and we rented a car from Jeff and then we never even went down Mud Bay Road we were so chicken. We just you know stayed in the Haynes area but we stopped into the American Bald Eagle Foundation and there was no cruise ship that day and you know we paid our admission and walked in and there was a girl and there was your father and I can't remember who the girl was but she was here this guy Dave we'll take you around so he took us around and you know I saw these beautiful murals on the wall and the whales hanging from the ceiling and all the stuffed animals like we have right here and then took us into the diorama room and saw all the fish and the animals and took pictures standing next to a moose and all that stuff and then of course your dad said you gotta come back in November and I said why sounds cold because well you gotta come to our Eagle festival I said oh man that's crazy man I don't never do that come back in November and then he'd show us a video you know the snow on the river and everybody in big jackets and you know we're from California you know you don't even own a big jacket you know what I mean but two years later it landed on my birthday and my wife goes hey you know when we go there on your birthday what the hell you know we we met we know Jeff from staying there for a couple days and we called Jeff and he goes yeah I'll be open during this festival and then we proceeded to mail Jeff millions of cardboard boxes filled with food and boots and jackets and everything I mean tarps I'm thinking I go honey what do you do man you sit on a in the snow for four hours look at birds what I had no idea what to expect but um we came and we had the greatest time in the world and snowed uh you know the whole thing and and um you know we did you bring a camera of course okay I think we even had a camera that had the little printer that you could print little postcards oh really send them to your friends and stuff like that so we'd get there at home at night and print up all the pictures and mail them off and stuff like that but we'd be walking from the Hotel Halsingland down to the Eagle Foundation every day and some guy would come by and go hey you need a ride and we go sure man we'd jump in and it was Jim Shook. Okay and that's how we met Jim Shook and then he picked us up a million times we became lifelong buddies and then every year that and that was we came every year since then uh and we'd go on these uh the trips with at that time um uh Dan Eagolf is running the tours yeah and you know you spend eight hours a day with Dan Eagolf you know and all his guys and they'd be showing you pictures of um destroyed villages or the what Klukwan looked like or John Muir coming to Klukwan and telling all I'm going I had no idea I had no idea about all this stuff and and then the amazing thing about the Klingit art and all that stuff and eventually after spending all this time with all these tour guys I said guys you should you should move here and we were getting close to retiring and that's when my wife said hey man let's let's move to Haynes let's get away from the smog let's get away from the sun let's get away from the heat so getting away from the sun and the heat I don't know I can understand getting rid of the smog getting away from the smog but sun and the heat's kind of nice once in a while well when you live in California man it's sunny every day every day every day you know and it gets hotter than the heck you know yeah getting hotter right so how how many years have you been coming up to the festival before your wife's like hey why don't we move to Haynes well let's see 2002 It was the first time. Well, no, first we came here in the summer. Was the first festival. Yep. 2009 we moved here.

SPEAKER_02 44:12

It didn't take long time. During that during that time you came the one the first time you came in the summer? First time we came in the summer. Summer? And then you came like four times in the winter. Four times in the winter for a week at a time? Yeah, a week at a time. And then you're like, oh heck yeah, we're setting us up, we're moving.

SPEAKER_01 44:28

Well, I would say by 2007, which is only three years, we said, oh, we said, hey man, let's just come to Haynes in the summertime too. Okay. Check it out. And stay a little longer. And um I actually purchased two kayaks and had them shipped up to Haynes.

SPEAKER_02 44:48

What was the freight like on that?

SPEAKER_01 44:51

I don't know, but it came. All I know is I went to AML and I go, I'm here to pick up two kayaks and throw their over there. And they were, you know, all wrapped up in cardboard and strips of wood and whatever. And I go, Oh, we rented a car from Jeff and put it on the roof. And we rented a space from Lee Hine Miller to put the kayaks in the um barracks building. You still have them? Yeah. All right. Except one broke in half this winter with the big snow. I told you to put them in the garage. Anyway. But um yeah, so we would keep our kayaks there. So we would, I guess from 2007, 2008, whatever we were coming up. Coming up in the summer as well. And you know, we were looking at houses and stuff like that. You know, we met Pam Long and she would take us around and things like that.

SPEAKER_02 45:41

Because that that is one of those things my dad would also say is that there's a vi there's that Alaska virus that when you get here and you get bit by that, you're always you're gonna come back.

SPEAKER_01 45:50

Right.

SPEAKER_02 45:50

Well, of course and it got you really bad. Well, he because you not only did you come back, you moved here.

SPEAKER_01 45:56

Well, he sold me my first fishing pole. Oh my god, he sold me my first shrimp pot and crab pot. What can I say? He didn't. Well, he was here in the store at the time, I'm sure. No.

SPEAKER_02 46:09

Well, occasionally, but he was yeah, by by 2000, he wasn't helping people in the store. He'd be here, he'd be here to check and make sure I was doing my job.

SPEAKER_01 46:17

But tell you the truth, after the first um Eagle Festival, me and him stayed in touch. Yep. He would call me at work and we would talk about stuff and things like that. But um and at one point we were actually gonna do a project where we would um we were gonna have artists make plastic eagles and then have artists in town paint these eagles and put the eagles all over Haynes. Oh, okay. Never happened. Never happened. Never happened. By that time I had seen in a magazine a plastic eagle that was already painted, and I think, well, it can't beat that. It's already done. It's already done. Yeah. But I still have that plastic eagle hanging at our house.

SPEAKER_02 46:58

Yeah. So you retire at this time you're 10 years into being cultural arts director.

SPEAKER_01 47:06

Obviously, by that time of 18 years in. 18 years in years in. For cultural arts. By that time it was our cultural arts supervisor.

SPEAKER_02 47:14

So that's that program paid off for them then. It sounds like they're that it be it did become a cultural center in that area.

SPEAKER_01 47:22

Well, it did become a cultural center because eventually, you know, we branched out into um public art, you know, getting artists to paint murals around town and painting trash cans and bigger festivals, and it just became huge where we had you know maybe 10 or 15 people in the whole department of cultural arts. Are you proud of that? Yeah, no, I'm very proud.

SPEAKER_02 47:50

I was gonna say you should be that you're you're kind of the first hire for that, and you build this big department and you see the success that you had of bringing not only bringing the arts there, but obviously, if people aren't coming to these, it's not gonna come. So people had to come, and uh to keep it growing like that, that's really cool.

SPEAKER_01 48:09

And we had to sell tickets for the shows and things like that. No, it was great. And then just as I was retiring, we got involved with the Tour of California, which was the California like Tour to Force bike race. Okay, which came through different communities and stuff like that. So I got to work on that for two years before I retired. But by that time, I mean the job was very demanding, if you can believe it. I mean, we had our own trucks and you know, moving equipment all the time.

SPEAKER_02 48:37

For that amount of activity, it would seem yeah, it would have to be very demanding. Yeah, you were there's a lot of yes hot.

SPEAKER_01 48:43

You had a 110 degrees stuff.

SPEAKER_02 48:44

You put your fingers in a lot of pots on there trying to keep everything going.

SPEAKER_01 48:48

Right, right. And and by that time I was also in charge of permits for special events, which doesn't sound like a big deal, but basically, everybody who wanted to do something in our community, they had to come and get a permit, and then we'd had to review all their activities, how many toilets they were gonna have, and how long they were lasting, and you know, all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_02 49:10

And you had to do those? Yeah, by the end, I'm really yeah, yeah, yeah. That would that would seem to me like that would be like the planning department or land use and stuff, instead of like, hey, we not only do we want you to coordinate and bring all these people to town, right? But if somebody's got their own event, you need to make sure all that's up to you.

SPEAKER_01 49:30

Right. Well, at first I wasn't too excited about it, but what it got me to do was by that time I was working with our I had to work very closely with our local police department and the fire department and things like that. So I had and they all every all these different departments had to sign off on someone else's project. So it was easy for me to go to the city engineer, the police chief, the fire chief, all that kind of stuff, and get everybody's things approved.

SPEAKER_02 50:00

And since I knew how to run things, I knew what they needed to be safe, and uh so it probably ended up being easier for the city and for the people applying for the permits to have you involved in that process.

SPEAKER_01 50:14

Right, right. And um and through that I became because I was also having to do permits for all our the city projects, even though they were the city. I still had to get approval from all the other entities to do something or whatever, because especially at this movie ranch, we you know we would come into a big sound stage and I'd we'd have to rig up new lighting and and theater uh seating and it all had to be approved for fire marshals and stuff like that. So it wasn't that bad. But through there I became really good friends with our city engineer and I told him, hey dude, I'm moving to Alaska. You know, what what do I do? And he goes, Oh man, I you know, I'm like, well, I gotta what we're gonna try to do is we're gonna buy try and buy a piece of property and and build a house of some sort in Alaska. And he goes, Oh man, you gotta hire an architect to help you. And he gave us the whole routine of you know looking up architects in Alaska, and you know, then you mail them you know what you want to do, and then they'll send you proposals and stuff like that. So that really helped uh you know plan our way to moving here in Haynes. So I can't thank him enough for that. And um there you go.

SPEAKER_02 51:34

So now you're now we're living in Haynes. You moved to Haynes, you're retired.

SPEAKER_01 51:39

I'm retired, but you're not retired too. But you're not really what what did your wife do for my wife was a special ed teacher, and she spent 30 years with the Los Angeles Unified School District. Okay. So we both had great retirement pensions. You know, here it was. I started as an artist, and here it is. I got a retirement program. I'm thinking, my gosh, what a lucky guy. And um, and then from the people that we met from going to the Eagle Festival, we became friends with some of them, and one day they took me out fishing, and we caught our first salmon and took it home and ate it that night, and I was going, oh my god, this is the greatest thing in the whole world. And that fresh makes a difference, doesn't it? Oh my well, I couldn't believe it even happened. And then that led to purchasing a boat with two other friends, which led to the boat sinking one day at uh Letnikov, and the other guys going, I'm out of this boat. It's always yours, but pay us back for our share, and it's only yours. Yeah. And then for me to get together with some other people and become learn the great art of fishing. Shrimping, crabbing, halibut fishing, salmon fishing. And I had some a salmon dinner just before I came here. Good. So that was the biggest life-changing thing in the world.

SPEAKER_02 53:11

It's amazing to be able to go out and get your own food, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 53:14

It sure is, and that's all your dad ever talked about, and that's what encouraged us to finally move here.

SPEAKER_02 53:19

Yeah. So what what season in Haynes now do you enjoy the most? Is it uh is it well for most of us it's the summertime just because you got so much sunlight and there's so many things to do. But is it putting up the going out there, collecting, getting the getting the seafood, putting that up, or is it just kind of chilling in the wintertime? And I think chilling in the wintertime is the best start.

SPEAKER_01 53:43

Because you know, by that time, by the end by the time winter comes, it's like going, oh my god, I gotta go fishing again. You know, my fishing buddies are like crazy. Oh, we gotta go now, we gotta go now, we gotta go again, okay, we can't stop now. So yeah, by the time winter comes, it's like okay, things quiet down.

SPEAKER_02 54:04

And I don't I don't know if I know except for shoveling snow.

SPEAKER_01 54:09

That's the scept for shoveling snow.

Fishing Life And Saying Yes To Boards

SPEAKER_02 54:11

Yeah, that is the downfall of winter. So, but when once you got to Haynes, you you didn't really retire because you're involved, like we said before, with uh with the Sheldon Museum. Are you still on the board of the American Bald Eagle Foundation?

Saving Elder Rock Lighthouse For Visitors

SPEAKER_01 54:23

I'm still on the board of the American Football Eagle Foundation. Any others? Yeah, so I'm on the board of the American Football Eagle Foundation Hammer Museum. Hammer Museum, which I'm very proud that we just got a brand new hammer last year. Your hammer looks great. Hammer looks great, and so well I'm very proud of the fact that when I was a board member at the Eagle Foundation, your dad wanted to do those two po totem poles in front of the foundation, and I worked with him and we he hired Jim Heaton, and he sat outside for two summers carving it while people watched and came inside, and then I'm also a board member at the um uh so that's three, um Eld Rock Lighthouse. Okay, where that was like you thought, man, if that ain't the biggest joke in the world, who's ever gonna fix up this lighthouse? But we got it going. Yeah, and we're opening this summer for the first time in 120 years to the public. It started June 1st, 1906, and on June 1st, 2026, we're open to the public, and we have parts of the building rented out.

SPEAKER_02 55:31

And um so is that gonna be uh have you arranged for transportation down there for them in a boat, or do they have to take their own boat down there? How's that how's it because people don't know Elder Rock lighthouse is what? 17 miles south.

SPEAKER_01 55:46

17 miles south, 70 disastrous miles away.

SPEAKER_02 55:50

Depending on the weather, it can get it's usually the roughest part of the canal is right where Elder Rock lighthouse is.

unknown 55:56

Right.

SPEAKER_01 55:57

Well, they have two options. They can get their own transportation, you know, a helicopter. We still use the helicopter pad there, or get their own water taxi from wherever. But we've just we're working on a situation now with a tour company that'll be taking tours out there a couple days a week.

SPEAKER_02 56:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 56:16

And uh the boat can take 26 people and they'll like leave at nine o'clock and come back at three o'clock, and they'll half the group will go into the lighthouse where the other half of the group walks around and gets a tour, and then they'll switch and then they come back.

SPEAKER_02 56:32

And so weather permitting.

SPEAKER_01 56:34

And on the way back.

SPEAKER_02 56:35

We hope they're not stuck there very often. On the way back, they'll stop at the Sea Line Rock and so with renting it out, you'll rent it out on the days you're not having tours, I'm guessing, because you're not gonna really go.

SPEAKER_01 56:47

No, it's rented out even on the days of the tour. Even on the days of the tours. Right.

SPEAKER_02 56:50

So you can go down there and stay for a couple days if you want to and live the lighthouse life. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 56:55

Or we have a thing called the Volunteer Light Keeper Program. Or it's actually the Volunteer Keeper Program, uh-huh. Where you sign up for a week or two and you have your own quarters, and then we put you to work while you're there. Doing what? Painting, mowing the lawn, weeding. If you're trained for asbestos abatement and that kind of stuff, you can do that type of work.

SPEAKER_02 57:23

Okay. So what what condition is the lighthouse in now? How how much of that is it? Is it a hundred percent of the rooms and stuff you can go into, or is there some that still needs work?

SPEAKER_01 57:34

97% of the lighthouses as bestis and lead abated. Okay. And the only places that we haven't hit really are like maybe in the attic, stuff like that, and maybe one room that we're saving for the last or something like that. But um, we've made amazing progress through all the incredible volunteers who've spent time out there.

SPEAKER_02 57:58

And how how long has that process been going on? That because it it you guys have been working on this for a few years now to get this right.

SPEAKER_01 58:04

Well, we started at the Sheldon Museum when I first moved here, like well, I moved here like 17 years ago, so about 15 years ago I became a board member at the Sheldon Museum, and that's when we started a committee to save the lighthouse. And we would go out there and take pictures and try to do stuff and maybe paint stuff, but it was all not uh condoned at that point in time. And um eventually, and we were at all the time we've been contacting the Coast Guard to get a lease on it because that's how uh we found out that it was available to lease. It was on the market for leasing, and then the Coast Guard took it off. So six years ago, we got our lease from the lighthouse from the Coast Guard for five years, and now we're on the first year of the second five-year lease. And we have four five-year leases for 20 years, and we're hoping at some point in that time the Coast Guard is gonna sell us Elder Rock for a dollar, maybe, or something like that. And then we'd be we would own the place, and then it would make it even easier to get grants because right now it's a little bit difficult to get certain grants because it's owned by the United States Coast Guard.

SPEAKER_02 59:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 59:30

It's federal property and things like that. But the main thing is by fixing up the lighthouse so it's suitable for the public to go to, and now being able to have bring the public to the lighthouse, the Coast Guard is in a position where they now need to perform their duties, which is there is some toxic soil there left over from fuel leaks and things like that that they're supposed to clean up. Yeah, and then that then they would be able to convey the property to Elder Rock Lighthouse Preservation Association.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:06

I doubt that cleanup's gonna happen anytime soon.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:09

Well, they're talking about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:10

They're talking and they they they they talk about a lot of things.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:14

They took a long time before they actually well, hopefully the Coast Guard doesn't see this, but basically, apparently it's on their schedule. Good.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:22

It's on their schedule and well, actually, I I should I should rephrase that because it's probably a small enough, it's you don't there's not a huge acreage down there. I just I just think of the tank farm and how polluted that is, and the army's doing next to nothing to do anything to remediate that. Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:40

The tank all the boulders away.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:42

Yeah, they're not gonna do anything there, picking off they're just taking some topsoil, some topsoil off the top of it. So it's probably an easier project that somebody's looking at, hey, we can finish something.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:52

Right.

unknown 1:00:52

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:52

So there's an incentive there. This is an easy one to knock off the list.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:57

And I'm also on the foundation for the Chilcat Center.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:00

Hang on a second, let's let's stick with the lighthouse for a little longer. Okay, that's no longer an operating lighthouse, correct? No, it's an operating light. Or the Cheltens. The original lens. The original lens. And now it's automated.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:14

Now it's automated, and if you saw what it looked like, you wouldn't believe that it even works. But it's just a little thing like this with a couple of LED bulbs, but it you know it does this thing, throwing out 15 miles or whatever the specifications are.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:28

I guess looking at that and looking at the lenses, the original lenses down at the big difference in technology.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:34

Big difference, and John Carlson was just telling me how he got the job to go down to Juno to take apart the lens, put it in his truck, and take it to the Sheldon Museum when they transferred the lens to the Sheldon Museum.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:47

Really? He brought that back from Juno, huh?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:49

He brought it back in his car on wrapped up in old winter jackets. Jackets? And he told me that Helen Alton was working at the Douglas Museum at the time as an intern or something like that. He dealt with her.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:06

Dealt with her, and then she ended up being the director at the Sheldon Museum. Right. Much later. Following the lens around.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:11

Right. And then John got the design uh the job to make the casing for it, and the rest is history.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:19

So on the tours, is that just leaving out of Hanes or is it coming out of Skagway too?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:24

It's leaving out of Hanes only, as far as I know. Well, it might come from Skagway. Well, it originates in Skagway, so I guess it might have some passages from Skagway. It hasn't happened yet, so I don't know all the details.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:34

Okay. But the the hope is for this summer you'd be going to be able to take a tour.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:39

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:40

And if a person wants to, if a person wants to donate to that, or if a person wants to find out on getting a tour, if they're coming to Haynes and they're listening to this, where do they go for information?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:52

They go to elderrocklighthouse.org and they go to book a tour. Book a tour. They've got a spot on the website. We already have a spot on the website for that. And we got an ad coming out in the uh visitor's guide this year, four-page ad about Elder Rock and how to how to become a volunteer lightkeeper, how to become a member, how to take this tour. So we can't wait.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:17

And as a matter of fact, we're everybody that comes on a cruise ship sees Eldered Rock. Unless they're I mean it's it's one of the iconic things from Juneau to Haynes, it's one of the iconic scenery things that everybody looks at. This is just a beautiful lighthouse sitting out there, the mountains behind it. It's there's a ton of stunning fake pictures of it all over the place. And so I think it's cool that people are actually going to be able to go on the island now.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:42

Absolutely. Well, we're so impressed, and part of my job up till now was we have an Elder Rock stamp, and if you take a picture of Elded Rock Lighthouse and mail it to us with$2, I send you a post a stamp of Elded Rock Lighthouse for your lighthouse book. We have a lighthouse like passport book. Oh, really? Right. So all these people are sending me these pictures. Here's my two dollars. And you know, stamp it and mail it off to them.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:17

Oh, so there's that I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there's there's people that are trying to see every lighthouse.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:23

Right. No. They want to go because they're cool as heck. They're cool as heck. Well, I think one of our first tours out there is uh gonna be a group from the United States Lighthouse Society that are coming to Alaska and they're taking they're renting the boat for this tour. Of course. Yeah. And the United States Lighthouse Society helped us tremendously when we were getting formed. We didn't know what to do, and the guy who was the director there helped us give us some tips to get where we are today. So there you go. So from that historical thing, go ahead. Right. So and then an Elder Lock Lighthouse gets two free spots on the back of the boat to send our volunteer lightkeepers back and forth. Okay. So our goal this summer is to have nonstop lightkeepers, you know, continually painting and cutting and cleaning and whatever and being having regular transportation. Whereas before we were using a boat from our um host, one of our uh hosts, which is the um Marine Exchange of Alaska that has a landing craft, and up till now we've used that boat to get people back and forth and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:36

So who's who's running the taxi for you, the tours?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:41

Well, at this time I'm not allowed to say. Okay, that's all right. Sorry. Until it's published. Until it's published, that's fine. But I I understand confidentiality. But the the other boards I'm on is the foundation for the Chilquette Center.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:55

Yeah, so you're going from one historical landmark to another.

Chilkat Center Projects And The Steinway

SPEAKER_01 1:05:58

Right, to another. Basically, when we moved here, my wife was in the play Oklahoma. Yeah. And that's how we found how cool the building is and the stage and the theater. And after that, you know, I had already known Lee Heinmiller from renting his space rock kayaks, and he was the head sound guy there. So I started helping him. And you know, since I did festivals and things like that, you know, I'd hired a sound guy, so I knew a little bit about it. So I worked under Lee Heinmiller for a billion years until he had other interests. So now my wife and I through this foundation of Chilcat Center help, you know, put on different plays or performances with you know Todd Sebens, or we also helped the Arts Council with their concerts and things like that. And um and we are doing a Steinway concert coming up on Mother's Day at the Chilcat Center, and we're getting local pianists to perform on the Steinway. And we were just there yesterday with a reporter from the Chilcat Valley News, and she goes, Oh man, we gotta find the serial numbers on the Steinway because she wanted to take pictures of the Steinway, and we keep it in a super box. I'm not sure if you've seen the box yet. And I took pictures of the serial numbers, and I you know did the other stuff, and at the end of the day, I looked it up and I go, Holy cow, this Steinway was made in 1975. Wow. It's 51 years old.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:41

I'm trying to remember when did when did it get here? I remember it was a big deal when the Steinway got here for the Chilcat Center, but I don't remember the year.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:48

I didn't hear my paperwork to be completely accurate on that, but apparently I have it correct. And in just the past three or four weeks, Annette Smith has said, Oh, well, we have a second grand piano at the Chilcat Center. And I said, Really? I mean, I've seen been all over the place. I haven't seen it. You've seen it? Anyway, so I was talking to people, going, Hey, we got a second Steinway. I don't know where the heck it is or whatever, but we're gonna find it here. And I mentioned it to Tom Haywood, and he goes, Oh my god. Twenty years ago they came to school and blindfolded me on my birthday and took me to the Chilcat Center. I had no idea where we were. And they took me into the scene shop where this piano was and they did a concert for me. You were there? No, anyway. And he goes, That's when I sort of heard that we had this piano. And I go, Wow, where is it? And we finally found a box-like thing in the scene shop, and we locked up, so we cut the lock off. I opened the door, and there was this grand piano, which happened to be apparently Mimi Gregg's piano she had in her house. Yeah. That they got from Whitehorse, and then eventually she donated to the Chilcat Center, and that was the grand piano that this famous composer, musician was playing for a concert a gazillion years ago. And after the concert, he went up to Mimi and said, You need a Steinway. And I got one, and I'm gonna send it to you. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:23

And that's how it's and he shipped a Steinway to the Chilcat Center, which you could only I remember there's I I vaguely like I said, I vaguely remember the fact that they got the Steinway and it was a big deal. I couldn't remember the I didn't remember the rest of it, but cool.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:39

Yeah, so I mean I couldn't even believe that you could go on Steinway website and type in the take in the serious number and find out when it was made. Right. And um and then you start finding it's 51 years old, and then I go, wow, how long does a piano last? You know? Oh well, about 50 to 100 years, maybe, you know, but you might have to have it reconditioned, but it has to be done at the Steinway factory in New York City. So I might be taking a Steinway back to New York City. Oh, skip. But anyway, we have this concert on Mother's Day at 4 p.m., and we have some great musicians and haines that are gonna play on the Steinway. And you know, some might have an accompanied on a flute or a violin or something like that. But we're featuring the Steinway, and it all came about because um I also work on the school concerts when the school does their concerts at Chuka Sun. Every time the Steinway is sitting out, everybody has to run up and play it. It's just this magnet. Yeah. And so I said, let's let people finally get a shot at it. Yeah. So a couple days before, you know, once you can contact uh us up until April 15th, we're taking people who are interested in putting together a solo piece or a you can even have two grand pianos and we'll put together the show and then we'll have rehearsals. We'll give them time to rehearse in the Chilcat Center by themselves on the piano, and then we'll have this concert. And in the meantime, we're trying to get a piano tuner to come to Haynes to tune the Steinway and the new grand piano. Oh, the old grand piano we found, and like the school piano and the library piano and things like that. And that is the biggest challenge in the world because no one wants to come to Haynes to tune a piano.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:23

Where's the closest piano tuner?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:26

Juneau. But we have a guy who's interested in case he's listening. His name is Keith Giles, and we hope he comes. And he runs a music store in Juneau called Alaska One Music. And um he's interested, he's he's he's getting kind of serious. And um, but you know, I talked to the last piano tuner who retired and then found out things like why you can never get a piano tuner in the summertime to come to Haynes because you figured, hey, come in the summertime. Yeah, everybody in Juneau is tuning pianos on cruise ships all summer long. Oh it's cheaper to get your piano tuned in summer in Juneau than anywhere else. Because it's easier. I don't know what it is. That's so they every boat has got like eight to ten pianos, and they're going on and tune them, and they go on and tune them, it takes a whole day, and oh there you go. Anyway, so we hope to have this piano tuner here. And um there you go.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:24

So with your with your history and work, your work history of doing these uh cultural events and everything, I've always I I understand why, because of our location. It's tough to get people here from out of town, but it always seemed to me like the Chilcat Center is a vastly underused resource that we have in the community. You're on the board, I'm sure you're doing you don't want a full-time job of being a cultural the cultural arts programmer for the borough of Haynes. Ideas, I mean, you got like you said, you've got Lin Canal player community players that do a great job putting on plays and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:05

Uh end of April.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:06

You got the Arts Conference. You got the Arts Confluence that's putting on concerts and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:11

Arts Council Council. Yeah, Arts Council.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:13

Doing doing different things. Arts Council.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:16

But I used to be on the Arts Confluence for three years as the president there, and that's when we um Carol Tyman got that giant grant, and that's when we did the the new interpretive signs in Fort Seward. And that to me was like a lifelong project because I remember when I first came to Haynes in 2002 and walked around the parade grounds and looked at all these yellow interpretive signs and going, my god, this is so cool, and it's they look like in 2002 they looked like they'd been there for 50 years already. And even today they still look like they've been there a hundred years. To be able to be involved with the project to bring new interpretive signs. Uh-huh. That was a true special time.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:59

So, how how do we get more people to use the Chilcat Center? How do we get more people? Well, what what more activities?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:05

We can only have so many concerts, I understand that, but well, I'm not sure if you saw the tree that's on theater drive that just got chopped up this last week. No. Right. Cut down a tree? Well, it's on theater drive and it was breaking apart and happened to be because I also have a home on theater on Sopsitz Alley. So the borough, you know, came and cut it up, and while the guys were chopping it up, they go to me, how come we don't have a weekly film series at the Jill Cat Center? So I can take my folks to it. I go, Well, I know people are showing films and whatever. So this week I called film companies to rent films, but it costs like$350 to$4.50 to rent a film legally and to legally advertise it. And that's even So that's that's the cut.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:52

That's gonna be that's gonna be tough to get a payback on that.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:56

Tough to get payback on it. Or the other thing is if it's or 50% of the take, whichever's more. Okay. So it's it's a dilemma to show movies there unless you do it.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:10

But uh your your illegal career ended in fourth grade when you moved out to Warren Island. So we cut that off. So we're gonna do anything. We're gonna do it illegally now. Somebody else got to be involved.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:20

Right, right, right, right. Because we want to show some of the things. Michael Marks is on the straight narrow here.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:24

No more slugs in the binoculars. That's why we're so thankful for the arts council to bring in all these performers that they bring in, you know, who come to tour in Alaska and have to deal with that insanity of like, oh my god, is the ferry gonna get here today? Can they fly in? How can they get home? On this last concert, the guy had this incredible old instrument, you know, that was designed in the 12th century or whatever, and he was in some towers 35 below zero, and it like did numbers on his instrument. So, but I have met some of performers that I've worked with in the past at the Chilcat Center. Really?

SPEAKER_02 1:16:06

The ones that were down in California, they've come up here.

Film Nights Costs And Access Challenges

SPEAKER_01 1:16:08

Well, because they brought up a group called the Hot Club of Cowtown, which I had hired for our cowboy festival a couple times, and um some other group I can't remember right now, but um so we're trying to use it as much as we can. And um if you look at the rental schedule, people are renting the lobby out the window and showing their films in there because it's less expensive. It does cost$350 to rent the theater. Yeah. So that when you spend$350 for the rental and then$450 for the movie, it's tough unless we can get to the borough to lower the prices and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:49

But we're trying to do more stuff there, believe me.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:50

The the other the other part of that is there's so much deferred maintenance in that building that that's uh Well, it's looking good.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:58

It looks it looks great, but there's we gotta thank Dave Long for all the time.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:02

Dave and Ed do a great job putting band-aids on stuff and keeping things going. Great job. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:08

So there you go. We're trying to use it as much as we can.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:12

Yeah. I just I just didn't know if you had any magic secret that you've just been holding off on. I'm gonna wait. I I could have been doing this for the last 17 years, but I'm gonna wait until I'm here 20 years to tell them the trick to generating a ton of revenue after the city.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:26

You could bring the grateful dead here, but they're not a band anymore or something like that, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:31

I always wondered if a person had an inn with a big band, yeah, even something and just like, hey, do you guys want to come here and just do a fun cut? Like during the fair. Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:43

How much if you had even somebody that was- The problem is by that time the set the Chilcat Center is like a hundred degrees inside there during the when it gets.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:51

Yeah, whether it's the Chilcat Center, where it's at the fairgrounds, whatever. I'm just wondering if it was different at a couple steps higher than usually that they're coming here. That's a name brand that people are like, oh, I remember listening to them one in the 80s or early 90s or something. Country rock, pop, whatever. I'm just wondering how many people from Juno or Whitehorse would be like, oh heck yeah, we're coming for that.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:18

Right. Well, we've talked about that. I mean, at one time I did bring up one of my friends who's a cowboy performer Sourdough Slim. And but those people don't realize what it's like coming to Haynes, you know. Yeah, they have to overnight in Juneau, and then if you get to Haynes, you've got to take the ferry. And if you don't take the ferry, I mean at that time he came and he had to get a flight to go to another festival, and no one would fly. And we went to Sam Smith and said, Dude, man, can you fire up your plane and take him out of here so he can make his gig? So it's just a rough spot to bring people, you know. If they have to leave the next day, if they have to leave the next day. Yeah, no, it's no mind coming for a week, then that's okay. But to plan that out. Right, right, right, right.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:06

Yeah, I've I've I've I've thought about that often. What it would be like to try and get what what what kind of name recognition do you have to have like Haynes full out?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:16

Bring some great bands up, but then it's like, oh my god, then you gotta entertain them and all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:21

Well, just the just the cost, just the cost getting them here, right? Just the cost of getting them here. The cost of getting them here and everything else. How much so you got you got your bag of secrets?

Inflatable Sculpture And Big Public Art

SPEAKER_01 1:19:30

I got some bag of secrets here, so I'm just gonna whip out a few things to to change the subject. All right. So um part of the thing that um I did when I was in college was I had a teacher who taught us a thing called inflatable sculpture, where you take plastic and just we used to iron plastic together into shapes and then blow them up with fans. Okay. So this is one of the projects that I did at this particular school I was talking about earlier in Kastaic. Um this was called King Puss the Octopus.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:07

And can can will you allow us to take pictures of these so we can show them on the video? You can talk about it. So as we're talking about it, we'll have Sam edit this in so people can see.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:18

So basically, each there's eight legs on an octopus. So each class made one leg, and then another class made the head. Made the head, and then another class put it all together, and then we put it out as a playground.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:38

225 kids, 225 kids. Eight arms each, 30 feet long, 12 feet diameter, head, spreads out 72 feet in every direction. Then another look at that octopus design, Michael Marx.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:52

Imagine that. I learned how to use pie. You know, this mathematical form to make it. Yeah. Anyway, one of the first things we started on was an inflatable snake, which was easy. And then these other things that are like pillows, which at the bottom are those are inflatable, giant pillows that were called the art box, where the kids would come inside and then draw pictures on the walls. Okay. And then we would lower the ceiling down so they could draw on the ceiling, or just with air pressure then. That school had a mascot of a tiger. Tiger, so you got to be able to get away. So we did our best to try to make a tiger's head. Yeah. Then um this was in Philadelphia. I got to be a guest artist at the Franklin Institute, and we did a thing called the Headmaster, which had four different faces on it. It was like a giant. Okay, each side had a different, yeah. So each part of the class did a different head. That particular one has a girl smoking a cigarette.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:00

So while we're working, you know, this team's going, oh my god, it goes, Mr. Marks, man, this girl has to have a cigarette in her mouth. I go, you know, that's not the greatest thing to promote. Because oh, we gotta have it. So I said, Okay, put the cigarette in your mouth. That was a big thing, but that was during Hands Across America.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:18

And then this was uh another, this was the first headmaster. It had different masks faces from around the world, and that was in Los Angeles, and it was designed for the Olympic Arts Festival during the and also the festival of masks.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:36

Then this kind of took off, and I got hired by the Los C Los Angeles County Museum of Art to teach there, and I taught a class called Inflatable Sculpture, and each week we made a different sculpture and then blew it up on the grounds of the museum and took pictures and things like that.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:53

So it'd take you one week to build one of these, to make one of these. Right. Wow, that's pretty good. Yeah. Well that and you're just getting big sheets of plastic and you're ironing the edges of them together.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:03

Well, by that time we moved to taping it together. Oh, you're taping it. Yeah, so all these were taped together. Taped together. And then this was a band that I played in, and we uh made a big marshmallow you're playing inside of. We had shadows, it was like a shadow theater and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:20

Cool. Yeah, we'll get pictures of these and we'll put these up so people can they'll be able to see that.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:27

Anyway, let's see.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:29

What other cool stuff do you have in the book?

SPEAKER_01 1:23:30

Well, anyway, so this is just some stuff uh going backwards. This is, you know, I used to do uh book covers, so I did a series of children's books for Isaac Asimov. Uh-huh. This was a famous jazz guy, Nat Hentoff. He had a book called Jazz Is. This gives you an idea of the stuff that illustrates me streets. I had all these magazines, so I was like an illustrator doing pictures for the magazine. This is the Count, Count's County page. Yeah. Upside down. One time I did get to do the cover. Cool. Uh Cookie Monsters. Cookie Monkey's. So they're all educational that we had to do and stuff like that. And then this was the only one that I ever had to change because every every time you sent your drawings in, they would sit down with a psychiatrist and kids, and they would tell you, hey, you gotta change this, change that. So, like I had the weasel on the log here blending in. I had the weasel on the ice and he was blending in, but they go, Oh, they thought the kids thought the weasel was drowned. Oh, okay. Can you put him someplace? Yeah, put him somewhere else. Yeah. And then there's like a story on the snake. And uh there's another Sesame Street thing. And then the electric company. Yeah. So since I worked for them, that they were doing stories on the things that I was doing off the street. Oh, cool. And there's at the museum, some of the stuff. Yeah. Okay. And uh then National Geographic did a spread on spread on the same ones, yeah. So you know, we blew them all up. This is at that school, and the cattle were back here. And then this is the kids putting it together. Okay. Stuff like that. And uh and then this is some of the stuff from you know, noontime concerts or summer concerts, stuff like that, or Sink of the Mile festivals we would do. And this is getting into the cowboy stuff, and then we would hire different cowboy artists each year to paint different posters because I got the idea from your dad with the Eagle pictures. Different pictures, yeah. Blues festival. Dang. And more cowboys, more cowboy, more cowboy. Now, this was uh what Millie Ranch looked like at that front gate, just a beautiful place. And um more cowboys, more cowboys, and that's what the place looked like. Yeah. And uh there's some famous cowboys that come. Um more cowboys, and then this I used to do the city's firework show too. And then this is the calendar of when we when I returned. That was all that that was all the events that were these were all the events, so you know we had the bike race, you know, it's a public art thing. Yeah, you know, we had golf tournament too. That's at the cowboy. So it looked like you were right into Cowboy Town. Yeah. We used to run farmers markets, that's the fireworks show. And actually, fire, we would we used um this is where Princess Cruises had their offices. So I got to work in Princess Cruises before I even knew that they had things going on here in tours in Alaska. Concerts in the park, chalk art festivals, cultural things in schools, it's a marathon, parade. You know, I would give permits for parades. And then this last thing was a public art thing when cities were like painting cows or horses. The biggest grizzly bear was killed in our town in like 1898 or something like that. Because then grizzly bears in California didn't hibernate. And since we were a cattle country, they were coming down for free food. They were coming down for free food. So this was a model of a cow, I mean, a uh grizzly bear. Yeah, and then this artist decided to glue photographs on it, and we manufactured all these different grizzly bears, and people painted pitches on them, and we placed them around in city parks and things like that. Cool, yeah. So there you go. So that's that's the end of the life of Michael Martins.

How Haines Can Grow The Arts

SPEAKER_02 1:27:49

Well, I don't think it is, because I got a couple more things for you here. So, you know, even though it's not at the same level, right? I correct me if I'm wrong. I Haynes is a good fit for you and your wife because you're very involved in the arts there. Haynes has a very vibrant art community community.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:11

There's a lot of people with more artists in this town than most places. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:15

So all sorts of different mediums of art. How do we capitalize on that more? How do we help?

SPEAKER_01 1:28:23

Well, if anything that I learned from my city that I work for, the city needs to invest in the arts. It needs to take some of that hard-earned taxpayer dollars and help support the arts by hiring someone to run the Chilcath Center and give them a giant budget to bring in performers every week to play at the Chilcath Center.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:51

Do you think that's sustainable though? Do you think that's gonna if if you put somebody in there, do you think they're gonna be able to hire enough people to come in and play that it's there's gonna be a return on investment?

SPEAKER_01 1:29:01

Well, even if you take think about it like the Alaska Folk Festival that's happening in a week or so at uh in Juneau, that's bringing in hundreds of musicians from all over Alaska are coming to play, and people from outside Alaska are coming to showcase their bands to get recognition. I think it's free to get in, but they you know they raise money by getting memberships and things like that. But apparently it's a giant gathering. I've never been to it myself, but everybody I know just raves about it. But you have to have some kind of giant thing that everybody wants to come for, where it's like, hey honey, let's get on the ferry and go to Haynes for that wild weekend or whatever it's gonna be.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:49

I've talked to people, I've talked to a lot of people about this over the years, trying to figure out what that is, and it it always seems to be that accessibility issue. Right. It's the tough place in the world to get to. It's a really tough place to get to, and so how much are you relying on locals to come and pay to go to all these? Like even back in the in the 80s, we had ActFest here, I think it was every other year. I was just gonna mention it was it was great, but I think it was heavily subsidized by the state at the time with oil revenues. Right. And so trying to balance that on where how much can you subsidize that to bring people to town on even the the Eagle Festival, the the the attendance has been dwindling for a while because it's kind of past the shoulder season on the cruise ships. There's sometimes it's hard to find restaurants. Uh sometimes the weather, if you're not if the ferry gets canceled, it's hit or miss getting here. I mean, it's a great event, but some of those things, it's it's it's hard to maintain those going forward unless you have a consistent way to get people here.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:56

Well, I don't have a magic answer to any of that stuff, but I just came for the I think you need to get a bigger boat.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:02

So we can just tell Michael will be the weather sucks, the fairy's not running, but Michael's gonna come get you.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:09

Well, I think we're gonna put all eggs in one basket and have a super rock concert at Elder at Elder Dry. Yeah. Are you bringing your band back together and just having to blow up bring a real band with real music?

SPEAKER_02 1:31:23

That'd be good because you can have everybody just in a flotilla around, because you're not gonna have that many people on the island. Well, you can have this, you can get a bunch, but then you can just have this flotilla of boats around it. Absolutely. Just bobbing around there on a front warm day. Warm day?

SPEAKER_01 1:31:38

Yeah. Well, that's where ideas get started. But uh but either way, we've been doing our share to do stuff in town. You know, we do that river talk.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:48

Yeah, you get you guys give you guys you and your wife give back a lot. There's a lot of people who have been here much longer than you that don't contribute to the community as much as you guys have. I'm not I'm not saying that you need to love our town. I'm not saying you need to do more, right? Right. It's just it's I want I want to throw ideas out there so it doesn't have to be you doing it, it doesn't have to be doing it. Somebody else could might have an idea like, well, I think this would be a cool thing to have at the Chill Cat Center.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:12

Right, right, right. But I mean we got people doing all kinds of cool things. They got the coot to cat and you know all that kind of stuff. And so I think you gotta leave it to the people to find something that they really love to do and let them do it and see what happens. But uh I know our tourism department has worked greatly to improve the Eagle Festival, and now in a couple weeks she's doing a migration celebration as a new thing coming in May 1st, and show the museum is redesigned the entire exhibit hall.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:47

That's opening May 1st, too, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 1:32:49

It's opening May 1st, too. And um Andrea Nelson's putting on to the has been working for two or three years on that. You know, I get the behind the scenes and see what's going on, and can't wait for that night. And as a matter of fact, tomorrow we're having a meeting to plan what the opening activities will be. And you know, we got this buoy thing, the buoy painting. So we're trying, we're trying.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:13

For somebody that hasn't been to Haynes, hasn't lit, hasn't lived here, hasn't visited, why should they come to Haynes? The Michael Marks reason. What what you and your wife came here on a short trip and fell in love. Give give me a short answer, short answer, long answer. It doesn't matter. Why should somebody come to Haynes? So we need Shannon to start cooking at the Halsingland again?

SPEAKER_01 1:33:39

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I mean they did their 4th of July concert where she had the salmon bake and Jeff with the crab and the cool music and stuff like that, things like that. If we can bring some of these things back, what can I say? You know, we got the bike race. I mean, people are plugging away in this town.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:58

They are, but I'm just what what was it if you need a million bucks for but you know, don't worry about not events or anything like that. Just if somebody somebody's like, okay, listening to Michael. Haynes sounds like I would never go there. Why why should somebody that's sitting in somewhere else in the lower 48, wherever they're listening to this, your pitch for why they should come to Haynes?

SPEAKER_01 1:34:25

I don't know if I have a pitch for why they should come to Haynes because then we have more people here. But anyway, they're just coming to the place in the world. They're coming to visit for a week. They're coming to visit. Well, it's the most beautiful place in the world. You can go to Chilcoot Lake, go up the highway, Million Dollar Falls, go fishing.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:48

Um visit me, so I don't know what to say to anybody. You haven't had any of your friends come visit you? Nobody wants to come and visit. What can I say?

SPEAKER_01 1:34:57

Wait, if they take a cruise ship to Skagway and go, hey, you just get on the boat to come here. Oh it's$100, forget it. You know, whatever. So I I don't know. I haven't thought about things that I don't know what this says more about here, what to do when they get here. They should go to the Hammer Museum, show the museum, and Eagle Foundation.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:16

That I know. I'm I'm worried about you. I'm worried about you. I don't know if it's your salesmanship or if you need to get better friends. Nobody comes to visit you in Hayes Alaska. We need to fix that, Michael. We need to have you need to tell all your friends when this comes out.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:32

I send them pictures of the wintertime. That's probably who they can come in the summer. They don't have to come visit in January. I'm fishing all the time. No, just kidding. So they'll get fresh fish. No, I know, I know. I know I know. Actually, my wife's sister is coming this summer. Okay. Help my wife clear out junk.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:48

It's like be careful they if they do that on a day when you're out fishing, you might come home and you don't have all your stuff. That might be the junk they're getting rid of.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:56

Oh, that's okay. That's okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:58

That's all right. That's okay. That's okay.

What To Visit And Final Thanks

SPEAKER_01 1:35:59

I've gotten rid of pretty much everything I can. But my wife has got a big collection. What did what did we miss, Michael? I think he got it all. I think he got it all. I think he got it all. Well, I can't thank you enough for this. And went into the midnight hour here. Are we are we on the midnight hour here? You're you're you're worried that we're gonna go really long. You know how it is. Once you start blabbing, you can't stop. But anyway, everybody wants to go home for dinner. Have you had dinner yet?

SPEAKER_02 1:36:30

Uh yeah, before I come in for this because I don't know how long they're gonna last me to me too.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:34

Well, smart haynes people.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:35

Smart Haynes people. I've learned in the past that if I go for a certain amount without food, it's not good for anybody around me.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:42

So I always try and anyway, but most importantly, I'm just lucky to have met you and everybody I've met in Haynes and have a great quality of life here in this wonderful little town.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:56

Well, I I not only appreciate you joining us so we can share your story with other people, but I appreciate the fact that you did move to Haynes, and you and your wife, I think, are a major asset to our community. The different things that you guys are involved with, the amount of volunteer time you put into things, um appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:13

You got it. Well, I learned everything from your dad, who was a great volunteer too.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:20

I learned a lot from him also. Right on. Not as much as he wanted me to, but that's never that always happens.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:25

That always happens.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:27

Did you ever teach about slugs? He did not teach me that. But I like my grandpa probably would have if there was someplace to use slugs when I was a kid in that. Right. There's no slug machines in this town. There are no slugs machines. Yeah. Well, thanks for everything. No, thank you, Michael. Thanks for watching this episode of Doug Had's Questions. Just a reminder: if you've enjoyed the conversation today, please like, subscribe, and we're available on YouTube if you want to watch us, if you just want to listen. Uh, it's on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and we have new uh episodes being launched every Thursday. So thanks again for watching or listening and following us. We appreciate your support.