Episode 26: Lee Heinmiller; A Lifelong Haines Local Explains How A Community Gets Built

A town can start with a big dream, but it survives on unglamorous details: heat that actually works, water that keeps running, and neighbors who show up when the plan falls apart. We talk with lifelong Haines resident Lee Heimiller, president of the Port Chilkoot Corporation, about the unlikely chain of events that helped turn Fort Stewart from a postwar military site into the heart of Port Chilkoot. Lee shares the inside story of veterans trying to buy surplus equipment, the scramble to finance a fort purchase, and what it meant to build a community in Southeast Alaska when money was tight and winter was not forgiving.

From there, the conversation opens up into a deep, practical history of Haines and Tlingit cultural work through Alaska Indian Arts and the Chilkat Dancers. We get into how scouting, statehood-era promotion, and federal manpower training programs helped launch artists and carvers, and why the value of a totem pole is measured in hours, risk, and responsibility as much as dollars. Lee also tells stories about shipping major carvings, projects that ended up across the country, and the way cultural pride grew when public performance was not always welcomed.

We also take on the question people argue about the most: Fort Stewart’s barracks buildings. Lee breaks down why “save it” can mean $30–$40 million, how landmark rules shape what’s even allowed, and why a seasonal tourism economy makes big redevelopment plans so hard to sustain. If you care about Haines Alaska history, Fort Stewart, Port Chilkoot, Alaska Native art, and what preservation looks like when budgets get real, this one is for you. Subscribe, share this with a friend who loves local history, and leave us a review telling us what part of Haines you want us to record next.

Transcript

Welcome To Doug Has Questions

SPEAKER_06 0:01

Welcome to this edition of Doug Has Questions. Today my guest is lifelong Haynes resident and president of Port Chilka Corporation, Lee Heimiller. Welcome to the show, Lee.

SPEAKER_02 0:12

Hey, thanks. Nice to be here.

SPEAKER_06 0:14

Glad to have on here and get some more history of Haynes.

SPEAKER_02 0:16

Oh yeah. Well, you know, I that's the thing I guess about getting older is people keep going, oh we'll ask you, you know.

SPEAKER_03 0:23

Wait, ask somebody else. Ask somebody else. I don't want to be that person.

SPEAKER_02 0:26

Well, I started going, you know, trying to ask a couple questions a while ago. I was doing some interviews, like Dan Henry did 14 of them of Eldul's with the museum. And I so I did David Light and Charlie Williams from Juno and stuff, talking about local history in the early days of, you know, before my time kind of thing. And it was like I think it went for a couple of hours for each one of them, but I turned out it was a really good thing that I didn't do both of them back to back at the same time.

SPEAKER_03 0:54

Because, you know, an hour or so into it they start talking about things that they're from the other family side. No, no, no, no. Let's talk about the fire department or something.

A Doctor Dad And No Hospital

SPEAKER_02 1:06

So you're you're born in Haynes, correct? Well, I was born in Juneau and St. Anne's, but only because there was no hospital or my dad was delivering babies here then. Really? Yeah. He delivered a uh set of twins up in Kluckwan, which is how he eventually got adopted, you know, in the late 40s or something. And I never asked him who, you know. And I figure I could go back and look at birth records, and there couldn't have been that many twins in Kluckwan in a short period of time there, late 40s, because it was before I was born.

SPEAKER_06 1:36

But and so your your mom and dad were part of the original group that purchased Fort

Buying Fort Stewart After WWII

SPEAKER_06 1:43

Fort.

SPEAKER_02 1:43

Yeah, my dad my dad and and a few of the other guys were all in Washington, D.C. after the war. And it was pretty much like Mountain Market, you know, they all met at the coffee shop and talked about what they were going to do after the war, because everybody that was there wasn't from there. You know, my dad was from Ohio and other people from Connecticut and stuff, and they were kind of like, well, we should do something, you know. So then the it was the you know, post-World War II, pre-Alaska statehood, and they were trying to get the vets to jumpstart the economy and you know, different places, and so they got a lot of support. And they sat in the coffee shop and talked about it, and they kept going to GSA. Steve Homer and Rajer Lott were trying to buy the early the first ferry that was the Chilcoot that was a uh landing craft for a tank, you know, that flopped down in the front and they landed it on the beach, and they started the ferry system with that, but they were going in and talking to uh GSA, the government services, wanting to buy some surplus stuff after the war. And both um Steve Homer and somebody else early on um had been here during World War II, just through the southeast and then saw the area and he thought, oh, it'd be a good place to, you know, to have a a ferry system to run to Skagway and Juneau and stuff. So that's what they started out doing. And then as soon as they did that in the late 50s, then the state of Alaska, you know, reared its ugly head in 59 and all of a sudden how did your dad and the rest of them, how'd they find out about Fort Stewart? Uh they were, you know, doing the coffee shop routine and they went in to GSA again while they were hitting them up for the boat and said, you know, what else have you got? And the woman was so tired of them pestering her that she took the book that was the surplus book from the fort, pictures of buildings and the it and the inventory and everything, and just gave it to them and said, Here, just get out of my office. So then they're at the coffee shop going, Oh, look, you know, you could start a plumbing business and you could do a you know, wood shop and all of that sort of stuff. So they went through those things, and so a few of them got together and decided they would bid on it and stuff, and there was only one other person that was bidding on the fort, and he was a a vet, but he was from Fairbanks or someplace. But he had a bus company up there, and all he wanted to do was get the port here, the dock, yeah, and st at a place for his buses to leave from to go to Fairbanks, and so they were but he had the money, you know, to buy it outright, and they wanted the woman told them it was fifty thousand dollars, and they were like, Oh no, we don't have that kind of money. But between big money back in the 40s, but a few of the guys like my dad that were officers had their back pay from the war and that. So a couple guys had a couple thousand bucks and somebody had a thousand, so they started what was they called VACA, which was Veterans Alaska Cooperative, and they were gonna move to Alaska and start a town, you know, and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_03 4:39

So sitting around the coffee shop, there were lots of the people that were vets that thought it was a great idea, but when it came down to, you know, anybody got any money, all of a sudden they were barely able to scrape up 10 grand.

SPEAKER_02 4:51

So they were lobbying the government to give them the sale for $10,000 down and then, you know, pay the rest along the way, sort of thing, once they got their town started, sort of thing. Well, it turned out that they went back, you know, to talk to the woman again when they were all getting serious and stuff, and she said, no, it's they she told them it was fifty-five thousand, and they came back, and she said, no, no, it's a hundred and five thousand. Well, that was a million dollars compared to the end. Yeah, I mean fifty was a million dollars to them, but that was like, well, you know, we can't really do that and stuff, but they were still in the loop, and they ended up giving the the government ended up giving the sale to the single guy, and then they were lobbying because my dad and a couple of the other people knew, you know, Bartlett and other people from Alaska that were in the government there and stuff. So they were pulling any string they could get, going, Well, look, we're a bunch of you know, vets, and some of us are disabled and stuff, and we want to start this town, and this guy's just a businessman, you know. And so they decided the government decided when they went to were threatening to go to court and stuff, that um they were gonna give it to the vets. And so my dad stayed in DC dealing with that, and the rest of the gangs or some of them came up early, and um Ted Gregg came with his whole family and stuff, and they but they drove, you know.

SPEAKER_06 6:13

So what what was year what year was that that Ted Gregg and his family got here?

SPEAKER_02 6:17

They got here late in 46 and my dad got here in 47, and just a couple of them when they came over the road coming down, Clarence Madsen and his mom and stuff like that, they were up there on the pass, and the road was you know, the road had been built in the 43 for and nobody knew about it sort of thing. And they got up and there was no way that it was really finished. They like repaired some of the bridges to get across with the stuff coming down. And when they finally got down here, they went to the fort and well, both the people are dead now, but two local guys had been given the job from the feds as cute as the caretakers of the fort. Okay. And like most of the appliances and some of the clothwit tubs on officers row and a bunch of the furniture and stuff was long gone by the time they got here. And so they were like, Well, what happened to everything? Whoa, you know, and stuff. And there were things in town. So when they finally got the fort, my dad had told, you know, said, Look, here's the inventory, and this isn't, you know. So they sent the FBI undercover, and the guy looked around and he came to my dad and he said, Well, you know, what's your plan? My dad said, Well, you know, we're gonna start a town and live here and stuff like that. And the guy said, Well, just forget it. He said, That stuff is all over town. He said, People have receipts, some people don't, but you're not gonna make any friends and influence people by doing it. They they actually sent the FBI up here. Yeah, and they of course, yeah, to check it out and stuff, and decided, no, because the government wanted the sale to be done. Yeah, they wanted to be done with it. And when they were in court over the issue, my dad was in Juneau sleeping on the couch at the lawyer's office because they didn't have any money and stuff. And my mom had come up to visit her sister, who was living in Juneau at the time with her husband, and my mom had come up from Seattle to visit. My mom was working as a temporary typist at the lawyer's office, so that's where my mom and dad met. Okay. Brevards, the basketball players from Juneau and stuff. My parents were married in their house. And, you know, so those people that were living right down by the Capitol or by the federal building were people that we knew growing up. And my cousin George Houston from there, he lived, you know, just right over on Fourth and D and stuff. So we pretty much hung out in the neighborhood there as kids and stuff. But I was born at St. Anne's because there was no hospital here, and that's a whole story in itself, you know.

Surviving The First Winters

SPEAKER_06 8:39

So when when your dad first got here, what uh and the whole group of them, they've got the fort. The the very first what are they planning on doing?

SPEAKER_02 8:47

The very first winter, they were all like, oh now, you know, and there was the wood shop, so Ted Gregg decided he would, you know, get into the wood shop and do some stuff. But it was pretty much the same thing of, you know, well, the water system's not working this week. Who's gonna help on that? So there were some people that jumped in and did stuff, but it came down to the pretty early thing of, you know, if you're not helping, you're not and you're not working, you're not eating, you know. And the very first winter, the ones that were here all lived together in Norm Smith's house, their officers' road, you know, because it was one of the ones that was because the commanding officer and then the chief surgeon was kind of in the nicest shape, you know. And so they were all staying there for the winter. Well, it was just like college roommates in the long run, you know. Even in the early years when I was young at meetings, they would, you know, push the envelope and go, Well, you always left your underwear on the sink, you know. You guys, that was ten years ago, just let it go, you know, and stuff. But I think those first winters, you know, and the one where they're all together was really rough because, you know, everybody assumes that you got, you know, radiators and heat and everything like that. But you look at the pictures of the museum when the soldiers were in the barracks building and they had every crack and cranny stuffed with rags and you know, and the windows covered and stuff, because the only insulation in the wall is a dead air space, so it's not like when there were glass bad insulations. No, no, and when the wind's blowing, you're in there freezing to death, and you know, they're burning the first winter, they they were still burning wood, and then they started burning coal soon after that, and they didn't get oil until 39. And so but in those early years, you know, they were hauling coal from the Sakai Cycle Building, the building that was there before we remodeled and took it down, was the coal shed. And they had wagons that, you know, they filled up with big bags of coal that came in on the bar to the ship, and then they drove them around and poured them down the coal chutes into everybody's house. But like in Officer's Row, there was a boiler in the basement, but uh um the coal stoves were little and were like, you know, in a fireplace kind of thing out of marble. I mean they're still there, but you know, if that was what was supposed to be keeping you warm, lots of luck. And then they had the there were n uh you know privates and low low-ranking people that got the job of working in the officers' row, keeping the fires going and mining the stove in the kitchen and stuff like that. And they had some derogatory name for them, I forget, you know. But it was because, you know, the rest of the soldiers hated you because you were getting breakfast sometimes and things like that up there and stuff.

SPEAKER_06 11:32

But but there were what is you what is your earliest memory of being

Remodeling An Officers Row Home

SPEAKER_06 11:37

over in the fort? Was were your parents in the the house on the corner by then? Or was it? No, my dad was remodeling the house when he first got there.

SPEAKER_02 11:44

So I've got some now that I'm working on it. That house was originally, was that the Commandant's? It was the headquarters building, but it was really the office, the commander's room in the hotel, which was the dining room. That was really the commanding officer's residence. Okay. And they didn't build that till a couple of years into the fort. Okay. The ha the hotel buildings there. And so Norm Smith's or you know, number one there, was originally the commanding officer's building for the first couple years. And then they built the other buildings and it became the chief surgeon's quarters. Because there were two surgeons, and the chief surgeon got that house, and it has like, you know, 21 rooms and five bathrooms, and he's got a wife and a kid, and that's it, you know. But the chief surgeon, I think, made a hundred and thirty dollars a month in those days. And so that you know, you spent no problem. And so what was happening was the doctors there could treat people in town too, and that was on top of things. So that was their cash flow above and beyond thirty dollars a month, you know.

SPEAKER_06 12:47

Over the army pay. So when you were when you were a kid, dad was remodeling. Yeah, that's a good thing.

SPEAKER_02 12:53

The house was pretty much done, you know, when Norm Blank got here, I think in 59, when he first was working as a uh for fish and game or something like that. But he was also doing what he did later in life, carpentry and stuff. So he worked on the remodeling on the inside of my parents' house, and it like um what was Egoff's Vera Sieg's house up next to Cortes's, both those houses have Luan mahogany in them, like real mahogany paneling, which was the cheapest stuff you could get, I think, in the 50s, but it's real, you know, and so I'm trying to preserve all of that because most of the downstairs of the house has got that. So I got insulation and we stripped out a room upstairs and I had Stickler blow in that insulation and stuff. Well, it turned out that that my parents' house is different than the rest, and it's balloon framed. And so we blew in what was supposed to be ten bags for upstairs, it ended up using 17 and it went down to the first floor. And so everywhere that has the big thermopanes that my dad put in, it didn't get below them, but it got down the walls around them and everything. So I've got little spaces under the windows on the first floor that take apart and insulate, but otherwise I ended up insulating downstairs too, you know. Oh, nice. So yeah, that and that's the front half of the house that faces the wind. So like that'll make a big difference, you know. And then we've got a big I've got a fireplace in the living room that my dad built that was open, and then in when I by the time I was in high school, he put an insert in the fireplace for a wood stove. But it's got a big wood box, but it's all made out of the marble from 37 mile. Okay. So and it's you know, I mean, it's as big as this whole area. It's 12 feet long or something. It's got a wood box at one end and a planter and some other stuff. But as far as a thermal mass, once it gets heated up, it keeps it. All that marble's gonna Yeah, it just holds the heat in the bottom half of the house. So now that that whole wall behind it and uh upstairs above it is insulated, I'm thinking that you know it ought to put out some heat. And there's only two doors going into that lower half of the living room bottom of the house. So that's my next project because I was all ready to move in years ago, and there was one electrical circuit that went upstairs to my old bedroom where my mom had gotten a Mac in the early days and won't needed a plug with an app with a ground outlet.

SPEAKER_04 15:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:13

So I ran a piece of Romex up there and put in a plug for it. Well, it turns out to be that, and what's in conduit that goes to the outlet in the front of the fireplace and to the boiler are the only two things that actually have a ground in the house. So when I figured that out, I went, my dad had added Romex to drop the ceiling, but only from the old wiring two feet down. When I discovered that, I went to the back porch with a pair of diagonals. Uh-huh. Cut and I'd had Irwin redo the whole panel and the drop to the house. And I went to the panel and just cut everything off of it, except that one circuit that was in conduit and the one that I'd run. So when doing the remodel, I got extension cords and stuff. So now I got to do all of the outlets all the way around. But it's got a basement and an attic, so I can get above and below for most of those rooms. And then the interior walls are all open so you can drag the Romex through there. So that was going to be my big plan for last year. Jerry, my nephew, was going to help because he's the carpenter and then he had house fire. Now he's busy. So he's busy on his own place. So now I'm going to be working on it. But I figured if I just put some wood in the wood stove and work my way around the room on the little rolling cart, I can do one outlet at a time and shove a piece of Romex through the floor into the basement and then hook that up and the first four will be done, you know?

SPEAKER_06 16:33

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 16:34

But it's like, you know, I don't know.

SPEAKER_06 16:36

So what was when when you guys were here, so you're in the we're talking 50s.

Port Chilkoot And School Day Logistics

SPEAKER_06 16:40

Yeah. What was there a lot of uh activities happening in the fort? Where you guys just you'd wake up, you'd go to school in town here? Yeah, we were that was before consolid that was before the original consolidation, before Port Chilcoot and Haynes.

SPEAKER_02 16:56

Yeah, until 1970, we were the city of Port, well, from 57 on, we were the city of Port Chilcoot, which was a separate, you know, second-class city. And so we had my dad was the police chief, the fire chief, and the mayor and stuff. Because nobody else would do anything about it, you know. But there's only a couple hundred people in the whole area over there. And I mean the town wasn't a whole lot bigger, it probably had four or five hundred at the time. But uh yeah, going to school was you had to be a mile away from school when it was on Main Street here to take the bus. And so, like Paul Potter and his brothers and stuff, they lived up on FAA there, so they were a mile away, but we were only like nine-tenths of a mile or something.

SPEAKER_06 17:39

So did you walk up to Paul's house against the ride?

SPEAKER_02 17:42

Sometimes in the winter when the bus was going by with four kids in it, and we were slogging our way to school, they would take mercy on us and pick us up. But hardly ever in the morning, but usually after school when we were making the long walk.

SPEAKER_06 17:55

They figure with the snow you can walk downhill, but they couldn't be a drink going uphill.

SPEAKER_02 17:59

But then, you know, they went by a couple of times with your friends riding the bus doing this, you know. And we were making snowballs, and you know, somebody picked up, I don't know if it was Vance Blackwell, who nobody claimed it, but getting snow off the side of the road to make a snowball, a big chunk of ice or something ran with it and took out the back window of the school bus. Uh-oh. So then we all had to get jobs, you know, and pay for the school bus. But but my dad would drive us to school and they sort of took turns. The Greggs had a part of their tour business was a Volkswagen bus with a little, you know, it looked like a Santos sleigh on the top. I think it was one that where they could pop through the roof, too, you know, or whatever. But they had that bus and it was part of their little running people around tour business because Mimi had the craft shop, which is how how were people uh in the 50s were I uh you see pictures up at the bamboo or some people down for the original cruise ships and stuff.

Tourists, Pet Rocks, And Dock Crabs

SPEAKER_02 18:55

You know, is that where they were coming, or were people actually coming over the highway at that time? There were a few people on the highway, but mm you know mostly it was you'd get a couple people that were sort of caravanning together off the highway. But the ships were, you know, the cruise ships quote quote were 100 passengers and came in. But in those early years, Chuck West had his small boats that came out and went down to Vancouver or to Prince Rupert and stuff like that. And once my mom and I and my sister rode back on that boat to to Prince Rupert to Vancouver, then we took the train to Seattle where my grandma lived and stuff like that. And I remember that one when we were pretty young. But like the picture that's on the wall at the bamboo room where Tony and Omar Cortis was sitting there with his little basket. Yep, he was like the the little brown kid in the neighborhood that everybody assumed was Clinkett, and he's actually of Indian descent, not American Indian, you know. But there he was, the entrepreneur that he is now, you know. He was there with his basket and he was picking up those uh rodnite, the pink rocks and stuff off the beach there and selling them to the tourists for pet rocks.

SPEAKER_03 20:01

And I'm going, that was like a decade before pet rocks were a thing, and he was making a killing, you know.

SPEAKER_02 20:07

But that picture of him and Chr and Tony and Christian sitting there, and then some tourists, if you look at the picture, I took that picture. Did you? Well, I was a kid, and you can tell the camera's down real low because I'm there with my brownie camera taking that picture. I gave it to Christy and she blew it up and stuck it on the wall. Uh-huh. But I just and when then after that, when those ships came in, we stuck we had crab pots off the dock there that we made out of bicycle rim and gill net with a rock for a weight, and you catch a bullhead or a flounder and tie it on there and throw it off the dock, and then when you pull it up, the crabs are all on it, but you gotta pull real fast because they jump out, you know. And so we kept losing them, jumping out. So we found one of those little punts that was like six feet long, and a couple of us would paddle out and wait, and when they pulled it up on the dock, as soon as it broke the surface of the water, we would dump them in this fish.

SPEAKER_03 20:59

And then we could take the crabs up and sell them to the cook on the boat for like a buck apiece. And so sometimes we'd be like your commercial fishing is kids without a permit, and we were like, we're going, hey, we made six bucks today. I mean, that's a lot of money. You could do movies and everything, you know.

SPEAKER_02 21:15

So we did that, but our parents were all uptight because we were out in the skiff.

SPEAKER_03 21:19

And before we had the skiff, we just had the pallets from the dock, and you'd be pulling yourself around, and you had to stack them up to keep them afloat and stuff.

SPEAKER_02 21:27

So my parents took us, both my sister and I, when we would go visit my grandma in Seattle, we both had swimming lessons when we were young. Yeah. Because my parents were like, because it wasn't so much that women were. And nobody really had kid life jackets, and most of the adults didn't wear them either, you know. So it was that thing. So I, you know, like I told people, I said, Well, I tried to pass my Eagle Scout here swimming a mile in saltwater, and it was like the only thing I couldn't pass.

SPEAKER_03 21:57

I had all the other merit badges, but it was like you were dying.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

Trying to swim a mile in this water, and I tried in the old reservoir at 25 yards one direction. And you know, you're passing out from going around in circles before you get to a mile. But yeah, it was so we were, you know, making a killing down there at the dock, and they were, you know, little ships coming in, but they didn't come in very often, sometimes once a month in the summer. And then the freighter only came in that brought all the freight to town once a month. So, you know, a lot of it was like the same as the post office for freight.

Thinking About Time And Mortality

SPEAKER_02 22:31

I had a bicycle one year that was coming, and I'd sold seven subscriptions seven lifetime subscriptions to the Saturday Evening Post when I was seven. And for seven subscription lifetime subscriptions, I got a free bicycle. So I was like, yeah, because how much was a lifetime subscription? I don't know, you know, it was probably cheap, you know. I feel guilty because I looked, I got the mailer the other day from the Historical Society for Alaska. And they're doing like lots of nonprofits, you know, going, God, times are tight, can you donate extra money and stuff? And I'm a lifetime member, so I don't even have to join. They send me the flyers and the books. My dad bought me a lifetime membership in 1970 for $100. I'm thinking, well, after 50 years, you spent more than that on postage sending you stuff over the years. Well, and they send me the quarterly little book that's this big, you know, that has Alaska history stuff in it. And then for their regular one, they you know, once a year, just like they do on the radios with playing all of the you know, rock and roll musicians who died this year, they list everybody in Alaska history that's recent that's recently died. And the last one, you know, I think COVID got in, so they were missing, putting a bunch of people in. And so they had a couple pages worth, and I went, Oh man, I'm so you recognize a lot of friends?

SPEAKER_03 23:53

I was going, ten of these people are younger than me, and I knew them, and they're not there anymore, you know.

SPEAKER_02 24:00

Dan Ekoff said that on his birthday, he's about five years older than me. And back in July on his birthday, I said, Happy birthday, and he said, Thanks a lot for you know, so everyone I get, I really enjoy another trip around the sun. And I said, Yeah. And he said, you know, lifetime expectancy for a w white male is only 74, and for women it's 78, you know.

SPEAKER_03 24:21

I said, Well, look at the bright side. I said, the more people that die, the better our odds are.

SPEAKER_02 24:29

But, you know, there are a lot of people these days that you get to that late 70s to early 80s range, and you know, musicians are dropping off. People that you knew and stuff are like, but my sister's down visiting my aunt in Seattle, my mom's older sister. She's 108 now. 108. Yeah. She's still sharp as attack. It's like amazing, you know.

SPEAKER_06 24:52

She's in she's in Seattle.

SPEAKER_02 24:53

Yeah, but she was she was born basically before there were cars and airs. That's you know, you think about you know her life.

SPEAKER_06 25:01

Technological changes over her lifetime has got to be outstanding.

SPEAKER_02 25:05

She came up on the cruise ship one time. She used to be a travel agent. She had sundial travel before Randa was a travel agent, and she did people in town here and stuff, and it was great for me because I knew if I was ever stuck anywhere at an airport, I could just pick up the phone, call her at home, and say, I need a ticket at this counter now, you know, and stuff. And she bailed us a couple of times where you know, you overfly coming to Juneau and end up in Fairbanks in the middle of the winter or something. I need a hotel, you know. But yeah, I mean, my mom was 86 when she died in 2006, and her older sister is still dang. But it's amazing to think that, you know, she when she came up on the cruise ship, my sister and Randy were together and we had the Model A running then. So we went down to the cruise ship dock, and she came to Skagway and then just came over for the day with her 86-year-old friend that was with her. They came over and we loaded them in the Model A and drove them around the parking lot, got pictures of her. And I realized, wait, she was born in 17, she could have learned to drive in this car.

unknown 26:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 26:11

Holy cow. Then you feel really like, holy cow. Yeah. But you'd forget that, you know, in a 100 years everything just changed so radically.

SPEAKER_06 26:21

So when did your when did your dad was he doing other jobs besides just the mayor, police chief,

Launching Alaska Indian Arts

SPEAKER_06 26:27

fire chief?

SPEAKER_02 26:27

Well, those were, you know, all those were just unpaid jobs. Unpaid jobs. But because he was, you know, had lost his eyes and his finger when he was in the service, he had some disability. So that check basically, you know, kept us fed, sort of thing. And in those days, you bought, you know, we bought case goods of all kinds and frozen stuff from he and e meats in Seattle. Comes in on the boat, you pack it up, you put it in your freezer, you put it in the basement, and you know, that's pretty much what you've got, you know, cases of mayonnaise and cases of you know, beans and fruit and stuff like that. But he started Alaska Indian Arts with Carl Ward and and what year was that that they started that? They st well it it started in as Alaska Indian Arts in 57, but a few years before that he was already doing the Boy Scout troop and stuff. Okay, my dad and my grandpa and my dad's side were both you know in Golden Eagles, so that's where you've been in scouting for 50 years. And my dad was the only Alaska one. Ted Stevens came here to give him the award, and there was at that time there was I think 108. Some of them were astronauts, some of them were presidents and stuff like that. And I said, Well, if you live long enough, you can get that, you know. But uh Ted Stevens flew in on a Blackhawk helicopter and landed in the pre ground for the presentation, and I thought, well, that's pretty good, you know.

SPEAKER_06 27:47

Yeah, I know I remember your both your dad and Carl Ward being very instrumental in scouts when people in front of the house.

SPEAKER_02 27:53

Well, when they when my dad started the scout troop there in the late 50s, Haynes House was still going on. And then Haynes House closed in 59 because statehood happened, and basically the buildings they were great, really nice in the way they worked, except they had open stairways that went up from the first floor to the second floor. So fire code-wise, there was no way they were putting a bunch of kids in a building that didn't, you know, have separations and stuff. So that's why they tore them down.

Scouts, Haynes House, And Foster Homes

SPEAKER_02 28:21

But when they were torn it down, all those kids, especially the ones that were in high school here, Chuck Goodwin and Walter Porter and everybody, they were like, Well, now what you know, it's like if they closed Edgecom, what everybody just goes back to the village they're from where there's no school. And so people in town ended up basically taking them in as foster home kids. Okay. So Chuck Goodwin and Walter Porter lived with us for a couple years, and Henry Porter, Walter's brother, lived with the Corteses, and yeah, Carl Ward had a couple of the bice living with him, the Matt Suno and stuff. And so a lot of those guys that were also in Boy Scouts then turned into the dance group because that's what Boy Scouts did in those days. You know, you pick the nearest indigenous people and copy them, you know.

SPEAKER_06 29:06

Well, and even when we went to because they went to what year did they that originally go to Jamboree? Um 57 when we were. 57 was when they went to Jamboree because they because they went and they did the uh Chilkat dancing at Jamboree. Yeah. And when we went in 85, your dad would taught us, and we went back there with all the regalia. And I I didn't think as much of it then, but looking back at it now, and you know, the blankets we had, the head topics and stuff, I'm like, what were they thinking? Sending hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of artifacts. I I I came up with it. I don't know how they chipped it. It wasn't, it didn't go with us. I think it was chipped separately back there. But even then, I was like, that's insane.

SPEAKER_02 29:47

Traveling around the country and hauling this stuff with the dancers and stuff. I went back for uh an event in New York a few years ago and stuff with Harold Jacobs, the cultural specialist from Clinkett and Heidi and Juno. We had one of those super fancy metal-edged, you know, giant footlocker boxes that they use for stuff. And we had three chokeout blankets of ours in there, plus we had the tunic that was his grandfather's that's from Angoon. And it's been the Park Service has used it in events at different places, so they insure it when they shipped it and they have it appraised. So that tunic alone was like $300,000. And then there's the three other blankets in the box, and you start going, oh my God, you know, and when I came back with the three blankets, I had them in a duffel bag, you know, hiding in plain sight kind of thing, said Yamaha on the side or something. And I put it on my lap on the small plane from Juno, and the guy tells me, Oh, I can put it in the back. I said, No, that's okay. I'll just sit in the back. No, you can't.

SPEAKER_03 30:46

He kept arguing with me about it, you know, and I go, No, it's not, it's only a 30-minute flight, it's not that big a deal. And he said, No, no, I'll put it in the back. And I said, Look, I said, this bag's worth more than this airplane. Just fly the plane.

SPEAKER_02 31:00

But when we had that whole box of them, we were in the middle of the country on the one stop going from Seattle to New York. And they'd oversold the flight. So they stopped there and they announced, look, we've got people getting on and we need an extra five seats. You know, does anybody want, you know, a free ticket and 500 bucks to get off or whatever and stuff? And we were going, ah, if we weren't going somewhere, I'd get off, you know. So finally a family of five, mom and dad, and three kids, said they'd go. So then they had to take them off. Then they had to get their luggage out of the plane. So we're sitting there waiting for this to happen, and we look out and they're taking our box off. And Harold rings the thing and tells the guy who's the steward stewardess on the plane, if that box doesn't get back on, we're making a scene and not bring it off.

SPEAKER_03 31:49

You know?

SPEAKER_02 31:49

So they made sure it got back on, but we were like, oh, that's you know, just what you want to do is get to a big event in New York and find out your stuff in this area.

Chilkat Dancers Go National

SPEAKER_06 31:58

So when you guys didn't they take the Chilcat dancers and and go around the country and different things when you were younger?

SPEAKER_02 32:05

Yeah, after 57 when they were in the jamboree, they came back. Then in 58 at the parade ground here, they had a regional camperie, which was Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and maybe Idaho or something.

SPEAKER_06 32:19

Really? When scouts come up? Yeah. And they're just up in the parade grounds here.

SPEAKER_02 32:22

I have pictures of never heard about that. Clarence Matson and Ray Gillotter, they're in their scout uniforms, and my dad and a few other guys from the national or something. And they built bridges and towers and stuff. You know, there was plenty of alder growing around the fort, and they just went up and whacked a bunch of stuff down and lashed it all together. That was a great way to get rid of all the alder. But you had a scout camp come up here. Yeah, and so they had the whole thing in the playground there, and of course, the the scouts that were dancers danced for that. But by the time that had happened, some of the girls like Benji Stewart and or you know Hauser and a few others were the girlfriends and boyfriends with the dan the guys in the clinkett guys in the dance group. So they started an explorate troupe and they became part of the dance group too. And so by the time all the visiting Boy Scouts were here, there were some local girls in the dance group too. And then in that was in 58, then in 59 was Alaska Statehood. And so the dancers kind of became the golden boys of the governor's office, traveling for you know, inaugurations and stuff like that. And then we went to every World's Fair and trade and travel show from 59 on. They went to the New York World's Fair in 1964, the Seattle Fair in 62. That was the first one I went along with the dance group. When they went to Gallup in 1959, well, 59, they went to Gallup, New Mexico to the intertribal ceremonies. And they drove two old beater station wagons and all the kids from here to Gallup. Down the down the dirt road. And they dropped my sister and I off in Seattle at my grandma's because we were young. Well, we rode in the back of the station wagon, you know, drinking root beer fizzies and stuff in dust clouds, you know, getting down there and stuff. But they got all the way to Gallup and stuff and danced for the event down there. And when they got there, they found out that the canned recording that they'd made with Dan Katzick and Grandma Katzik and the dancers learning some songs to sing. When they got down there, you couldn't use the canned music. And there were like 10,000 people there from natives to watch the whole thing.

SPEAKER_03 34:36

And they're going, Well, you guys are gonna have to sing or something, you know. And they were like, Boy, we barely know these.

SPEAKER_02 34:41

But of course, nobody knew what was going on anyhow. And the Apache and Navajo women had been, you know, raised to be deathly afraid of a brown bear. And Gary Hebert was the brown bear because he was one of the white blonde guys in the group, yeah. But he was really good at the bear. He rubbed up against trees and all kinds of stuff. Well, he started chasing some of those women around, and they were literally getting up in the stands and running for their lives.

SPEAKER_03 35:09

And of course, the minute they did that, he thought it was great.

SPEAKER_02 35:12

But Chuck Goodwin, my dad told the story for years. He leaned over to my dad. They were out in the middle of the arena with 10,000 people around them that were all natives, and they're there going.

SPEAKER_03 35:22

And Chuck says to my dad, Wow, now I know how Custer felt.

SPEAKER_02 35:28

But when they won, but they ended up winning the grand prize there. So when they came back, that's what plugged them into the governor's office for statehood. You know, just one more big thing for 1959. Statehood was in the spring, and the dancers were in August. Okay. And Dan Katzick had helped with his wife for the songs and the dancing and everything. And then he died maybe right after they got back or right before or something like that. But I remember his funeral in Kluckon, because that was, as a kid, that was the first open casket funeral I ever went to, and you everybody just walks by, you know, and glances in, and except the people that are family members or something. But when you're a kid, you know, I'm seven or eight, you know, you walk by and your head's kind of right down there at the end. And you're like, oh man, this is not looking great, you know.

SPEAKER_06 36:20

But I always thought they had the Chilcat dancers before, and that was just something that they did with the Scouts to take back to Jamboree, but the Chilcat dancers all came out of the Scout movement.

SPEAKER_02 36:30

Yeah, basically, yeah. You know, and it was because about half of the guys in the Scout troop, I mean, uh any group you started now, half of them were Clinkett, but a whole lot of them were ones that had been at Haynes' house and you know ended up staying in town, so really, you know, didn't have a family life other than living in Haynes because you didn't get to go back to the village necessarily from boarding school in those days.

SPEAKER_06 36:53

And so is that when when the governor's office after statehood, when they started sending them around the country and stuff, is that when your dad had the idea of like maybe we should be doing a presentation here, or was that later that they started performing?

SPEAKER_02 37:05

They you know by 58 we were building the tribal house, but it was just the part in the ground and the four posts with the cross beams there. Okay. And so the first few years we danced, we were dancing outside there where Bob Spring was taking, you know, photographs where the state of Alaska tours them and stuff like that. But we were dancing out there and like Tresham and that and stuff were dancing in those early years. And then the state used started using those publicity shots, like down on Picture Point or whatever, you know, with the ferry going by in the background and stuff like that. But part of that was Bob Spring was from Seattle and he was the photographer, and his wife Norma was a travel writer, and so they did all kinds of stuff on Alaska, a whole bunch of it on Haynes, because they had friends here and they would come up. And Tracy, who comes, who's the musician, who comes to the fair a few times but plays for at the folk festival in Juneau, she still lives in the Seattle area and plays music. And she when they had the golden anniversary for the ferry or whatever it was, they had a contest where you could write a song and then you got a you know a free trip on the ferry and a bunch of stuff when she ended up winning that. And so for a while she was coming every year to the folk festival in Juneau. And being the entrepreneur like her family was, she would find a Toyota v or a you know, Astro van or something at a good deal in Seattle because there's lots of used cars there. And then she would find somebody at Juneau or Haynes that wanted one, and she would bring up the used car on the ferry, and she'd get a free pass on the ferry because of winning that prize. So she'd you know make whatever she made on the difference of the vehicle plus you know the place and she'd get to visit her friends and stuff like that. So but but they then Stan Patty is was a writer for the the big newspaper in Seattle, and he writes for the tr Sunday travel section and stuff. And he was friends of Bob Geersdorf and and Chuck West and stuff, and they were doing the basic small tourism in Southeast in those years. And so they pretty much, you know, he wrote a lot of stories on the Chokai dancers. But the Seattle World's Fair was a big deal in '62. And when I went down for that with the dancers and stuff was the first time with the dancers that I was on TV and I was 10, and I was like, yeah, you know, but that was also the Seattle Center and the you know, the very first years of the monorail and everything else. So that whole area, yeah, that whole thing was perfectly great. The I remember my sister seeing the um the Space Needle for the first time. We came around the corner driving on the road there, and her eyes got about this big. It was like a flying saucer against the sky, you know. But after that, then in 64 they went to n the uh World's Fair in New York City as part of the Alaska Pavilion. So they were there for weeks, and Nathan Jackson was there and a whole and it actually was so long they rotated some of the people in, like Leonard Bowman was there for half the time, and Tom I think Tom Jimmy Sr. was there for a while. And then um no, he was it was the same time when his b fishing boat gas boat blew up at the harbor and blew him and TJ out of the boat, you know, fifty feet away, and both of them survived. But I think that was the same year I that he he was there and then came back or something because they switched some of the people for that. But there was a lot of major publicity stuff from the New York World's Fair in 64 and then Centennial in 67 happened, so they we did a bunch of carvings and stuff that went in

Training Artists Through Federal Programs

SPEAKER_02 40:48

different places. And in those early years, same time, 64 through 66, my dad got the manpower training program here, and there were four about it's a federal thing like they have at Seward where they have the Oh the Avtec or whatever. Yeah, and they had the same thing in Gnome, but it was uh MDTA Manpower Development Training Act or something. And so they had basically a whole lot of the people who had, you know, some form of physical disability, guy missing an arm, one lung, you know, uh one of the Eskimo guys had been Welch Madela, he'd been run over by his dog sled, so his legs were kind of screwed up. But they were all, you know, came here and got trained as artists. But like Ted Gregg taught woodworking, Gil Smith taught you know, life drawing and painting and stuff. Uh Dorothy Fossman did GED stuff. And you know, so there were other and uh Ira Powell from Powell's store. He did he was one of those, and same with Carl Ward, he was one of those guys that did homemade jewelry and stuff, earrings and things. So he taught that. So they had 14 instructors and about 75 students for two years and cranked out just tons of stuff. And Leo Jacobs and Ed Casco and a lot of those native guys were some of the carvers that had been carvers and turned into master carvers in those two years and taught more of those people. And then in 67 we got a bunch of projects to go with um the centennial for Alaska, and then they did the projects on we did doors for some of the big oil companies up in Anchorage.

SPEAKER_06 42:27

This is all through Alaska Indian Arts.

SPEAKER_02 42:29

Yeah, and then they did uh a bunch of stuff for in the legislature and the governor's office and others, and they're still there. They're like carved panels that divide rooms and you know, design on a door here and there and stuff. And then when my dad in 68, my dad got the job from Mar of the magistrate from Marty Cummerford was the magistrate before that. And back when one mile where fish and game was was the border. I mean, you could come through at 42 mile and be in Alaska for 42 miles before you run into the five. And if you came in after hours, yeah, there was a sign that said come back in the morning. And you just go check into a motel and then go back. And so there were people, Marty caught that one, Cummerford caught that one guy that stole $75,000 in Oregon or something, and got away from a bank and got away free and clear, and came in here to the border in a next to brand new car with all kinds of brand new clothes hanging in the back and suitcases and stuff. And Marty made some comment to the guy about his stuff and said, Well, you know, what's in the briefcase? He was just, you know, being himself. And the guy freaked out and ran and took the car and dashed off, and then they went.

SPEAKER_03 43:42

And so that was Marty's big claim to fame. He busted this guy with $75,000 of bank robber that had got away. And we were like, the guy could have just not stopped. Nobody even knew.

SPEAKER_06 43:54

Good luck running and hey, good luck.

SPEAKER_02 43:57

You know, I mean, and then in those days, you know, there. was you know, ten miles was a bar and a restaurant and stuff. You could have just gone out to dinner and waited until the place was closed.

SPEAKER_03 44:07

It wasn't like you driving by anybody checked to see which cars were in town.

SPEAKER_02 44:12

Mike Alex did that one time to, I think Les Catholic, but when they were high school kids, they were one of them got the one of them was coming back from Whitehorse and was stopped out there and Marty was out there, you know, giving him the third degree being a hard guy or something and one of their friends comes up and says, Well did you get all the stuff in Canada, you know? Marty Marty shook his buddy down for like 45 minutes or something. And you know, Les was like, oh thanks a lot, you know.

SPEAKER_06 44:41

So what there's everything until what was it, 75 or seven 74 that the school burned?

The Old School Fire And Gym

SPEAKER_06 44:49

72?

SPEAKER_02 44:51

Let's see. I graduated in 71 so it was right after that. It was yeah it must have been just right you know college was I was done with college in 74. So yeah it had to be right after that. When the when the school burned was you know all the stuff was stored all the stuff for the new school was stored in the gym at the old school for the construction. So it was literally packed with stuff and when it you know got caught on fire the guys who broke in went through the door on the corner by the was right into the gym but it was the corner on the towards the library and stuff. And they broke in that door well all the light switches are at the other end of the gym you know out in the hallway kind of thing. So they were lighting matches to get through the gym to see and the stuff it was full of everything paper products you know and so somewhere along the line that caught on fire and those guys were down in the basement in the locker room in the shower catching a shower or something like that and then decided that the whole place was on fire by then and just ran out you know and stuff.

SPEAKER_06 45:55

So so what what was that like going to the old school? Because I've heard you know it had the the the smaller gym you had the well you had the balcony over on the top and everything.

SPEAKER_02 46:05

Yeah and you know you played ball right you were basketball player from the time we were young there and then on the on the wall towards let's see the gym ran sideways this way so the the one basket was on the side towards third avenue there. And Schnobbel's was snobble lumber and hardware right yep and so and the post office was down there. And so everybody from the school and all the snobble kids and everybody else Doris Ward lived there in one of the apartments everybody pretty much migrated back and forth across the street because there wasn't any you know you brought your brown paper bag lunch in your locker or you went over and hung out with Irma while she was feeding all the kids or something everybody went back and forth but the door on that side was the main entrance to the gym too so you went in and you went kind of in and then down to the lower section where the gym was and the shop and the classrooms and the locker room for the team was on the right there. And when you got in there you know there was the upstairs balcony where people could throw stuff off but there was hardly any room on the other side of the gym so the scores box and stuff was 12 feet up on the wall mounted there and there was a ladder that went up really up there and you could be up there overlooking the gym and stuff and then there was enough room for the team to sit on that one side of the gym. But then the whole town was facing you know the other way you know and stuff. And then that one end towards the school and was the stage and so there was just a small stage and then you know the band played and the cheerleaders practiced there and everything else but then you went downstairs to the basement where the locker room was underneath the long part and stuff.

SPEAKER_06 47:51

But what are some of your what are some of your favorite memories of playing? Well you know there Was it trips or what?

SPEAKER_02 47:58

Oh no there were some great ones there you know that plus you know City League played there too of course and in those days when till I was out of high school the high school team got to I mean not only did we have intramural teams where we had four teams freshman sophomore junior senior but the teachers had a team too. So your dad and when your dad was teaching you know um PE and stuff and US history which was an interesting concept to learn US history from Dave you know but that whole time I when he when I was in seventh and eighth grade I was in his classes and then when I got ninth and tenth grade Jerry Loomis and I and Paul Potter would go down and come in for seventh and eighth grade PE and help him coach those guys. Really? So but you know we were doing gymnastics and the rest of the stuff we got mini tramps the little you know four foot square with that first you know maybe in my sophomore year or something like that. So we were putting him in the gym in front of the basketball hoop and spreading out the wrestling mats underneath and Robert Burlet could take a quarter and take it off the top of the backboard. Off the mini tramp? And yeah off the very top of the board you know and stuff. And so we were going up and people were dunking behind their back and stuff and Robert went up one time and hooked his shoulder on the edge of the rim and laid him out flat and came all the way down to the mat like that after that they said we couldn't use the mini more luckily the mat was there and he landed really flat so he was okay but he didn't hop right up or anything.

SPEAKER_03 49:33

Oh I bet not dang.

SPEAKER_06 49:35

But so you you had my dad so tell you were a sophomore then and then well he was still teaching all the way through high school when I was there.

SPEAKER_02 49:44

Was he yeah I thought he quit in 69 was his last year teaching it could have been yeah he might have he also you know when he first started out he started out his his extra laboring business you know besides being a school teacher and he did cement the first year and I so I started doing my basketball court over there below my house when I was in high school and I got a bunch of dirt hauled in and my friends all came and we smoothed it all out and everything. And then I was gonna they were paving a couple of streets around town so I got a hold of the paving guys they were you know poor high school kids they would bring us a load so they brought us the load of the greasy rocks you know and spread it all out on top of the thing and ruined a pair of boots raking out the asphalt stuff and then they said they'd come back and cap it and roll it and stuff. And then they got behind by the weather and stuff for the season and told me they weren't going to be able to do it. So not only could we not play basketball on it, we couldn't use it for anything else? Yeah the whole season was going by so I talked to your dad and he said he was going to do cement and stuff and he hadn't done anything yet. So I said well what about this? And so he figured it all out and we did a bunch of the setup work and he came and poured the cement and of course he hadn't done it too much so he was going to pour three or four inches but the asphalt stuff was all rocks and lumpy and weird so it ended up taking more like what would have been six inches of cement or something. But I mean there's hardly a crack in that court today six inch slab for basketball court that's pretty heavy duty. Yeah and it's been there forever and doesn't you know just held up really good I had no idea he poured that slab. Yeah yeah it was back before we thought about signing the concrete you know and stuff like that but yeah it went for the whole time and stuff and then we had the basket we had the hoop on the end at one end and we just took you know we had lots of yellow cedar at AIA so we took an eight by eight of yellow cedar and just sunk it in the ground then they poured the cement around it and everything. And a few years back when my sister was with Randy and we got a new hoop and we were going to put up a metal stanchion you know and stuff like that we got we decided we'd take that out of the ground because it was it was at the end towards Soap Said's alley tower road there. So when you lost the ball and it started rolling down the hill if you didn't catch it you were down at the water pressing it up to the beach. Yeah. And so we were going to put a net up and all this and then they said well let's put you know put the hoop on the other end. So we decided we'd pull that post out and Randy got his loader and we just hooked onto it and pulled it right out of the concrete and everything. And it had been in the ground for 30 years from 69 to 99 and only about this much of the yellow cedar was decayed at all on the thing. Really? So we just cut that bottom four feet off and cut the post up in a couple of pieces and mounted an oil tank on it or something someplace you know because we went well that'll last forever you know absolutely but yellow cedar's not in the cedar family you know it's a cypress it's the second slowest growing tree in North America.

Yellow Cedar And Pacific Trade

SPEAKER_02 52:48

Got a piece in the shop over there that Tim June got on Prince of Wales Island when he was building his sailboat he went down and got lumber and it's like a four by four and you have to get a magnifier to count the rings in it but in four inches there's four hundred years. Really? Yeah. Holy cow so it's like don't there's standing trees in Southeast that are alive that are 1500 plus but there are standing trees that are dead that are like 2500 years old. Dang. But if you know that about it's impervious to marine bores and stuff. When the logs came out of Southeast back in the you know maru days of the Japanese lumber ships they shipped Japan Alaskan yellow cedar to Japan and sunk it in freshwater lakes just to keep it forever, you know but some of the Japanese temples were made out of that. It was used to be called camp for wood when sandalwood was the big trade from the Pacific. They took Alaskan yellow cedar on the sailing ships and used it for ballast to throw it in the bottom of the ship, sail to the Orient sell them the wood, fill it up with whatever goods they wanted to bring back well then the Chinese made those steamer trunks out of it and covered them with pig skin that are like the Russian footlockers. Those became the market and they came back to the Alaska and they sold them to Clinkett's instead of bentwood boxes. So lots of the old travel houses have a and the museum has a stack of those you know Russian tea chests and stuff. But I Clifford has one that's a small one like a footlocker and I opened it up and like if you buy lumber at a mill in Japan they cut the log into slabs like that and then they stack them up and tie them and when you buy a log you get all of them they match if you're putting furniture well if you take one of those boxes yellow cedar boxes and look at it from the inside and just you know cut it on like a cardboard recycling and folded it out it's all out of the same log. Same log. And you're like oh my God, you know how did they do that stuff? Yeah. But the you know that trade across the Pacific for the wood and stuff it was just I mean you can throw it in the hold like for ballast and doesn't matter if it gets beat up or anything somebody will still buy it and it's not going to rot or anything else. Yeah. But they used it in the temples in Japan and you know there to do wood finished floors they just take bath water because you bathe every day or whatever, you know, in a nice hot tub and they take that bath water and just wash the floors with it. Well the natural oil from your skin comes off in the water and ends up on the wood so that over you know 50 or a hundred years you get this finish on a floor that's supposed to be really slick. Huh I never knew that. Yeah I was like So where where'd

College Detours And Returning Home

SPEAKER_02 55:40

you go to college? I went to Oregon State because I was going to study oceanography because in high school Frank Holmes had been our teacher my senior year for s an extra science course besides chemistry and physics with Bob Henderson. And so we had oceanography and ecology and in the oceanography class it was spring term and we were out taking dissolved oxygen samples at Chilcoot Lake and and off the dock and stuff like that. Well at that time in 71 there was no information available on limnology or studying the components of an Arctic lake at all. And we were like well let's find out what the oxygen levels are and stuff.

SPEAKER_04 56:19

Plus it was a great excuse to be outside for April and May Yeah might as well go to Chilco.

SPEAKER_02 56:24

Yeah and stuff so but you know I thought well that's cool my cousin on my dad's side of the family was the first four year scholarship to MIT and he was in oceanography and he was the captain of the research vessel that Shane that was on loan from the university to Nova Scotia for research and I thought well if I could get a degree in oceanography I could call up cousin Bob and get a job on the boat you know so I went to Oregon State because they had one of the better oceanography departments University of Washington has a really good one but my aunt and my drum that's the thing I'm wondering about when you're talking about that Oregon State is anywhere close to the ocean well it's fairly I mean you think if we can have an oceanography department you'd be close to the ocean. Right well they had a ship in Astoria I only found out about somewhere well I get there and I find out that oceanography is a graduate student program and the first introductory class you can take is in your junior year. So I take it in my junior year just because I wanted to take it and I don't even buy the books and I get an A in the class you know because I go I already had this in high school what's the deal well then I find out that they've got their research vessel in Astoria and they're always hard up to get oceanography interested students to crew on the boat and for those three years I could have been going out there as part of the oceanography you know tag a workforce and hanging out and going out on the boat and everything and it was like well now I'm almost out of college and you're telling me this you know but the guy that was the researcher at at Oregon State the head guy there and the head guy at the University of Washington were probably my age now or something but they were totally into king salmon fishing. So they'd go out on the research boats with temperature probes and stuff and fish at different levels in the water column and test dissolved oxygen and everything. And they had it figured out by temperature and they were catching like huge king salmon. So they'd have parties and you'd hear about them where the guy came back with a 50 pounder you know and stuff. That's pretty slick when you can get your job to pay you to go out king salmon fish. That's what I thought. You know the guy that I took an engineering class to learn to run I'd done surveying here with the old transit and stuff around the fort because it was all Muncaster stuff, you know, and they're all lead plugs in granite boulders. You go into the fort with the right you know stuff dig down four feet find a granite boulder the size of a beach ball that's got a lead plug in it you know that's the survey marker 1904 survey stuff you know and so that was like doing that with my dad it was like treasure hunting it was like look right here in the road and we can go over there you know and then of course they have corner ties to those and they're off of like the big you know spruce tree on the corner or the corner of the barracks foundation and stuff. So some of them were real easy to find you just strike an arc from the corner of the granite foundation and one from that big tree and you're within a couple feet. So we dig that up. So at Oregon State I decided well I want to take a survey class from the engineering department for electronic distance measuring to use the fancy stuff. And they go well that's just for engineering students and I go well you know so I I look at the beginning survey class and I go in and talk to the guy and he's he was a Buick owner like the Buick I had at the time for a muscle car that he worked for USGS in Alaska in the summer doing survey stuff and as a spare job and flew around on helicopters. So he was totally into Alaska so he let me take the class past Fale. Okay. So I went in and just took it past Fale and learned to run the distance measuring stuff. Plus they had some really nice transits or theodolites and my friend and I got a theodolite that was a Higgler and Watts it's like it's like buying really great binoculars. You know they're like super great. And so then in the spring we would go out on the open quad campus and he'd take the stadia rod and I take the instrument and we'd take turns and we'd go around and just sh shoot a random pattern around the quad with all these women out there sunbathing. We weren't taking notes or doing anything. We were just looking with a great telescope and then he'd go over and chat them up you know and stuff. It was a he was redheaded and stuff so he had pretty good luck with scoring women that way. He'd always stick me up well here you hold the stick I'm gonna go talk to them you know wait a second here I need to go talk to some of them but yeah so Oregon State it was cool because it was they had some you know Northwest Coast classes in you know in uh Native American poetry and history and stuff well the only thing I found out about that was I go to the class on Northwest Coast stuff and answer too many questions in the first few days and pretty soon I'm doing half hour lectures once a week for the teacher and I'm thinking wait I'm paying money for this paying money to give the lectures and I'm telling you about this. But then he took us different places and he was I think he was the poet laureate at one time for Oregon or something. So he was kind of an interesting character but if you stood him up he looked like that Jerry Lewis character, the the goofy one you know he looked ju just like that and had a 50s bicycle he had his whole life with the big canvas thing for delivering newspapers on the front and stuff. And he rode that around town and campus the whole time so you could he was definitely an eccentric but he definitely knew his job as far as Northwest Coast stuff. He managed to get us out to some cool places and Leleuska who was a I think a Cherokee but had a whole carving program and you know was well respected in the native community and stuff we got to go out and see his whole you know pretty much like going to watch the Chilkat dancers or something you know.

Cruise Ships And Too Many Shows

SPEAKER_06 1:02:14

So at out of college did you come back to Haynes right away?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:17

Yeah I was you know I when my when I got to be in high school in 68, 69 was when my dad's job started with the court system but it was a halftime job. And then a few years into it it turned into the full-time job and then he needed a clerk and so he hired Mimi Greg and stuff for a while as a clerk but they did the state wouldn't cover that. So out of what he was getting paid as the magistrate he was paid he's having to pay her salary? Yeah for the clerk and she was just working part time but it was so he wouldn't have to be there all day long and he could do other stuff. So he was still dancing with us as the dancers and stuff like that. And then when the cruise ships you know got bigger into the 80s and 90s coming in we were dancing and when it got to be a nightmare I mean three times a week was nice Monday, Wednesday Friday you put up a poster you can deal with it and stuff but then it got to be you know four nights a week or five you know and only one day off and then we got to the multiple ships and the ships coming over during the day to go to the Scammon bank from Skagway and worst case scenario was 178 195 and 205 shows in a year. So 15 a week for 10 weeks straight. So on Wednesdays we were doing five shows three during the day and two at night and you're doing narration for it and telling the story before the dance and you know into the fourth show of the day you start looking at the crowd going did I already tell these people this and of course once it got that busy there were a couple times when my dad would start out with us you know telling the story and then he would start to play the song and he would play the wrong song and you'd look at the other dancers and the kids were just going like what do I do?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:02

I can't dance this is a slow one it's supposed to be a fast one you know or something.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:06

And then of course he'd realize it and stuff but at that point you start trading off to where used to be we'd trade off every other story or something like that. Pretty soon it was like no you do this morning I'll do this afternoon or something so you had better continuity and stuff. But but it's funny now you know for years every kid in town from six years old to twenty years old knew who I was because they were going is dancing this summer do I have a job and stuff and then after dancing was over in 2000 and stuff we were like I was like none of these kids even know who I am and then I realized that I could go to the school and do storytelling with take the masks and tell the stories of like the bear dance or the cannibal dance or something like that. And so Jordan had me coming into his classes for a number of years in a row for active listening for the students. I come in I tell the they take one kid out of the class and put him in the hallway. I tell the rest of them a story and then they bring the kid in from the hallway and one of the kids in the class volunteers to tell him what I tell him the story. And there have been a couple I mean a girl did it a while a couple years ago and I mean she was on the far side of 95% accurate. Dang. And I thought man if we were still dancing I would so hire her it was like but there's you know when you came back in the 70s it was to work with your dad with Alaska his job started getting to be more full time so I was basically going well you know I guess we'll and we got a bunch of totem projects in those early years of s in 74 and 75 we did a a whole bunch of stuff in 75 for the port of Seattle. And when it was still in Seattle we did a big pole and then the great big like six by eight foot panels for the front of Pure 48 and a bunch of collection of masks and stuff Inside. And some of those masks and stuff are still on the ferries today where they've been different cases and stuff. But oh a whole bunch of that stuff that was in Seattle didn't end up going to Bellingham when they moved the ferry terminal. I think people in the offices sort of hydrated. Taking that with them? Yeah. At the Sheffield Hotel in Juneau, we did a couple of polls, one that was in the lobby by the uh a howling wolf out of yellow cedar right by the elevator and one farther up. And somewhere along the line, both of those sort of disappeared as the hotel went from Hilton to Marriott or whatever it was, you know.

SPEAKER_06 1:06:39

And some of the you guys did one for Senator Stevens too, didn't you? Because I remember being back there, I think it was 2006. I went back to D.C. on behalf of the borough and he had it in his office in the Senator Bank.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:49

And then another one, and then we did one for Mike Gravel and stuff. And it's funny because a couple of those polls, they contacted us a few years back when Greg Horner was back east and had in Stevens' office and had Greg come in and look at it because it has a crack. Well, it got to crack when it first dried out in Washington, D.C. And there's nothing you can do about it. But he got to go in and get the high fives at senator and stuff. But the one from Gravelle, he then took when he left his office, and just a few years ago, he was downsizing because he's in his 80s or whatever and was moving somewhere. And my friend Terry Williams from Skagway got contacted and he ended up finding a market for it and selling it for him, you know. Okay. And we've had like three or four polls from the early 70s that have been around the country that just recently, besides the one that from Western Airlines that came back to the CIA down at the dock there, we've had a couple more that have popped up that, you know, people want to know. They wanted to send one of them to the museum. And and we did one for the campfire girls back in Illinois or someplace. But just recently I got contacted from some researcher in Washington, D.C. who's doing stuff on the campfire girls and going, where did this total board discover from? And it's funny what they've got for information about it. But one of the ones we did not too many years ago for that went to uh a guy in New in Taos, New Mexico, I think, had it in his yard, a 15-footer behind the pool, and a couple of Coco Pelle, you know, uh flute dancers and stuff from the southwest that were quartet bronze and iron and six foot tall on either side of it. Well, he died of cancer or something, and his wife ended up selling the pole. And a while ago, Dan Egoff's relatives were traveling through Idaho and went to an antique shop and the 20-foot sitting there? The poles laying in the, you know, literally like this. It's like took an they got a sign on it, and they obviously had contacted me somewhere along the line and knew something about it for the design, and but they didn't say they were an antique shop in Idaho, you know. So, anyhow, they've got it there, and so Dan's relatives send it to him and say, Hey, what do you think about this?

SPEAKER_03 1:09:02

It says it's from Haynes, you know. So I go, Well, that's where it ended up. I wonder how it got there.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:07

So then I get to the whole bottom of the little video they said, and it's for sale for $70,000, and we sold it for $35 originally. And I'm like, oh man, it's doubled in price. Doubled in price. But I told people that when we did a poll for James Earl Jones, I told them, I said, well, you know, what he when you bid on the poll and it takes a year and a half to finish it or something, by the time it's done, it's worth, you know, another $10,000 or whatever. I said, if you bought a Humvee, a year from now, your Humvee is going to be worth $10,000 less or more, you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:41

I said, so if you're buying artwork, you know, if you get lucky, it might be worth twice as much in ten years, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:47

So I've done that appraising some people's stuff. They'll bring in and say, Look, I have this carving of Leo Jacobs from 1965, what's it worth? I tell you, well, I can tell you what it would cost to replace it if we made you one like it now. But the fact that that's an artist that was well known and he's not alive anymore and stuff, then it could be worth twice that, you know. And so, because where are you gonna get one, you know, and sort of thing. But like the MDTA stuff, uh you know, they turned out tons of stuff from soapstone carvings to anything. There's a whole swath of it in the federal building in Juno. When you go in on the first floor, it's kind of like in the back room over there. And if you go in, there's a plaque on the wall that has numbers that tells you that number 47 is a Leo Jacobs Raven. And it's just a little sticker like this, and you have to wander around and find the little sticker, and you literally need a flashlight just about to walk through there. And I had no clue it was there. And Charlie Jimmy and I were down there to go up to the Social Security office upstairs. And when we came down, the guy at the elevator there, because you got to show your past to get into the building upstairs or something. And we come down and the voice yells at us, hey you guys from Haynes, you ought to go over there. We look around, and it was um Bolander who used to work at the station up here, and he recognized us and he's just yelling at us. So we went and looked, and sure enough, there's all this work there, little Leo Jacobs pieces and stuff, and some of the pieces, my parents have a couple of Leo's, an eagle and raven that's soapstone that's about that big and maybe that tall. You know, the damn thing weighs 40 or 50 pounds. Well, they've got a couple of them in Juneau that are bigger, you know, eight by eight or ten by ten, and this tall, and probably weigh eighty or a hundred pounds, and it's just sitting on a little display, but obviously nobody's packing it away, you know. But they had like auto cascos pieces and stuff carbs that I don't ever remember seeing. And you know, I mean, I saw them working, but I never actually looked at one of their pieces. And when Carl Wirt sold a bunch of his stuff, uh Sam McFeeders was helping with that, and they had an auto casco pool that was a small one there. And when Ermus Nobel had a collection of stuff, and you know, some of those you pick them up and they have a price of $65 in pencil on the base bottom, and you go, yeah, I should have bought this stuff then, you know.

Totem Poles Across The Country

SPEAKER_06 1:12:11

So at the height of uh Alaska Indian Arts, uh huh, how how many carvers, how many people were over there at the time? Because there's a there's a lot of people in Haynes that over the years that were working there at a younger age and stuff like that, your Ron Martins, your Don Hages. Oh yeah, no.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:30

I was sitting in literally in bed the other night playing these games. I figure if you're you know, if you if you work on your memory, it's supposed to stay there, right? And my memory was pretty good. And I started going through those early years of everybody, and you know, like Joe Hayes and Charlie Hayes that were and Tom and Sonny's dad, Thomas Williams Sr., all those guys were City League basketball players too. Jeff David and stuff. And like Jeff was one of the first older guys with the dancers because his mother was, you know, instrumental in giving us one of the Chilcap blankets that was made by Jenny Clinton so he could wear it with the dancers and stuff. But he was pretty much older than a bunch of us. And he worked with uh Bill Holm when Bill Holm came up in the early sixties and did the first totem pole, that's my dad's name pole. Um Jeff worked on the bottom of that with with uh Bill Holm and stuff. So unlike a lot of the later sixties carvings where all the chip carving is done with a chisel, Bill Holm hand ads with a D-ads, that bottom frog on there, which is you know, it's the difference on a scale of one to ten of the technique looking like a nine or a six, you know, or something like that. But we noticed a while ago, yeah, look at that. That was obviously some of his work and stuff. But I was counting up the other night going, you know, how many are there? And you know, just getting from their generation of Ed's Casco and Otto and everybody else, to the next one of the younger guys, which was Butch Sparks and Ron Martin and Clifford and Bill Thomas, and you know, those guys. Then you get to the next generation of, you know, Hagen was 18 when he started carving. But I mean his ability was just amazing even at that time. I I should pull him out sometime. I've got a sketchbook. He and my dad used to do flaming totemic designs on fifty-seven Chevies, drawing cars and stuff. Oh really? So yeah, I have at least a maybe a half a dozen of each of 'em, you know. Oh, yeah. Oh, you know, these guys would have been able to retire if they would have been doing that in the right decade, you know. And even the stuff we did when Nathan was working there in the sixties doing the soakscreen program. Well, Nathan, Clifford, um Butch Sparks, all of those guys went to um Santa Fe to the Art Institute there. They were the first Alaska natives that that went there, and my dad sent them all there basically, got them hooked up, and all of them did artwork there. And Nathan did a lot of graphics and stuff, and he was already a a carver from his uncle's and stuff. Then when he came back for the manpower program, he taught the soap screen printing there. So a bunch of people like Clifford's sister Christine Martin and stuff, she learned to do block printing and stuff in those days. And then in 69, Jenny Clonott did a weaving workshop there. And Georgie Hotch, Georgie Lewis, and uh Lorraine and Alice Casco and a bunch of those girls were all young then and took those weaving classes too. And that was like, you know, 69 to 86. So that was like um, you know, fifteen years before Jenny taught her last workshop at Raven House and stuff. I got to do I was her slave because she w she adopted me when I was young, so and gave me my name and stuff, the other women from the wolf house. But when she did that, um I ended up being her slave for that workshop. And so I did all the mountain goat hides where you wash them in the claw foot tub up there in six and seven where Wayne's building is now, you know, when AI was there. You wash the hides in White King's soap because it doesn't take the lanolin off the wolf. Then you rinse them in hot water and roll them up and stack them in the back room and keep putting your hand on them every day for a few days until they're heated up pretty good, and then you can take the wool off. And she told me a couple of of the techniques for that. And I talked with Clarissa, her last apprentice for a while, about it. But there's, you know, she always said you have to take the the wool off to hide the way the goat walks. Well, that's from front to back. So you just start rolling it and one way it comes loose and the other way it's a nightmare.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:47

And I think, you know, maybe that needs to be written down some way for all these people weaving.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:52

But you s you can use for the yellow dye, you use the wolf moths from up in the Yukon and also for some of the blues, but they use either baby urine or pregnant women's urine to as a mortant, which you know sets the color in the wool or something like that. Well, it turns out that the the yellow moss from the Yukon that you know would have baby urine in it and stuff, they used it's an antiseptic and they use an antibiotic and they use it for to keep from getting diaper rash. So the reality of having it there soaked with urine and then using the urine for a weaving project made perfectly good sense, you know. But for doing that, they were she wanted me to go around the neighborhood there in the fort, because I was supposed to know everybody with this quart jar and see if I could collect it. So I'm like, you know, I'm like how old how old were you when she's asking you to go around the next one? Well, 69, so I would have been like 16 or 17. 16 years old, 17 years old. So I'm going around the neighborhood with this jar, and we had one of those old enamelware urine things that they have in the hospital that was left over from the hospital days or who knows what. And my dad was always going joking, just take this with you. No, no. No, no. And needless to say, I went around and just asked people if anybody, you know, but it's pretty weird where you're a 15-year-old going, Are you pregnant? Do you have a new baby? It's like, this little old lady wants this, you know. And I was like, sure, she does, you know.

SPEAKER_06 1:18:22

So you've been through through your dad starting that, it seems like he made a really close connection with the clink community when he got here and really dove into that, and you've continued that over the years.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:34

Yeah, when he when he first, you know, delivered some babies in Klukwan and stuff. Well, basically, when there was no doctor, he was, you know, he did the you know, he went with Marty Cortesup to take Forrest Young out after the bear mauling and all that. And then, of course, that got written up in the book, so then everybody hears about it. I've got a copy of that magazine. Well, you have you ever heard the tape?

SPEAKER_06 1:18:55

I haven't heard the tape.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:56

They have the tape at the Museum of Forrest Young. Of Forrest Telling the Story? Oh, yeah, it's really great. And I think maybe they they played it from me and we comment one time. I was on the air, not with Forrest, but maybe with Marty and somebody else, Cortis and somebody else, but they were talking about it. And of course, I'd heard the story from my dad, but you know, early on, like when they were blasting for the tank farm out there in 55 or whatever, it's all rock on that point pretty much. So they were blasted to make it flat for the tanks and stuff. Well, you're blasting, you know, you're not digging down very far when you're blasting. So shrapnel is an issue, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:32

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:33

And so in the course of blasting out there, you know, the shrapnel caught some one of the blasters running away in the back of the head and killed him colder than a rock. And so they show it. Yeah, so they show up at my parents' house when they got a pickup truck with a gem top on the, you know, pickup truck on the back with a bunch of firewood loaded in there like a half a quart or something, and the guy's body thrown in on the top. And they're bringing him to my dad's house to see if they think if he thinks he's dead, you know. So they go out there and my dad's looking in there, and you know, obviously the guy's been dead for a while, kind of thing, you know. So my dad just looks in the thing and he's not about to crawl in there. So he just pushes the guy's pant leg up and checks for a pulse in his leg, you know, and there's nothing. And so he turns to those guys and says, No, he's dead. And I've crawled in the truck on the other side and I have a hold of the other guy's leg, and I go, Yep, he's dead.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:26

So then my dad tells that story for the next decade, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:30

I don't really remember it, but I remember him telling the story all the time. But there were times where people would show up, like at dinner time, a guy showed up one time with a hatchet stuck in his shin, literally just right through his Levi's. She was your dad kind of the doctor until Yeah, until Phil Jones, the one who stand, yeah. And he came in 59, I think. Mm-hmm. And lived up there, you know, at the top of the fort there. Did was your dad a medic in the Army? Or what did how did he get the Partly from Boy Scouts and all that. But, you know, also, you know, he'd done when he was in the Army early on, he did, you know, sports medicine stuff for boxing and all kinds of stuff like that. But I think he was just, you know, willing to do it too. But I remember when the guy showed up with the hatchet sticking out of his shin there at like six o'clock or something, and my mom going, you know, it's coming dinner time, you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:27

Well, I think it came when the hatchet was like mom, you know.

SPEAKER_06 1:21:31

He wasn't waiting. It was like, but when's gonna be dinner time so I can stick his head away from it?

SPEAKER_02 1:21:35

People would come in to get stitched up for something simple, and my dad's missing three fingers and an eye, and you're looking at the people and they're like, oh man, you know, we just put some duct tape on it and get me in the hospital, you know.

SPEAKER_06 1:21:47

Would he just do that at the house then?

SPEAKER_02 1:21:49

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:21:50

He'd just bring him into the house and stuff.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:51

Not only do I still have his doctor bag with forceps and everything else in it, I have the, you know, the the state was giving him morphine to like give the people in an emergency.

SPEAKER_06 1:22:03

And so I have the it's gonna come to the even without a medical degree or anything, just because he's helping their like, here's some morphine?

SPEAKER_02 1:22:09

Oh yeah, no, they and it's a little booklet that's like a a ticket you would get for driving too fast. It's got a or a bank statement, it's got a little stub on the end and a tear-off thing, and the tear-off thing would go on a tag on the person's toe when they shipped them out, and then the rest of it says, you know, I gave them four CCs at four o'clock or whatever. Yeah. Well, I have that book, and the pages from Forrest Young are still the stubs are still in. Really? Yeah. So I looked through and go, well, that's a lot of morphine. But Forrest Young came in back when we were like maybe even your dad's class in seventh grade or something. He'd come in to this, you know, show and tell in the morning sometime, and he'd come in and you know, all the boys are in junior high going, and he'd come in and peel off his shirt, you know, and he had three ribs bitten out and claw marks all over, and you're just, oh my god, you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:58

Then of course you get to read the story and print, too, you know.

SPEAKER_06 1:23:01

But that was uh I don't when did when did Forrest pass away? Because I don't remember ever knowing him as a kid. I we're we're really close with Retha, but I never knew Forrest.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:12

Retha was just really sweet, you know, except when she was mad at you at the post office. But other than that, you know.

SPEAKER_06 1:23:18

Yeah, if you were on her good, she was she was an angel, but if you did anything wrong at the post office, her and Minto and Edith would love you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:27

No, I have a well, you know, I still remember when Bill Hartman first was the being the postmaster and they had the dedication of the new building, he said that the phone number was 2930, which I think it still is. Yep. Because that was Minto and Edith's ages and said, I always remember because my mom was 29 for a couple decades, and then she was 39 for a few more, you know. Yeah. But yeah, it was like, but Maretha, I would go in when I had my motorcycle dealership in the early 60s, I'd drive to the post office and check the mail. Well, if you got a slip, she was making you take the box.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:03

Well, when it was a huge box and it wasn't for me, I was leaving it for my parents. Uh-huh. Not a chance. I drove home a couple times with like a case of toilet paper sized box on the handlebars of my motorcycle trying to get home, you know, couldn't even see around it because you weren't willing to argue with her about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:20

Yeah, no, that would that would have been a losing argument. Yeah. You're not winning that one. And Forrest was kind of, you know, he had a really sort of not a deep voice, but a little gravelly voice, but he was kind of quiet. So, you know, he he and Marty would sit around and you know, gab and stuff like that. But otherwise, you know, I remember him responding to Omar and I talking to him, but I didn't see him that much.

SPEAKER_06 1:24:43

Yeah. So what so be time besides with with AIA, you guys are making, you got people over there that are doing um carvings, yeah. Both the wood for totem poles, plaques.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:57

Well, you know, like Sue Clayton and Brenda Katzick, who was Brendan Schote, was in my class in high school, and Greg Horner and Wayne, um, both of those guys, both Greg and Wayne are born in 57, and when they were like 15 years old, they were like not real interested in what was going on at school. And Norm Smith Sr., who was into scouting and was the fifth grade teacher and stuff, he talked to my dad and said he thought those guys, you know, should come over and learn to do some artwork. And so basically, the same as a whole lot of people after school at three o'clock, you go to AIA for two hours and sweep up chips and hobnob with the carvers and maybe get a chance to do something else. And those guys that were interested like that started working on carving and stuff. But like Sue worked in, they had the office, you know, education program at the school. And Sue came over to be like the to learn to do office work and secretarial. The same with Brenda and uh Elaine Alex went and worked at DMV for as a part of the school job, and then you know, retired from there 30 years later or something. But there were a bunch of people that sort of went around the community from the school and did that. And the ones that came to AIA, most of the women ended up silver carving because as their life developed and they had kids, it was something you could leave on the counter in the kitchen and deal with the kids and then sit down and where if you're wood carving and you're you've only got an hour here and there, it's just you know it's like building models, it's never gonna work. You're

Friendship Pole Economics Get Real

SPEAKER_02 1:26:31

gonna have that.

SPEAKER_06 1:26:31

So speaking of the wood carving, the the friendship hole at the school, was that AIA? Yeah. Because I remember when that was first put up in what is it, 79 or 80 over the original school?

SPEAKER_02 1:26:41

76 of the old school. And then uh we did the original ones in the museum, right? It's like this big, and it was done in 27 by uh James Watson from Sc from Klukwan as a gift to Lib Hakinen's father, who was the U.S. Marshal, because he'd brought broke and was friends, but he'd brokered a piece between the clans in Kluckwan. So they made that poll with both Eagles and Raven clans on it and white people to be the friendship poll. So we decided to do it for in 76 for the school and stuff, and when we did it there, and Brendan Larson and his wife had written the book Proud Shilcat, working with Austin and Lillian and and Mar and uh Mildred Sparks and a bunch of the elders, and put that book together as a study guide, and they got a ten thousand dollar award or grant to do that. And they donated the ten thousand dollars back and we did for the pole. For the poll. And we carved the pole, which is a forty footer for ten thousand bucks that's got, you know, a thousand hours in it, you know. And you go, Well, that's okay, I guess, you know, for ten dollars an hour, you know. But like the w pool down at the waterfront, the uh Eagle Family pool there at the lookout and stuff like that, that's a sixteen foot pole. Many years later and it has a thousand hours in it in 16 feet. So, you know, as my dad used to say, Well, we're not making a piece of jewelry, and by the time we got to those and the pole we did for James Earl Jones and Pilchuk Glasgow, we start going, No, we are making a piece of jewelry. It's like the Pilchuk pole is probably a forty thousand dollar, twenty-foot totem, and it's got forty thousand dollars worth of glass in it, too, you know. And then you get to it nowadays and you start going, well, uh, you know, a 40-foot pole at $5,000 a foot is a $200,000, it's a whole different ball game compared to the early ones when they used to be the pole.

Building The 132-Foot Totem

SPEAKER_02 1:28:39

We did the in 69 when we did the pole that went to Expo 70, the tallest totem in the world, and is now in cake. That 132-foot pole, that was a $10,000 deal for $132 feet a. $132-foot pole? Yeah, it's still there, but they broke it, they lost the top of it a while ago. But it went on the Japanese lumber ship from here to Nagoya in Japan on the deck because it was so big, and they put it up at the Alaska Pavilion there for Expo 70, and then and then we carved it in 69, and then it came back after that to the village of Cake because we consulted with them originally, they used to have 106 or 108 poles there or something. Yep. And back in the missionary days, they burned them up. Oh, burnt them. Well, the missionary didn't burn them. The last sh in depending on who you ask, but the last story says that the last shaman in that area burned the poles up because the missionary's whole vibe was such that he didn't think it should be around. And that's happened in other villages where people have literally burned up regalia and shokat blankets and stuff because those were the old ways and they should be dead. Oh man. And you just go, oh man, you know. Yeah. Dang. But that pole's, you know, they put guy wires on it when it at 110 feet or something in Japan because of the typhoons, and it survived all of that. But a few years back when we had that massive storm, it broke like, and I don't think they had guy fires off, but they broke like a good chunk off the top. But we did that one. Jenny Lynn and everybody worked on that one, and like 14 carvers, and we had we had 88 days to do it in '69 before it left on the ship. So it was just jamming on it and stuff.

SPEAKER_06 1:30:30

Holy cow, 88 days to do 132 feet. That's a lot of carving.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:34

Yeah, and there's a section near the top where it's not carved, and then it's carved at the top. But then it was the tallest totem pole in the world, and a few years later, Washington or British Columbia or something. Somebody put up a 160-foot pole, you know. But it's got like 50 or so feet that aren't even carved. Aren't even carved out. Wait a second. But when they cut that pole, Murkowski was economic development for the state or something at the time. He was promoting, you know, economic development. And they went out. Yeah, they went out to cut the logs and stuff like that. And the first thing they did was, you know, to get a the tallest pole in the world was cut these big spruce trees. And then we told them we're not carbon spruce trees. We're not carbon spruce. So they went back to cut, and they cut a couple of 160 footers or something like that. But like when you take your fishing pole out, it hit the ground and snap the top off, you know. And so after doing that a couple times, they ran some cables between trees and the loggers fell it through the cables and it slowed it down and didn't snap the top off. So they put, and it was about seven feet longer, so it was probably 140 feet, but the butt swell was hollow and real big, and we cut that off. But when they put it on the barge, the barge listed like 30 degrees. And so then they put a 110-foot yellow cedar on the other side. Uh-huh. And the bottom of that 110-foot pole is the friendship pole at the school. Really? Yeah. And then, you know, the next section up was still big enough to do something. Do something else with it. Yeah. But the early pictures, we took the pictures from the top of the tribal house, I think, maybe looking down, because you know, it wasn't like we could stand it up to take a picture of it. But there's some, but the all the villa the elders from Cake are on one side, and the elders from here, the carvers, and then the elders from Klukwan are all on the other side in this photograph that we've got. That's a pretty nice one, of course.

SPEAKER_06 1:32:28

So how did a hundred and thirty-two-foot pole? You're carving it at Yeah. How do you how do you get that?

SPEAKER_02 1:32:38

The fat end of the pole. Well, there's a logging truck and a big 966 loader. And one of one of them's got the base, and the truck is carrying most of the rest. And then, you know, but there's a picture at the bottom of Main Street of it going by, you know, or something like that. But you know, we we were always a little worried about it because you get it out there, and then the you know, the local longshoremen that are half gassed and hung over out there by the end of them loading the whole boat, plus the Japanese crews there that are lots better on the winches, but the longshoremen won't let them do the work, you know, and so and no communication going between the languages either.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:19

You know, we're out there going, ah, don't break it.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:21

But they finally got it set on the pole and or on the deck, and we were like, oh good, you know, because it was so big we weren't gonna cover it like we would normally, you know, build a crate around it. So we just took thin sheets of plywood and laid, I think, fiberglass, you know, bat insulation over it, and then put the plywood on there, and then just got the bander from AML or whatever, and banded it over the top. So you could at least weren't gonna whack it, you know,

Shipping Carvings To Japan

SPEAKER_02 1:33:48

or something. But then we did a in 75, we did a whole collection of artwork for the Little World Museum of Man in Japan, and one of and a 45-foot pole and four interior poles and the inside screen, and then the front wall of a tribal house that's got a John Hagen, two leaping whales on it, like this. But they sent us the wood for it for the project from Tetchikan or wherever, in their rough-cut red cedar three by twelves, just absolutely beautiful, clear grain, you know. So we had this whole wall and we made the design, and we were going, well, we're gonna have to lay this down and draw it on there. We waited till it was dark and we stood it up against the porch at AIA there like this. Yeah. And we went outside with a and drew a design small, went outside with a big overhead projector from the school, that giant thing they had, yeah, and projected it right on there in the dark, and then drew around it with red, blue, and black sharpies to line it on. Well, once it was done in daylight, if you stood back 50 feet, it looked like it was there. We were like, oh my god, look at that.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:52

We should have drawn it in in color before, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:54

So then when it got it all carved, we carved, you know, it's we could do one side and the other, then you just take the matching pieces and put them together like that. And so we put cardboard in between them and stacked them carved side face to face, and then piled them all up and bundled it all up and banded it. And then we took it out to the same kind of deal, loading it on the ship. They were going to put it down in the hold, and they got it up, and the local longshoreman and the winch operator from the ship were arguing away, and it was swinging like this, and we were like, and all of a sudden it started to spin, and the guy with the pike pole poked it, and it clumped it into the side of the rail on the boat, and all the bands popped, and the whole thing poured into the bay between the dock at Lou and the boat, just chuw. And we're like, you know. So we get a rope and a skiff, and we're fishing all the pieces out, and there were some big dents, and none of the dents were on the carved side at all of any of it. And we stacked it all back up and then roped it up instead of those metal bands and let them put it on the boat. But they could just see the steam coming out of my dad's ears when that thing went in the water, you know. We were like, oh my god, because it was already, you know, it had to go on that boat because that was always the deal, you know. How are you gonna ship it to Japan otherwise, you know?

SPEAKER_06 1:36:14

So what was the how when was the last time that there's anything at AIA, there's like a major carving project?

Big Projects And The 9-11 Shock

SPEAKER_02 1:36:23

Right, towards the end there in 2008, nine, we did we had James Earl Jones pole, and Wayne was doing one that went to the um the hatchery or something in Juneau, and we had the pole for Pilchuk in there. So we had three 20-foot polls side by side, two of them are projects, one of them Wayne's, but like we never had that much value in one spot at a time in there, and we'd just done the remodel there, and we decided to have a party for everybody that worked on the building. So on the second floor, we had a a dance there with the local band on there, and then we had the kitchen and one of the bedrooms as booze in one and food in the other and stuff. So we'd have this New Year's party for all our work that we'd done that year, and nothing was scheduled for New Year's in town that year. And somehow word got out, and we had 108 people there, including the mayor and stuff, you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:21

And we're like, do we have more food or do we have more booze and stuff?

SPEAKER_02 1:37:24

Well, that whole building, like the rest of them, is all built with, you know, old Northwest timber from clear fur, you know. So they're all solid beams, and it's like, you know, 40 the downstairs rooms 40 feet long by 25 feet wide, and upstairs it's the same width. Well, the first floor is built seriously, you know, for a floor load of a couple hundred pounds, maybe. But you don't know about the floor up above it. And I'm sitting in there and the band is playing it, and the crowd is leaping up and down, and you go down and look at the three totem poles, and the lot the ceiling's dropped in there and has fluorescence on it. And you could just, it looked like it was moving this far. Oh man. And so I went upstairs and counted the number of people and started doing average weight and stuff, going, oh my God, you know, you know how much it would cost if everybody went through the floor and ruined three poles, plus all the lawsuits, you know. But and it was, you know, it would have been okay if it was slow music, but a bunch of those people were younger and they're into the jumping up and down, headbanging crowd, you know, and I'm like, no, play a wall so it's slow, you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:30

Let's twist and shout, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:33

But yeah, so we had those polls in there and did that poll for Pilchuk, which was a big deal and was gonna be a super big, you know, starter because Pilchuk, when we did that poll for them, they have a big fundraiser every fall where they raise like a million and a half, and that supports their programs for the next year and everything. Well, the year we did that poll, the dedication for the poll was like two days before or after 9-11, right? Okay. So they made like $400,000 that year instead of a million six or something, and they were making a whole 35-millimeter film about it and everything. Well, it ended up taking a couple years for them, they had the film done, but they hadn't produced it and stuff. So they finally did, and it became it came out on DVD and stuff. But when they did that, the f the film crew flew in here on a helicopter one morning and zoomed a picture of the fort and the parade ground, and then you know, got all these pictures. Well, that was right in the middle of the helicopter issues here, and people were going, what's the helicopter doing flying over town and stuff?

SPEAKER_03 1:39:36

And we're going, well, it's really publicity, but you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:40

But once we finished that one and we did James Earl Jones' poll, which I realized the other day that after he's died, now we don't have pictures of that one in place. But obviously, it's not going anywhere. I just have to contact the people there and say we'd like a picture of that one. We got pictures before we did it. But then we did a poll for Camp Top Ridge in 2009, which is uh Harlan Crowe's state in uh Pauling, New York.

Raising A Pole At Topridge

SPEAKER_02 1:40:08

No, Pauling is where James Earl Jones is. It's in uh well Topridge was originally a 400-acre par estate that belonged to Marjorie Merriweather post of post-serial fame. And she was married to the Russian ambassador in the twenties. And so they built a couple of extra buildings there. There's a stone church with a copper steeple on it, like a Russian steeple, and a whole bunch of other buildings. Plus, the lodge is like um Mount Hood or something, it's one of those late 1800s giant lodge. Well, it was 400 acres, and she had it, and Harlan Crow bought it, and he donated 200 acres to the state of New York to be a state park, and that's one side of Upper Saranac Lake, and then he owns the other side in the lake and his estate there of 200 acres. And so he called up and said that you know he was interested in in an authentic clinkett totem pool because he's got clinkett friends and he wanted to do something to represent that. And his name is Crow, so we said, Well, there's some stories that use crows. I said in the Yukon the raven is the crow and the eagle is a wolf, and in Southeast it's the eagle and the raven. But it used to be eagle and it used to be raven and wolf in southeast too. So I took Ida Calmegan, one of the Dishitan elders from Tagish, and my friend Harold Jacobs, who's the cultural resource specialist for Clinken Hyde Injuno, and then Charlie Jimmy Sr. and his brother Tommy, and uh my sister went to hang out with Ida, I think, and then TJ went with his dad, because his dad wasn't really carving or anything then, but he was getting old and he wanted to go, so he said he'd buy his own ticket and stuff, so we just covered the rest of his expenses, and he shuffled along with us. So we went and put up the pole there, did a dedication ceremony and everything. And Harlan Crows had his friends all come for that. Well, when we went there to put the pole up and stuff, the lodge is like huge, and it's got a big rock fireplace at one end, and I think a you know, canoe from someplace hanging from the ceiling, other, you know, 1800 stuff. But at the end, towards the big fireplace, there's three pedestals with like really old, really outrageous plains Indian headdresses there with the long eagle feather capes on it and some other stuff. And he's in the libraries, so the library at SMU, Texas, is named after him, and he's on the board of uh trustees for the Bush Presidential Memorial Library and stuff. So there's ephemera from that around. I look up on the wall there, and there's an old like Eskimo Parker, but it's not very fancy, it's just kind of black and white, and it's in a glass case on the wall, and it's kind of dirty and funky looking, and I go, Well, what's that? And then he answers me, and I notice that next to it there's a photograph on the wall. He said, Oh, that's the parker that Admiral Perry wore to the North Pole. He said, I bought it when the Smithsonian deassessed it. And I thought, oh, sorry, I asked you. But he's got a boathouse down there that's multi-story with residents above it, and the boats pull in in the in front, and it's all stone and goes out on the lake, and he's got like uh those mahogany crisscrafts from the 50s. He's got a small fleet of those, and when his friends send their kids there for summer camp or something, he lets kids drive those around on the lake. And they're all converted to electric so they don't make any noise. And if they get beat up, he's got the John Carlson of the neighborhood that comes in every winter and redoes them. Redoes all the boats. But he has one that's like maybe has enough of a dining table for 12 people on the back. It looks like the African Queen from Humphrey Bogart. Yeah. And when he has guests, they'll motor around on the lake and have dinner and stuff. And it's electric too, you know. And I'm like, oh, I think your neighbors must be going, oh my God, you know, but well, they must like it if it's electric. He's not making any noise. The whole thing was really nice, you know, and his taste in art is like everywhere. We're walking on a trail out there past the church and the woods just taking a break, and there's a a bronze of Gandhi, and it's only from the waist up, and it's coming out of the ground, and if it was intact and full size, it would be 10 or 12 feet tall. Jeez. And so you're just walking along through the shrubbery in the woods, and you turn your head and go, Oh, there's Gandhi coming out of the ground. You walk around one place, and there's a like a mountain market where they have a little rail with a bunch of cut-out ravens on it. We go buy one out in the woods there, and it's got like literally bronze ravens, like a half a dozen of them on a log, just, you know, they look totally lifelike. You're like, wait a second, you know? And you when you come in on the made road, there's an old like 39 Ford or something pickup truck kind of looking like it's resting away there, and a guy leaning on it, you know, like you'd be leaning on it. Well, the guy looks like a bronze statue, and then the truck is just painted to match. Uh-huh. And I said, Wow, that's something. Who's that? And he said, Well, that's the architect that designed the Russian chapel and the other thing. And he died a few years back, so we put this up as a monument to him. And I said, Oh, nice bronze sculpture. And he said, Well, you he said, the truck is bronze too. And we were like, Oh, you know. When we we put the pole up, we had to put it on a uh a barge back down, put it on this platform they'd put on a skiff, and you know, like a 16-foot lund or something. We got this 35-foot pole balanced on the thing. We take it out in the lake and turn it around and back it up to a spot where they built the platform for it, and it's all cement and welded and stuff, and they've built it, they've inset a piece of steel into the back of it with a hinge, and you just go ahead and slide the pin in and then stand it up, and they weld it there and you're done, you know. Yeah. Well, when they're raising it up, they're raising it up with a cable that runs through the woods and hooks to one of those winches on a unimod, uh-huh, which is parked over there. Well, when I look at the pictures afterwards, the skiff is here, the pole is like this getting lifted up, and I'm right there.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:26

And I'm thinking, maybe that wasn't so good.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:28

Yeah, maybe that wasn't the best place to be. Dave Svenson posted a picture from the old days of the pole when we were putting it up at the elementary school, the friendship pole, and I'm up on the ladder on the back of it where it's got the pipe there, and the pole is over it like this, and I'm up there to fasten it on at the top, and it's been set there by the crane, and nothing is connected anymore. The pole is there, and I've got my arm around it and a rope in one hand, and I'm thinking, this is not really a good idea.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:57

And of course, you never notice then, you only notice 50 years later. Sends you the photo and you go, Oh, you're still alive, you know.

SPEAKER_06 1:47:05

Yep. So, what besides AIA, what other with the with Port Chilku Company, you got the fort and surrounding property

Landmark Grants And Barracks Restoration

SPEAKER_06 1:47:16

and everything. Over the years, uh some of that's been sold off and everything.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:20

Yeah, in 72 we did the we ne uh got nominated as a national on the National Register for Historic Site. And then in 78 we got to upgrade it because we went through the centennial year of 76 when everything was kind of rolling at the federal level. And then in 78 we got it uplift lifted to a national landmark, which is a whole different status all the way around. There's like 2,500 in the country now, there were about 2,400 then, 12 of them, 1,200 in private and and hands, and 1,200 in state and federal hands. But there's like 50 in Alaska, and the money that goes to national landmarks gets divided up by state population, and then gets and then you get to Alaska and you've got 50 of them beside. So your slice of the pie starts to evaporate along the way. But in the late 70s, when we first got the nomination, I wrote a grant that was a three-year restoration project on the barracks buildings, and we were it was a uh $210,000 project, so which nowadays wouldn't build you anything, you know. But it was $105,000 was uh the half from the feds, and $105,000 we had to match. Well, some of it gets to be in kind for your you know, labor and admin and stuff like that, and then we were salvaging bricks from the chimneys we were taking down and selling them back to ourselves for a buck apiece to repair buildings, and that gets to count as in kind. So we were doing that while w the state had a historic district loan program, and so we borrowed $50,000 from them to match some of the federal money, and then the rest of it we'd have to pay along the way, we figured. Well, the first year we applied, we were thinking we're on a roll, and then the legislature created that loan program, but the first year they didn't put any money in it. And so when we were we're at the top of the list for the applications, and there was no money to get. So the next year we're still at the top of the list, so we got 50,000. And so then they make you get insurance on both of the buildings and 25,000 on each one in case something happens, they get their money back and you're screwed, you know. So then we do like a year and a half of the project and spend about 170,000 on the one building, redoing the windows and the porches and the chimneys and stuff, and then the newspaper had their fire and burned the building down, right?

When The Restored Barracks Burned

SPEAKER_06 1:49:47

And that was the one you'd done the work on?

SPEAKER_02 1:49:48

Yeah. And of course the fire trance went through the building really fast because once it started on the first floor in the print shop and got up through the second floor, we had it stripped down to the stud wall. the whole length of the building and had lowered the ceiling just framing to the tops of the windows to get rid of a 12 foot ceiling, you know, drop down to 10. So there was all new wood and all exposed old wood. So once the fire got up through there it just like raced through the building. And we had twelve thousand dollars in that time, but we had all the fiberglass insulation and the vis screen stacked in there too. So it melted that into a weird glob that dropped all the way to the basement, you know and Bill Hartman went over there after the fire and he was going to salvage the lead from the linotite machine, get it out of the basement, melt it down and all that. Nothing was there. Vaporized 2,000 pounds of lead because the whole foundation is granite block.

SPEAKER_04 1:50:45

And so it was literally an oven it was literally an oven at the bottom of the fire, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:50

And it lowered the fire lowered the Lily Lake by a foot and a half but poured like the hundreds of thousands of gallons of water on it for 11 hours or something.

SPEAKER_06 1:50:59

Ike Al was telling us wasn't it like 1.1 million gallons of that?

SPEAKER_02 1:51:04

Yeah it was something just ridiculous. Yeah I think 11 hours at 100,000 gallons an hour or something. And then of course after that whole fire I'm trying to recover at the end of the week and I'm the manager of the Chokat Center then. So I go back to the Chokat Center and when they had the fire they bypassed the treatment plant and the filter plant for the water to get as much water from the lake. Well the sprinkler system at the Chokat Center is a pressure sensitive thing and it's full of air but when the pressure dropped off on or changed on the water line it tripped the system at the Chokat Center. Oh see yeah which didn't didn't spray any water anywhere but flooded the whole system which takes me and one other person like a day and a half to reset. So 10 days after the fire I go over there to check back in at work and go, oh now a couple days with a couple people helping two more days of work I was talking with Mike Ward after his fire you know and he said you know literally right after it and he said oh yeah and I said yeah I know how you feel and he said oh that's right you do he said I said well my worst case scenario is the buildings are identical mirror images of each other and so when I go down to get something in the building if I go into a room and it's not there I know it was in the other building but not until then you know so you start going wait I know there was a rack in here that you know and you go well no it was in the other one and of course we had to pay the state for the they you know for the 25,000 insurance they were going to get you know and we were like well we got to clean this place up so they agreed to move the $50,000 guarantee insurance all to the one existing building and paid us the $25 which we spent just cleaning it up down to the first floor level and then for 20 years it stayed like that but that money that we'd borrowed from the state the $50,000 $464 a month for 10 years I had to write a check for a building that wasn't there. And I go you know if we had $500 a month for every month of 10 years we could have done something else you know but so then we've got small grants along the way and initially we put a we got a $25,000 grant for the hospital building when we first didn't move in there because when we moved out of six and seven was when where Wayne and Sherry have it now Steve Homer was buying that and so he was going to move out of one half we'll start working on one half we'd move out from AIA and then when we were ready with the hospital building we moved the rest of the AIA there. Okay. Well my dad and Steve never got along very well and so they got into butting heads and my dad told them we'd be out in three weeks. So we moved out in three weeks and when we moved the stuff into my office at AIA we had drywall up sideways only four foot high around the room with the baseboard in place and all the office stuff in the middle of the room with a blue tarp over it. Until we finished the room and the whole thing was like that. It was like well thanks Dad this didn't help out much you know but we finished that poll for Harley Pro and then got down to and then you know after that you know we were we had a couple more brig projects planned and it turned into COVID you know and so that shut us down for the whole first year and then the second year again there was no tourism business at all. But we'd have been working on the the pole projects except both those projects were for out of state and involve you know in 2020 involved me traveling there and pitching the town that wanted the 20 foot pole and then you know we were like well this isn't gonna happen now you know so for last six seven years you haven't done any polls or anything over haven't done anything in the you know since that we finished that big one we did some small stuff and then the artists were doing some other projects but then we donated the the tribal house and the pre ground to CIA and gave them all that artwork. So now they'll rebuild the building part of the deal was they rebuild the building and then they put the artwork back in. Into the tribal house or the hospital too or is that we still have the hospital. We still have the hospital and that's sort of a future plan if you know the the feds hadn't jerked all everybody's money around you know they were looking for a place to move the language program which was working out of the A and B hall and stuff. But then the feds cut that money off completely so the language program doesn't exist anymore. But they started their carving program to replace the friendship pole from the back of the tribal house and the two other polls and they've got them out at the gathering place on the way to LUTAC and they're about they're gonna start up again in the beginning next month but I think they're about 80% done with the friendship pole and they've got the other two and of course they'll be building on the building at the time and put everything back in and stuff. But I'm putting together another project now that's still in the works but hopefully we'll use those same carvers and make another poll but it's not for here and stuff. But on the other hand it would be a whole nother six months or so for those carvers to work with the the young guys to work with the master carvers. And both Greg Horner and Dave Spencer are willing to work on that project and John Hagan I'm hoping to have him part of the design project for that. So as the elder master carver he can at least loaf and give good advice and stuff like that. And you know the if he gets back into carving at all after doing designing we might save some special area for him to do you know because a couple polls that Wayne did he had John come and carve you know had a human face on it this big and he had John come and carve that face and stuff as John did the the car word plaque that used to be at the school you know but once that came down was like oh I don't have another carving around town you know he was you know he's gonna I think he's eighty now he's Clifford's age and stuff but when he was eighteen he's probably as good as he is any time in his life and better better than anybody we ever at that young age he just had the knack for it. Yeah I mean if you take a flat plaque and you know do the form line outline of it just carving the V cut all the way around anybody else when you're done you pick up the chips and throw them in the trash. When John's done you can pick up great big long pieces like that just lift them out.

SPEAKER_06 1:57:38

Really?

SPEAKER_02 1:57:38

Yeah it's it's you know when you're at the bottom of a knife cut going two different directions at the bottom if you match it perfectly it comes out and you don't have a groove or anything he you'd look at his work and just go my God when you he'd do like half a face until the carver to match the apprentice to match the other side and he'd do one side in a day and a half and the ma and the apprentice would do the other side in a week and a half. It was just like that and that was made the difference. He was talking the other day about somebody was posting some gun stock pictures and he did some really like 44 mag with a walnut stock you know and stuff that was just you know really outrage some of the gun stocks he made for people over the years that are just gorgeous. No I know and and nowadays you think oh cow you know you could re for the custom rifle world you know you could really do it. He did a for Harold Belleski's place out there they got a big old slab of wood from something and carved the mantle for a fireplace which is like pretty outrageous. Then I think Harold had a fire and it burned part of it and they still like it the way it is you know I wouldn't get rid of it.

SPEAKER_06 1:58:45

No.

Why The Barracks Cost Millions

SPEAKER_06 1:58:46

So what what do you see because one of the things is you've been you've been getting a lot of heat for a few years from some people about not doing anything with the barracks building what you never respond publicly maybe you don't want to even respond here but I wrote up you always beat you up on it.

SPEAKER_02 1:59:01

Oh yeah no I wrote up a whole history from day one you know when the fort started in 1950 or the city started in 57 all the way up through the funding years and what we'd spent on different things and projects and said you know the point is is that even when we did the major restoration on the barrack Eric McDowell had his, you know, whole business in Juneau that was for economics and stuff and he's was an early chokat dancer and everything. So he said to us he said well you know you're working with those architects and the developers and you're ready to go to the bank in Seattle to see if you can make a hotel out of it or whatever else he said don't listen to him. He said they don't know what they're talking about. He said if there was enough business for a hotel Arnie wouldn't be closed down in the wintertime and he said and these other motels wouldn't be struggling he said the magic number for a hotel is 70% occupancy to make a go of it. He said the summer months four or five of them you could probably work that out he said you might be able to do December January as a one month you know winter festival sort of thing but he said you're still going to have at least five months of the year where you're not gonna have crap for business. He said you'll go under somebody will just own your land and property and then they'll just tear it down and put up whatever they want you know and so we went well you know what can you do with it and basically because the ceilings are like 12 and 14 feet or whatever you can drop the ceiling and put your mechanical and everything in those spaces but you still have these giant things you'd have to strip everything out to insulate and then you know what can you do with it that you can afford to do in the long run and make payments and you're like and and and that and that's the thing looking at it a couple years ago um when Juge was up here he took me through it and I it had been I don't know how long it had been since I'd been I think it was probably before the bar the one burnt was when last time I'd been in the barracks building I was like man this is cool as heck. But then you figure out the the amount of square footage is what 32000 square feet basically the size of the school which if you wanted to build the school when the architects we brought them down a few years ago because as the landmark we can use the historic preservation architects for free. Okay. So we have them come down and do a workshop and stuff and they you know did some pointing and different things on the foundation and basically do an engineering thing and tell you well if you have $150,000 you could do engineering to talk about how to replace the roof.

SPEAKER_06 2:01:34

And you know but basically that was the thing when it in people that I've talked to in construction they're looking to get that into a usable function you're looking probably 30 to 40 million dollars.

SPEAKER_02 2:01:44

The the last time they were here which was probably you know eight or ten years ago now the price originally the price was seven to eight million clear back and whatever. The last time they were here we're here they figured it was like 19 to 20 million dollars and they said every year that you don't do it you could add another half a million dollars.

SPEAKER_06 2:02:03

Yeah you know so thirty to thirty to forty million dollars is realistic and so what do you what can you put in there that's going to generate enough revenue not only to pay the thirty to forty million dollars right but to pay maintenance going forward.

SPEAKER_02 2:02:17

Yeah nothing and so you know that's the reality and like they said they said the building structurally the bones bones are really good you know and they said you know you might be able to and it's possible to close off the second story floors and get the and redo the first floor with drywall and stuff with and get the fire marshal to prove you to have access to just that portion of the building but that's still really touchy because they could say no after you spend all the everything done after you get it all done. So what you're doing and they could only be there in the summertime anyhow so you're thinking okay April to September you could do a summer project for an art school or whatever. But the rest of it you know you wouldn't be able to make the payments on.

SPEAKER_06 2:03:00

So basically what you're telling us is you don't have thirty to forty million dollars sitting around that you want to burn. No.

SPEAKER_02 2:03:05

Yeah darn it and if I did I'd have my house well I'm still paying that price you know for if if I lived in my parents' house which I've owned now for 20 years and it was worth 1500 by the borough's assessment. Well now it's worth 300,000. They haven't done crap to it except fix the roof and the little electrical work and so now it's worth 300,000 but I don't I still have to pay taxes on it because it's not my primary residence. If I lived in it I could quit paying you could quit paying taxes on it. So I was offset to try to get it done last year and then Jerry burned up his house and we had to put that on hold too so it's all Jerry's fault. Come on Jerry yeah or he's coming back next week to start working you know he built the building to go over his boat in the trailer next door and then that big storm hit and crushed it onto the trailer. So he's coming up next week and they're gonna lift that up and he's got six by six or eight by eight posts instead of the four by fours to put it up with and then fasten it. But originally he was building it tall because he was going to use it as the boat shed for his 24 foot whaler which has got a you know radar and all that stuff on top. And now he's thinking that you know he might change that and I said well if you got one of those ones where the metal thing would fold down he can go but so I don't know what he's gonna do. He's trying to figure that out you know but obviously he's not going to be helping me work on my electrical work so I'm going well he's there's 24 hours in a day. Oh I don't know why he can't do both. I'll give you better time on this worst thing is I since he's my nephew you know I think thinking oh you know he's well closer to my age than he should be because you know his mom's in her 80s now and she's my half sister but you know I'm going well wait a second you know how does this work and then I realized that he's over you know I think he was born in 61 so now he's 60 something right you know or whatever and I'm going oh no that means he's old too and you know he he back when he was working construction in Colorado he was working on a building where they have the opening for the stairway and you cover it with a sheet of plywood and stuff and he was hauling stuff around and somebody had slid the plywood and he stepped on it and it tipped up and dropped him you know per floor or something and jammed up his back so you know he's managed to get through that but the older he gets the more that room starts coming in you know yep absolutely so what do you see as the long-term future for the barracks?

SPEAKER_06 2:05:35

What's gonna is there any way to would there be a way if a person goes in like they did with Haynes house and tore it down and you can use the timber for something? Is there value in that?

SPEAKER_02 2:05:44

I know people would crucify you for doing it for taking down a historic that's one of the weird things about it being a national landmark if it was in state and federal hands you can do anything. And like for the barracks building you can't you could rebuild something on the burn site but you can't build what was there before. The the buzzwords from the Park Service and stuff is don't trick the public. Like if George Washington house burned down you could build a structure on the spot and interpret what his house used to be but you can't rebuild it to look like another barracks building that matches the original. No well you could build a one story you know thematically similar but you know you couldn't try to trick the public but fixing the one obviously like you say fixing one up is expensive enough starting a new one would even be worse.

SPEAKER_06 2:06:35

But what what happens to the is is there something because I I I don't see anybody coming up with 30 to 40 million dollars and as you say the price is going up every single year. Right.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:45

Is that is is the plan now just kind of duct tape and band-aids until it falls down or well you know theoretically as long as you keep the weather out of it and stuff it's pretty well you know it'll stay pretty well intact and stuff for uh as it is and then you know you're rolling the dice looking for big investors or something. But the trick is is that you know you get a big investor where we've had a couple people ask and then you tell them well last thing they said was 20 million minimum and it's more than that now and then you know you have to figure out something to do with it. And one guy came in the guy that the Arizona water or whatever it is that you sell in the store you know that business the son invented that and they live in the I remember when they were here like late 90s or whatever. Yeah and they came and they were you know it's bottled in New York or whatever but the kids got all the money and they were talking about doing it and the guy's idea was to build a hotel and change the galvanized railings on the porch to brass and get you know old uniforms and dress up your bell hops and the people that check you in.

SPEAKER_06 2:07:50

And I'm thinking we're next to saltwater and if you make brass railings if you don't have a whole bunch of privates out there polishing them you're gonna be sorry you know so the more the guy looked into it the more he was like well nice doc idea you know yeah because they bought the old camper park over where um behind DMV or DOT they had that little camper park I remember them spending the summer there and talking about talking about all this money and everything and they're I was like I don't know because they're I'm I'm not sure how much but that it was that Arizona right stuff is that he was the one that invented that.

SPEAKER_02 2:08:25

I remember some kind of drink that his son invented button I thought it was funny because it was in the store and his I met his kid that was the one in charge of the business and stuff and I mentioned it to my daughters at the time and they both said oh that stuff tastes like crap you know my kids don't like it now you know so I was pretty sure that wasn't going anywhere. And then there have been a couple people along the way that have said you know well what about this and that you know and I go you know if you want to hear the story about who's got 20 or 40 million like you say to spend. And of course now I can't talk about it but I do know somebody that has that kind of money and stuff. So I'm waiting to see what I can interest them in in the Chocap Valley in general you know I'm doing between you know between CIH development and Klukwan in the river and everything else you know if you could find one person with seriously deep pockets that doesn't know what to do with their money it might be interesting that you know could change the the whole color of the whole community without much trouble you know when I was mayor and I was doing windshield tours for people from DC and everything anytime I'd go through there and I was like if you guys ever come up in the budget with an extra 30 to 40 million dollars that you can't spend anywhere else get in touch.

SPEAKER_06 2:09:37

We'll we'll we got a project here for you.

SPEAKER_02 2:09:39

Early on when I was trying to figure out I joined an organization that was just getting started called the National Historic Landmark Stewards Association and it was a nonprofit group of the 1200 that aren't state and federal ones to try to leverage some help from the feds because the law says that the the Department of the Park Service is responsible for all the national landmarks not just the state and federal ones okay well they take the lion's share of the money and then dole out a little bit to the private sector and the private sector was like hey wait a second here you know you're supposed to be doing this well twelve hundred of the national landmarks or half of them in general are in the east right because that's where the country started. So Pennsylvania New York and all these states is totally into like the lion's shear of the pie and you know they're you know remote Alaska is like whatever you know so we were figuring so I was proposing to the St Landmark Stewards Association when they were making a little progress and like one of the places in I think it's in Iowa I forget but like the five major private ones that were doing well were who the rest of us wanted to talk to and one of them is like got an old train like in gold and silver mining country like or Colorado or wherever like Skagway does and that train in the you know history of that is driving there having enough money to exist. Well there's a place that's a prison in Iowa that's like from the Civil War vintage or something like that and they came up with an I you know it's all fallen down they're trying to fix it up they came up with an idea and plugged somebody from Hollywood and they made a scary movie there. Then they made another top run movie or something and that and now they do a haunted house and people come from the surrounding eight states for their haunted house and 85% of their annual revenue comes from that.

SPEAKER_06 2:11:42

85% from their haunted house? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:11:45

You got a ton of roof for a haunted house and but it's just really hard to get people here. No and that's the thing you know is there is that hook of you know if you had a great idea you might be able to do something but you'd have to figure out where the people came

Advocacy, Investors, And Hard Math

SPEAKER_02 2:11:57

from. Well I decided well let's get the landmarks Steward Association group that I belong to to have their meeting here. So I figured they'd come here early in the spring, like in May, so they could be here for Oligan and stuff. We'd get one of the small hundred passenger cruise ships to come up and pick them all up in Juneau when they fly in and tour them up Lynn Canal, tie them up at the dock, let them stay at the hotels in town and hang out and do the scene and have their annual meeting and then see if we could get something from that. Well, Ted Stevens was big in that and Lisa Murkowski and stuff, and we were going, well, I could get Ted to come and stuff like that. And that was the year that they took Ted to the wall for, you know, building his house up north and hammered him for all the stuff that turned out to not be true or something.

SPEAKER_03 2:12:45

And I thought, well, I guess we can't use Ted Stevens as our lead man here on this project right now.

SPEAKER_02 2:12:53

And so for a while that was working out. I was getting the park service at the end of their season before, you know, June and July. They know how much money they've still got in last year's budget. And they'd have a couple of times they had money in their travel budget. And I got them to pay my travel back to Philadelphia a couple of times. Because otherwise I was on my own money and the company didn't have any money to send me. But I tried to visit some people I knew along the way and stuff like that. And so that worked out okay. But as soon as that sort of dried up when they started squeezing the Park Service for money all the way around, it was like, but the going to Pennsylvania was cool because the people, the Park Service there has this huge office and they have a giant printing thing that, you know, any of the fanciest brochure packages that you've ever seen in your life for annual meetings, they have all that publishing stuff there. And I thought, oh man, if we could just get access to that once in a while to build promotional stuff. Because when we first were doing the development at the fort there, Ron Kasperson, who's the architect who um he got an award for Ketchcon's waterfront and a bunch of awards in the Seattle area. And he teaches, he's in the in the master's program of architecture at the University of Washington. So for a while he was bringing his graduate students up here, and they're the ones that built the the initial building there at Lookout at the waterfront. And he came up later on when it was getting old and stuff with his group and they would camp out and do stuff in the fort. And he said, Well, you know, we'll grind that and repaint it for the city and stuff like that. You know, we'll volunteer, you just buy the paint. And at the time the city wouldn't buy them the paint. And so then they published the book about the standards that we were trying to get into local code for the fort and stuff like that. They wrote that whole book with their students and stuff like that, and then went to the borough and to the university, and nobody would pay to publish it. And the students ended up paying to publish it. Okay. And the borough ended up with like a straight copy, and I don't know who else had one, but I had two. And I went into the borough a couple years back and in with the you know, reject box of stuff. There was one of them in there. So now I have two copies, and I don't know anybody else that has one. I told the museum, well, I'll give you one of those probably. But you know, it was crazy that, and Ron just sent me a th a thing last year saying, well, send me some pictures of the town. I haven't seen it in a while. And I thought, well, you know, the quick shop will be different, you know, the schools, the waterfront, you know, and I thought, well, I'm gonna go run around and take a bunch of pictures, Lanisa's building and others, you know, and stuff. But now the, you know, my next task is to try to, if I put together this totem carving project with the guys that are working on one right now, we'll use the wing at AIA for that. And, you know, hopefully that will generate enough revenue on that project to continue. And CIA's got an interest in the in the building if they keep growing with their projects, because right now, if you go into their offices, you know, the girl's got a 10 key here and a beadwork project here on her desk, you know. So if they had space for the language program and for carving and weaving and stuff that wasn't in their office space, too.

SPEAKER_06 2:16:14

So what do you what do you see because there's I know there's it's it's it's just me looking at I'm not into the scene as or dialed in as

Teaching Craft With Better Guides

SPEAKER_06 2:16:23

you are. Uh huh. But it seems like there's more of that late 20s, early 30s group now, and maybe even younger, that's kind of this new group coming in, really getting into the carving, the weaving, the beading and stuff.

SPEAKER_02 2:16:39

All over places. I worked for about six months for CIA before the feds cut the funding out of the program, but I was doing working as a curriculum development specialist. So we did weaving, beating, carving, dancing, and those, and made a package for each one of them of, you know, basically I went through every all the stuff that's in print and went, oh, this is garbage, and well, who wrote this, you know, and stuff, and tried to straighten those out. But we were making these totes that would go to the teachers at the school here. Uh-huh. And so if you want to teach a curriculum on carving, here's the box that's got sample designs, samples of woods, and it's not to teach you to be a you know a master carver, it's to give you the introduction to if this is something you might be interested in. And so I got all the only one that I didn't get completely finished and written up was the carving one. But otherwise, you know, like for example, the bentwood box one, see Alaska Heritage has got workshops in different towns like here, where you make a cedar bark hat or you know, a sh blanket or whatever it is, and they've been running people around to different villages while they're also publishing books to go with those with nice color pictures and everything. And some of them are like just totally wrong, you know. I mean, not all of it, but I went through like the bentwood box one, I went through like six or seven different ones, and then got to one that was uh mimeographed pages and maybe ten pages long. And if I'd have done that one first, I'd have just thrown all the other ones away. That one's by Steve Brown, and it was the person that took his Bentwood box class in Seattle at the Wooden Boat Society and came from back east and wrote the whole thing up from his class. And you know, 95% of it was everything I knew, and five percent was something that he knows, and I don't, you know. And compared to the other stuff, it was just like outrageously great. And I thought, now, if these were all just high graded, you save so many, so much time of doing this, you know. And like a couple of them, one of the guys, well, for example, one of the guys that was traveling to the other communities for Sea Alaska and was teaching how to make the Bentwood box. Well, a couple of the main things, you gotta soak the whole plank and you do it overnight or more, and usually they did them in salt water. And then you m carve the kerf in them and stuff, and if it's done right, it'll fold up like a piece of wet cardboard almost. Yeah, bends is perfect. Well, once you do all that, the guy that was doing it in the workshop wasn't soaking the plank at all. He was making and then you steam them, right? You put them in like we we made a box, but they used to put them in the canoe with water in it, put in the hot rocks, put a lid on it, take it out, and then it'll bend. Well, just like in furniture making or something. Well, this guy had made a steamer box for each cut, so he had these narrow little boxes that the board that fit four places on the board like this. Well, it only steamed like just the part you were bending and the board wasn't soaked to be wet at all. And so he was laying them on the floor and he made a plywood box that he slid over it and you stood on it, and then you bent it up, and then he was speculating on how much time it took to fix all the cracks and shit.

SPEAKER_00 2:20:01

All the cracks.

SPEAKER_02 2:20:03

No, no, no, you can't do that, you know. And so then I looked for a few more of them, but it was just, oh my god, you know, and they're they're nice books, they're hardcover and they got color pictures and everything.

SPEAKER_03 2:20:14

And I'm thinking, maybe if you started with Steve Brown's and made a book, you know.

SPEAKER_06 2:20:19

So who do you think for for some of the younger artists coming up, who are the well, who are some of the names to keep an eye on?

New Artists Coming Up Fast

SPEAKER_02 2:20:25

Well, James Hart and Rob Martin are both, you know, James is doing form line and carving, Rob's doing, you know, jewelry and stuff, and they've got websites and stuff, but they're both working with TJ Young on the friendship polls and stuff. And then James uh Teddy Hart is doing artwork too, and so is uh Zach James, who works at CIA. He had that bill that really nice bench outside the library there for a year with the car back on it and stuff. And he works running the pro one of the programs there at CIA and stuff, but you know, those guys, plus there's a few others around that are definitely interested. And the other, you know, um the apprentice programs that they've been doing. They've got Jessie Morgan is doing beadwork and jewelry and stuff like that. And she's got a business doing that now, and then Rhonda Degtoff is doing cedar bark weaving a bunch, and they've got another couple of workshops coming for making regalia before celebration and stuff. But then they've got another cedar bark hat one just because you know, ten people made hats and they didn't. And everybody else's like, I want one of those. Yeah, exactly. I gave Lorraine some materials, uh, Casco a few years back, and going, here, I'll trade you for a hat someday, you know that stuff. But I made my mistake a year ago when so I knew a young woman in Juno that was like 16, going on 18, and she made six hats for the dedicate the rededication of the flotilla robe that came back to Wrangle for Chief Shake stuff. And at that party, she gave away six hats there. And I saw like three of them when they were almost done at her house, and I thought, ooh, I should ask her when she was young for one of those. Now decades gone by the decimal point, probably moved over it. And I couldn't afford it to begin with, you know. But I wanted to have one for sitting out there subfishing, you know, in the same old spot, going, hey, this is what I need. There you go. But there's the cedar the cedar bark ones are nice, but I wanted a spruce root one because the spruce root ones are watertight. You know, when if they get wet, they don't they're shed water and you can cook in them and stuff as a basket. But when they're dry, they breathe, so it's kind of like a Panama hat. So until it starts raining, then you got the vents? Yeah, and then it works, you know. There's one they my friend Harold and Juno just redid for the uh the celebration in Sitka where they're returning a bunch of old pieces, and one of them is a hat that's called the shelter of the tree, the cedar. And you know, when you have a big tree, it's got that sort of dead zone underneath it that's underneath, like under an umbrella, and they made a spruce writ hat that's in some of the old pictures, and it's about this big around, and it's called the shelter of the seed of the tree or the cedar, because you could stand close to the guy when it was raining and everybody um like the golf umbrella. Exactly, you know, and I thought, oh perfect, you know. But that one was all smashed. Harold sent me a picture of it, and it's got a painted design and everything. And I said, Oh, I said, where was that? And he said, Oh, he said it was all smashed up in a box. And he sent me a picture, and he was in the hotel someplace with a claw foot tub, and he had it weighted down with a couple of you know umbrellas or poking on it, and he was soaking it in hot water in the tub. He said, Yeah, once I got it back in shape, then I just let it dry out again. But it came out looking perfect,

Repatriation Stories And TSA Confusion

SPEAKER_02 2:24:00

you know. Nice. But it was all just we saw a couple of stuff when we were back east that were, you know, an old tunic that was a shaman's piece or something that's folded up like your laundry room, you know, or something like that. That's obviously never been unfolded in 75 years or something on the shelf in the museum. We were going, well, this needs to go in the other cabinet. All the there's museums, even if they're not returning that stuff, they're supposed to keep all the shaman's objects separate from everything else. And we brought some stuff back, the like the the bones that are the necklace and stuff like that, that are the penis bones of a porcupine. I had that, well, they the ducklawaiti at the Killer Well R clan from at the Memorial for the Chief and Sitka gave me a big name there, and I said, I already have a cogwantan name, and they said, That's okay, we're giving you this one. And then I found out that they gave me a birth name of a famous shaman because they wanted to take me on this trip and have me bring these objects back. Okay. None of the clinkets will touch them.

SPEAKER_04 2:25:05

Oh, they said the women will give them. I'm the sacrificial adopted white wood. They said, Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:25:12

And I said, Well, I said, I don't really have a problem in bringing this stuff back. I said, I would never take it from someplace. Yeah. But if we're returning it, I have no problem at all.

SPEAKER_02 2:25:22

My, you know, my karma's intact there and stuff. So we get to the airport, and it was in a big box, and I realized when I'm carrying it, it's not going to fit under the seat on the plane, and I'm not giving it to him. So one of the ladies, uh, Christine Hunt from the Hunt family in BC was there, and she had gone out and bought a set of black and white plasticky totes for, you know, that a woman would buy suitcases that all match. Well, she said, I'm only using the little one, you know, you want one. I said, Oh, okay, you know, I'm figuring hiding in plain sight, no one's stealing this, you know. So I wrapped them all in a little bubble wrap and put them in there. But one of the things that was the net Shahma's necklace was in one of those padded envelopes that's bubble wrap you can see through and stuff. So it was padded. But I had a letter from the museums that said, you know, don't mess with this guy, this stuff's going back. So I get to TSA with some 20-year-old blonde, and she's like, oh, you know, and I give her the letter and she looks at it and she wants to and doesn't want to unpack all the stuff I've got taped up, but she takes the thing out, and all the little old ladies from the plinket that are there are waiting off to the side. And the minute I have to pull that out, they all start laughing.

SPEAKER_03 2:26:33

So she asks me what it is, and I say, Well, most of those are penis bones from a porcupine.

SPEAKER_02 2:26:39

So then her boss comes over, you know, and says, Okay, you know, and I finally get through, and I'm just dying, going, How am I gonna get this through there? You know.

SPEAKER_06 2:26:49

She probably went home and she was telling her partner, whatever, she's like, You'd never believe what some crazy old guy tried to tell me he was carrying PSA today.

SPEAKER_02 2:26:58

I I'm just going like, I just knew she was gonna.

SPEAKER_06 2:27:00

Have you ever heard of somebody carrying the penis bone of a porcupine before?

SPEAKER_04 2:27:03

The click that women I all knew, they were all laughing way ahead of time, you know. I'm going.

SPEAKER_02 2:27:09

I was on the when we were going to Wrangle for the repatriation of the Shakespeare, and I hadn't been on the small ferry going that direction, so we stopped in Cake, and it was late at night, and the dance group from Cake got on, and a whole bunch of other people. And I'm sitting up in the front of the boat there in like the lounge dark area, you know, just going for the next trip. And a couple of old ladies from Cake come by and sit down up there and stuff, and they're both speaking clinkett, and cake is a different dialect than I know from here, so I was just eavesdropping, and I don't get more than about 25% of what they're saying in a normal conversation. I just really wanted to hear the flow of it. So I'm listening, and this young kid from the Cake dance group goes by and he's wearing his Levi's, you know, hanging off of his butt, and the crotch is down to his knee, and he goes by and the ladies kind of give him the look going by. Well, the word for an octopus bag or a purse or anything is guest, right? Well, guacely as a word means baggy, you know, or something. Well, slathly is close to pronunciation in Clinkett, and it's a joke among the elders because it means floppy or flaccid, right? Uh-huh. So the kid walks by like that, and the one lady says to the other lady, Slathely, she says, and I crack up laughing because I know the joke.

SPEAKER_03 2:28:31

And they both turn up, they're both looking like, let me just look, you know, and I'm like, oh man. So then busted.

SPEAKER_02 2:28:37

Yeah, the next day when we're at the big event, I'm there in regalia and we're dressing people in the old regalia, and they look over and they realize, oh, okay, this is probably all right then, you know. But I if it hadn't been one of my favorite jokes that you know, a couple of older women had told me, I would have never known, and I wouldn't have burst out laughing on an instant, you know. But I was thinking the same things because we always see those kids and you just want to walk over it and just go like this, you know.

SPEAKER_06 2:29:07

So look so looking back as we kind of wind this down, Lee. Sure, your your your dad and mom moved up here, you know. You and your sister were raised in Haynes, your dad with AIA and everything. But just hearing you hearing you talk throughout this, I can sense a lot of pride in whatever part your family has had and kind of preserving Clinkett heritage, the the arts of it, and kind of promoting those people that are doing it. That means a lot to you, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_02 2:29:39

It it does, you know, I especially with the older people now that you know, I mean, I there isn't a person around that's you know, anywhere from 50 years to older than that, that wasn't a choke dancer that doesn't have totally flawed memories of it, you know, like Christine Martin and Ron Martin and those guys that are that age that went to Gallop or to the chamberee or something, you know. It instilled a tremendous amount of pride in them then because you know it wasn't something that was acceptable at all, you know, and and so they realized that, well, hey, maybe it's okay to be clinking and have a culture to go with it. And now, of course, you've got you know, multi-generations of people that feel the same way. And, you know, like Mary Folletti is, you know, a language teacher and a drummer, and I taught her to dance when she was two and a half, and I saw Carrie Edwards at the grocery store today, you know, and she was a dancer for years and stuff, and then you know, worked for seven years on writing the clinkit dictionary with all the elders in Juneau, and I think, well, you know, they're leaving the footprint behind too, you know.

SPEAKER_06 2:30:43

So and it and it had it and also the the trust, like they're a dot they're giving you in a name so you can bring these artifacts back, and so that that trust coming back from the clinkit community, not just here in Haynes and Kluquan, but throughout Southeast. Yeah, that you're you gotta be thinking your dad and mom are looking down. I was like, Lee's doing a good job.

SPEAKER_02 2:31:06

Yeah, you know, when my dad first, when I you were asking when I came back from college and stuff, and I was trying to figure out what I was doing, and my dad was always, you know, working with the other guys like Nathan and everybody else that are like eight or ten years older than me, thinking that you know they could take over the program or something like that. And you know, at one time my dad finally said to somebody, he said, Yeah, I kept thinking I could find somebody, and then I decided I just had to raise money. But you know, the same way I got both my girls dancing when they were little kids and stuff, and you know, but it's still the same way. There's a whole you know, I don't think there's anybody that's grown up here that doesn't feel like the place is their place too, you know.

SPEAKER_06 2:31:47

Well that I when I was talking to my mom, yeah, you know, just the way that our that her and my dad were accepted when they first got here, yeah, and just the yeah, the that I think if if you treat other people with respect and you respect their heritage and stuff, that it it be ends up becoming mutual. There's yeah, there's times because of the way other people have acted over the years, it it takes some time to build that trust.

SPEAKER_02 2:32:14

Yeah, yeah, it's always fun when you run into somebody that used to be, you know, carrying a you know, a real club for their whole life and how everything went, and then you start to find out that, you know, well, actually they're moving a little bit away, you know. But I on the other hand, I never realized like when I was young, I did one of those story core things or something and didn't realize till afterwards when I listened to it that growing up with you know Sonny and a bunch of people like that, that you know, we ha Jack Strong and stuff that we all hung out. I mean, they were only half clinking. I didn't think anything about whether they were a quarter or a half or whatever. And then, you know, like people like Mary Falletti, Mary's like a quarter and stuff, you know, and her kids are an eighth, you know, and you start going, well, at a certain point, you know, it's really the w attachment to your culture, it's not, you know, what your blood quantum happens to be, you know.

Trust, Identity, And Cultural Pride

SPEAKER_06 2:33:05

I think that one of the best decisions that I've made in my life was in I moved home in '94. In the summer of 95, um, after I I got my residency back, and John Katzick was in the store, and and you know, my dad wasn't able to do hunting anymore. I didn't have any. I was like, listen, John, I I want to learn how to go bear hunting. I want to get a black brown bear, I want to go black bear hunting. Will you take me hunting? And you know John. So it took me a while before he actually, I think he probably was gonna say yes right at the beginning, but he made me work for him. Oh yeah. And then of course the first day, he's like, be ready at 6 30. He shows up at like 7 30 quarter to day, and I'm like, What the I had a phone I had a phone call, and so that was it it was never on time for anything. But as I started hunting with him, we would stop at Ruth's house, Ruth Casco, and we'd stop to get treats and And she'd always have fry bread or something. And then I asked him, I was like, Hey, would you smoke some salmon for me? He goes, No, but I'll teach you to do it. Yeah. And so I'm down at the smokehouse with Smitty and you know Ruth and Lorraine and Tom Cat and Isabel, all the different and in starting to just kind of become a part of that family and helping out and learning the way that they were processing the fish. I'm so glad that I asked John to take me hunting because that led me down this road that I never would have imagined.

SPEAKER_02 2:34:31

I went hunting for brown bear with him and my dad once when I was you know maybe 14 or something like that. So we're up above, you know, 26 mile above the bridge, up where the spotting scopes are and stuff, looking down into the river and stuff. And so we work our way down to the edge of the river on that side. And John gives my dad his 458 or something, 338 anyhow. And I've got a lighter weight rifle, and I've got open sights, and he's got the scope. Well, my dad doesn't do well with a scope with his missing eye and stuff like that. So he's looking through the scope, and John is coaching me, going, wait till he turns, comes this way, and stuff like that. So I'm ready to shoot, and just the bear stands up. So now I have to mentally think, okay, now where am I shooting and stuff? So I get a good beat on the bear, and I'm just about to squeeze off, and the bear drops. And when he drops, my it goes out of sight of my dad on the scope, my dad squeezes off around and it goes right through the hair on the back of the, you can just see it on the back of the bear. And so then I realize, oh God, he's shot, you know. So I shoot, but I'm the bear's already moving, you know, at a hundred miles an hour. And I shoot and I hit right underneath his chin in the front and blow up a bunch of sand on the river. And he makes a 90, and now he's going a thousand miles an hour away from me. And I don't even have a chance to take another shot, you know. And John is laughing because my dad just blew my big shot, you know, and stuff. So I was smart enough not to say anything to my dad, but it was like, but yeah, when he shot the bear drop, you know, dropped as it shot. But then when I shot and it hit right in front of the bear, boy, it just took because I don't think it knew where the shot came from. But boy, it was I was like, you know, I could have only worked the bolt twice in 50 yards if I'd had a chance.

SPEAKER_03 2:36:18

You know, it was like, so after that I decided, yeah, I don't really need to hunt predators, do I?

SPEAKER_02 2:36:23

I moved the bear off my list and moved the deer up, you know. Deer up there, yep.

SPEAKER_06 2:36:29

Yeah, no, it's just, and I I I think we share that in common that we both learned a lot from our clinket neighbors here, friends and family here.

SPEAKER_02 2:36:38

Well, Mildred used to Bill Sparks when he worked at AIA, he would come over with a uh like a beer case wooden box full of all the old hickory knives of Mildred's from the smokehouse, and he would use our belt sharpener and just sharpen the whole pile and take them back and put them in the smokehouse, and when they got dull, she'd just throw them back in the box and then he'd bring them over. Well, whenever he brought them over and sharpened them, I'd end up with a grocery sack like this full of smoke soccer on my desk, right? So I'd come out the apartment.

SPEAKER_06 2:37:10

You go over there into the smokehouse and run them over a rock to dull them so you get more smoke to him?

SPEAKER_02 2:37:14

But I when I came out that the apartment on the third floor of AIE there in the morning, if I opened my door, you could smell it. You could smell it as well. You could tell. It was like when Audrey came down from Haynes Junction delivering smoked moose moccasins. Uh-huh. You could tell they were in the office. I'd open the door and go, huh, no time for breakfast today. And but, you know, I would have the total opportunity to go over there and hang out with Mildred and learn to smoke fish like she did, you know. And I did, you know, and my senior year of high school, or my junior year of high school, Bill asked me if I wanted to fish with him. And I was like, Well, I got a summer job of dancing, I gotta, you know, so I didn't do it. And the next year he told me, well, if you had fished with me, I'd give you the permit. Because in those days the permit was first started to be worth $10,000. And he said, you know, I'll give you the permit, you can fish the boat and pay me off, you know. And the I was going to college and you know, gonna go to college and all that. Going to college, all I did was get drafted and spend a bunch of money I couldn't afford, you know. I was thinking I should have just gone and left. You should have just gone fishing. And gone fishing, because those first years of the 70s were really good years for fishing, too. I would have paid off that boat, and then I would have had a permit I'd paid $10,000 for that not too many years later would have been worth $50 or $75, you know.

SPEAKER_04 2:38:31

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 2:38:31

Yep. And all the college degree did give me was, you know, a bunch of bills to pay on.

SPEAKER_06 2:38:38

So what so what are we missing in the Lee Heinmiller story that we haven't covered yet?

Family Updates And A New Grandson

SPEAKER_02 2:38:44

Well, my daughters are coming next month. My Carly's little girl, Stevie, is just like Carly was, she's just running at a thousand miles an hour and she's four now, and she's got blonde hair that's this long, and you know, glacier blue eyes.

SPEAKER_06 2:38:58

So you've got to start, are you do you have the dance classes ready? You're gonna start teaching her to dance with her.

SPEAKER_02 2:39:03

Well, I don't know. Both Carly and Riley danced. When Riley danced, she was little and she was really good. And Charlie Jimmy said, She dances like her shit don't stink. And I said, Well, she's gonna be a good athlete, and she is, you know. But Riley's today's the 23rd?

SPEAKER_00 2:39:21

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 2:39:22

Yesterday she was 22 weeks pregnant with my new grandson. Oh, congratulations. Yeah, so she'll be here for Beer Fest with Carly and stuff. And Riley's going, Well, I I need to get into Beer Fest for free because I can't drink. And I said, Well, just get one of the little tasting glasses and bring a brown paper bag with a bottle of martinelli's and filling it up. You'll get six months pregnant, you'll be getting dirty lips. Everybody that doesn't even know you, you know. Yeah. She just finished, she and Matt when they got married last year. Then they bought a house and they bought a house and stuff, and it's a 50 something or other, you know, and it's been built in a couple of stages, but the baby's room and one other room, they decided to redo the floors because the floors were flat black and the room was totally white. The floors are red oak. See, they just it's they're just absolutely as beautiful grain as you can get. They sanded them all off and got everything done, and she sent a picture of somebody painted those matte black. That's what home. Yeah, they were just cleaning up a spot, and then they went, wait, this is oak, and then they went, red oak, you know, and the grain is just absolutely wild. And of course, Riley's sitting off to the side, Matt's grinding the floor with his eight-inch grinder, and Riley's got a mask on and earphones on, and taking a picture of the floor. And of course, you can see her little belly, and she says, Your grandson's white noise is gonna be an eight-inch floor standing. That's what he's gonna go to sleep with. But yeah, it's looking really good, so that's fun. Good deal. But yeah, they'll be here for 10 days, so that'll be good because I realized that we'll be able to take Stevie to Clinkett Park because she's four and she can run around. And then I thought, Riley and Carly helped build Clinkett Park when they were little kids, you know. Yeah. I realized the other day when they were having the a year or two ago when they were having the 20-year reunion for rebuilding the park.

SPEAKER_03 2:41:18

I thought, oh no, it's been 20 years.

SPEAKER_02 2:41:20

It's been 20 years on it.

SPEAKER_06 2:41:22

Yeah. No, that was a big project. That was a cool thing to have happen.

SPEAKER_02 2:41:26

Yeah, it's cool that it's still hanging in there now, too, you know.

SPEAKER_06 2:41:31

Well, appreciate you uh sharing your story.

SPEAKER_03 2:41:34

Oh, yeah, well, no problem.

SPEAKER_06 2:41:35

And thank you for all you and your family have done for keeping clinket art and carving and stuff.

SPEAKER_02 2:41:42

Same to you. I was thinking the other day of how many ducklueties there were in town now. I'm going, there's starting to be a lot of them. For a while, there weren't hardly any. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:41:50

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 2:41:51

I've got a picture in the scrapbooks that are at the museum now from AIA of Grandma Katzik and Dan in the living room of my parents' house with a few of the dancers around him when they're teaching them to sing, you know, and stuff like that. Grandma Katzik's actually Sibsian. Really? Yeah. I didn't know that. Well, and I don't know how many people do it. I've said it in some of in front of a couple people that said, oh no. But the the main song that you hear everywhere now for Yaha Huey, you know, that the dancers did for years. I always thought, well, close enough, Wes Willard used to play it a little bit different when he played the drum and stuff like that. But then they had Boxley or one of the Simps, you know, Simpsian dancers bring their group to Juno for celebration for the, and it was for the lead they were the lead group. So for the main entrance and the main exit, everybody sings that song for like an hour plus. They sing it exactly the way I know it. The Simpsons.

SPEAKER_03 2:42:55

And I thought, oh well, now I feel better about it.

SPEAKER_02 2:42:58

Maybe maybe some because yeah, the the Choka dancers from Kluquan sing it a little bit different, you know. And then the where people are shouting in the song, like yelling and stuff. That never happened in the old days. Okay. And it's recent, you know, and it's kind of like the people that are doing form line now and decide that it may be an old art form, but they can push the envelope, you know. Uh-huh. And I mean, Schopert did that. He'd do formline stuff and turn the pieces of it, which were kind of interesting, but you can see it. But now you've got people that are going, well, if that color is good, then what's wrong with magenta and purple? And you start going, and then you know, they've got ambulances and airplanes and everything else, and I start going, maybe you should have hired John Hagin to design that for you. Yeah, it's gonna be interesting. I'm hoping this project comes together for well after they get finished on the stuff out there for the tribal house. I think I'll have a project that'll take them another six months for all of them and maybe a couple more apprentices, too.

SPEAKER_06 2:44:03

So good. Keep those guys busy. Well, that's it. You know, carbon.

SPEAKER_02 2:44:07

It only takes a you know a couple of projects to all of a sudden you're totally hooked. It was like Wayne made one canoe and then he's made a bazillion since then, you know. And now just about every village has got a canoe to go to celebration.

SPEAKER_06 2:44:20

I was I was thinking about this the other day. You can I'll talk to you afterwards. I don't want to let everybody know yes, the great idea. Sure. So well, I can tell you. Well, they'll they'll they'll just have to keep waiting. Yeah, right. Well, I don't know if Martin will cut this out or not, but well, they'll just think it's like, oh my god, they got a really cool story to tell, but we're not gonna tell them.

Buffalo, Airplanes, And Final Laughs

SPEAKER_02 2:44:41

Nell Jurgolite was coming back up the highway and posted a picture of a buffalo out in the road, you know, or something like that, and a couple of them made me laugh because when Gordon Sandy had his airplane, he had an old uh Cessna uh, you know, bee tail dragger or something. And he was landing at the airport out here and got blown down by that thing and hit one of the newly established light boxes or something and bent a strut. So he needed to get it repaired, but there wasn't anybody here that could do airplane repairs and how do you get it to Juno and stuff. So we found out from Bud Barber, who you know worked on planes that you could take it apart. You don't have to be certified to take it apart, you only have to be certified to put it back together. So Gordon and I took the wings off and everything, and we put the fuselage on a trailer behind our big flatbed, and then we ran some ropes across from the side gates and slung the wings in there so they were just floating. And in the middle of March or the winter, we drove it to a uh guy up in Whitehorse that could work on it, you know. So when we drove it up there, we uh we were gonna come back empty, obviously, with the trailer. So the people from the fairgrounds hit us up to bring a load of alfalfa for the horses and stuff. So we went and got a whole load of stuff on there, and they had bags of it, kind of like, you know, pet food or something, too. And we had those on there. Well, driving down the road somewhere along the line in the snow and everything, one of those fell off. And some guys flagged us down later on and said, hey, you know, there was one of those bags on the road. We picked it up and we set it at that restaurant down there. We thought, oh, well, we'll go back and get it. Then so we thought, well, dragging the trailer and stuff is gonna be a pain in the butt. So we just disconnected it and left it on the side of the road. And one of the guys riding with us had his dog, so he stayed there, so we had more room, and we went back and we picked the thing up, and when we came back to get him, he was up on top of the load of alfalfa, and the whole trailer was surrounded by the buffalo. And they were eating the stuff out the edges and everything. And he had his he had his dog, you know, that was big, like a you know, trying to keep it under control. And I swear we were laughing for like five minutes, going, oh, you know.

SPEAKER_06 2:46:50

So that big flatbed that you got that uh I one of my first memories that for scouts, we did everything in that. If we're going to a camp out, right, everybody hop in it and we'd drive out to Chilcat State Park or whatever, you know, with a spring cleanup. Scouts, we had a section, everybody'd meet at the church, hop in the flatbed, throw all the garbage in there, and then when we'd go to uh Eagle River in June for Scout Camp, hop on the ferry, getting off the ferry, they had a tarp over the back of it, we'd crawl in the back there, and whether it was Steve McFeed or John Bruce, whoever, they'd drive us and we'd drive out to Eagle River, and we're all just right in the back of that, no bus or anything like that. The flatbed was our was our bus for scouts as well.

SPEAKER_02 2:47:32

No, when the last after we hauled all the burned barracks out and buried it and stuff like that, the wood on the bed just ate it away from the lye and everything from the ash and stuff. So we got together and stripped this, you know, it's in between the planks, they got little metal strips that hold it down. We took all that off and took a log and cut it up, and that whole bed is yellow cedar now. Oh, is it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:47:56

And it's like that's gonna be there when the truck rusts away.

SPEAKER_06 2:47:59

It's gonna rust away, and you're still gonna have the bed sitting there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:48:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:48:04

All right. Well, thank you, Lee. Sure, well, thank you. Appreciate the conversation. Yeah.