March 2, 2007

• Joe and Vi

  Late tonight, after midnight, front end loaders will start scooping up snow off the lots on the edge of Anchorage where the dirty stuff has been stored to wait for the spring thaw after it was plowed from city streets.  The same dump trucks that hauled the snow out there will haul some of it back downtown, where it will be spread along a few blocks of 4th Avenue and through a crooked trail of back streets leading to an out-of-the-way parking lot.

  

  In the hours after daylight, dozens of mushermobiles, specially equipped pickup trucks, will converge on downtown with dog boxes on the back, some pulling trailers with dog boxes like the one in my shot above (taken last winter at the Willow Community Center where Sunday’s restart will occur).  Sleds that have been bungeed to the roofs of trucks will be lifted down, dogs will be hitched to the sleds, and the trucks will be driven by spouses or dog handlers off to that out-of-the-way parking lot to wait for the mushers and dog teams.  At one-minute intervals, this year’s 82 teams will mush out of the ceremonial chute for the cameras.

  The dogs and their drivers will run the tourist gantlet on 4th Avenue, and do their best to get past the stray dogs and an occasional inattentive driver who ignores the barriers and strays into their path.  If they make it safely to that lot on the outskirts of town, the dogs will be unhitched and put into their individual compartments in the dog boxes.    The sleds will be bungeed back on top of the trucks, and the teams will hit the road out of Anchorage and up this valley to Willow, where they will spend the night.  On Sunday morning, the unloading and hitching up will be repeated, and the Iditarod will actually start.  And it all started with old Joe Redington.

  The book I picked up recently at the Salvation Army store, Alaskans, Life on the Last Frontier by Ron Strickland, includes a story told by Joe Redington, Sr. and his wife Vi.  Both of them are gone now, which only makes that glimpse into their lives more precious.  Joe was born in Oklahoma around the time of World War I, rode freight trains across the midwest during the Great Depression, served in the Pacific during World War II, and left his home in Pennsylvania for Alaska in 1948.  In the book, he says,

  We came to Alaska to mush dogs after reading Jack London’s books.  We didn’t know what kind of dogs we would need because very little information about Alaska was available back in Pennsylvania.  We didn’t know what the hell to expect, so we brought Dalmatians and English sheepdogs.

  When we stopped at the border for gas, they was pumping some gas out of a barrel into the Jeeps and we seen these two puppies running around.  Vi asked about the puppies and they said, “You can have one of ‘em if you want.”  We named it Dodger, and the following year it had nine male puppies and two females.  So Dodger was where our kennel started from.

  The Redingtons homesteaded at Knik, near Wasilla, and had a hunting lodge thirty miles up the old Iditarod Trail at Flat Horn Lake.  The trail, which had once been the mail route between Anchorage and the once-booming mining town of Iditarod, had long been disused and overgrown by the late 1940s when Joe started clearing out the brush so he could travel back and forth from his homestead to the lodge.

  In the ‘forties when Joe visited the Native villages of the Interior, every cabin had a dog team out back.  By the ‘sixties, he noticed that most of the dogs were gone, replaced by snowmachines.  He started thinking about a way to keep the sled dog tradition alive.  Joe, Sr. and his sons were using dog teams for both work and competition.  The photo below shows Joe, Jr. (in the plaid shirt) in his dogyard in the 1960s.

  

  Dorothy Page, another local legend, was in charge of events to celebrate the Centennial of the Alaska Purchase from Russia.  After many failed attempts to interest local mushers in a commemorative sled dog race, she met Joe, Sr. at the Willow Winter Carnival in 1966.  Her plans fit right in with his desires, and he took the idea and ran with it.  The 1967 race was named in honor of Leonhard Seppala and was called the Iditarod Trail Seppala Memorial Race. 

  The Iditarod Trail was still choked with brush for most of its length.  The race that year was fifty miles, from Knik to Big Lake and back.  Fifty-eight teams signed up to compete for a whopping purse of $25,000.  To raise funds for the race, Joe and Vi donated an acre of land at Flat Horn Lake. The land was sub-divided into lots one foot square. Along with the deed to the lot, the buyer also got a “Certificate of Ownership” — or as Redington once remarked –”about two dollars worth of paper!,” because it didn’t cost a lot to subdivide the acre.
   
  The following year, a purse of only $1,000 was raised and the turnout was smaller, but trail work continued even though most Alaskans were more interested in snowmachine races than in sled dogs.  Joe Redington and his family and friends continued clearing and grooming the Iditarod Trail, extending it all the way to Nome.  In 1973, the first Wasilla to Nome race was held.  Yeah, yeah, I know, a lot of hoopla happens in Anchorage and the “official” press releases say, “Anchorage to Nome,” but the 1925 serum run didn’t start in Anchorage, nor does the famous annual dog race to Nome. 

  In 1925, diphtheria serum was carried by railroad from Anchorage to Nenana on the Tanana River, where the dogsled relay to Nome began.  Until 1983, the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race started in Wasilla.  Since then, until recently it has still started in Wasilla after the false start in Anchorage for the TV cameras.  In recent years, due to global climate change, there hasn’t been enough snow in Wasilla for the “restart” real start of the race, so it has started in Willow, thirty-some miles farther up the Susitna Valley.

  Joe Redington, Sr. died in 1999.  His widow Vi (shown here with another great Iditarod competitor and booster, the late Colonel Norman Vaughan) continued to promote The Last Great Race until her death about a year ago.  They and others now gone such as Herbie Nayukpok and Susan Butcher (below) , who also passed in 2006, made the race an event of international importance and it serves as a fitting memorial to them.

  

       

  • 5:22 pm
  • 4 Comments