It is -7º F outside. In his kitchen, Harry makes me tea. He is a broad-shouldered man with a prominent chin and a deep, smooth voice. He has been remodeling this house for the better part of a decade, after expanding the house where his children grew up and his first wife still lives, less than a block away from here. His second wife has hung decorations on the sheet-rock walls: flat, craft-store angels and painted tiles with reminders like “faith” and “patience.” Harry’s daughters, who have not lived with him since the divorce in 1999, set up this interview.
**
I came to Alaska in ’76. When my roommate John and I drove on the highway and saw all the scenery coming in, I was just flabbergasted. This place is so beautiful. It’s so rich with wildlife.
I got a job the first day I looked for one—as opposed to Pennsylvania where I was used to lookin’ for jobs for months and then having to settle for one other than the job I wanted.
They hired me for seven bucks an hour. They raised me to nine bucks an hour at the end of the week. I was making fifteen bucks an hour by the end of the summer, and I was the lead framer.
When I moved up here my plan was to save up a buncha money, move back East, buy some land in the hills and build myself a house, cause I thought that would be cool. Everybody wanted to build his own house back then. The hills were full of people building on a shoestring. By the end of that first summer, I was already building my own house, in Anchorage. The guys that I worked for co-signed a note. I didn’t think about moving back much after that.
I met a lot of guys my age and women my age. It was really a young state, because of the baby boom and the pipeline jobs. They were all engaged in fishing and camping, volleyball and softball. Barbeques. The men’s softball team that I was on played probably fifty nights out of the summer. Lot of bars would give you free drinks if you came in wearing a softball uniform. We did a lot of drinking. There was no 2:00am closing. All the bars were open as long as they wanted to be.
I was having a happy time up here as a bachelor, and I met a woman, and I got the idea I oughta marry this woman.
Deborah and I bought that house over on Redwood Street in 1980. The first summer that we owned it, I built the garage. The second year was the year that Brooke was born. When Deborah’s maternity leave ran out, I quit working to stay home with Brooke.
That’s when I started remodeling the house. I took the roof off, added the second floor, rebuilt all of the walls on the first floor, and the foundation and the crawl space. We tried to avoid things like borrowing a second mortgage on the house, but we had to.
Brooke was an angel in this whole process. I used to put her in a backpack, put my tool belt on, and just go to work. She’d lean over my shoulder and babble in my ear while I was running the skillsaw or climbing up and down ladders. It was wicked fun. She was never afraid of anything. She ambled around the house and got into things. I worked around it.
I had a lot of help from a lot of people. My brothers helped me a lot. My friends helped me a lot. I had a friend, Joel Rubenstein. John and I helped him build a little cabin near Palmer. When he was looking for work he’d come down to Anchorage to the union hall. He did a lot of work on the house. He was wonderful with Brooke.
We had a huge pile of Little Golden Books, and Joel, when he was down here looking for work, would sit in the recliner with like 50 books in his lap, and he’d read to her. He was very calm. He was never in a hurry, and he’d pause at the end of every page and if she had any questions they’d talk about it. Then he’d finish the book and he’d say, “well, what do you wanna do now?” And she’d say “Nudder story.”
“Another story, huh?”
“Nudder story.”
And he’d put the book down, pick up a new one from the pile. He would literally sit there and go through a whole stack of books.
My Dad came and we spent 5 weeks workin’ on the house. It has wooden shingles for siding, which is a traditional New England style of building. Shingling was a perfect activity. It didn’t prevent us from standing next to each other jawing about anything under the sun. It was work we could agree on.
One day we were up on the plank of the scaffold I built, about the second floor ceiling level. We’re working on that gable end, sitting on the plank. My extension ladder just barely reaches up to the scaffold. I’m on the far end of the plank, away from the ladder. We’re working away, talking away. We hear this little squeaking sound. Squeak, squeak. Squeak, squeak. My dad says, “What is that noise?” I’m going, “What noise?” Just about then, Brooke, who is less than three, puts her head over the top of the ladder. She says, “Hi daddy. I came to see you.”
She’s this little kid, no taller than that, and she just climbed this twenty-two foot ladder. I thought my dad was gonna have a heart attack. I’m at the other end of this wooden plank. I said, “That’s nice, Honey. Can you just stay right there and hold on real tight ‘til I get there?”
And she says, “Sure, Dad!”
We put things together as quickly as we could, to live in . The girls had their rooms. The girls were upset with me when I sheetrocked all the walls because they had gotten accustomed to just walking between the studs when they went from room to room. “Dad! You mean I have to go all the way over to the door?”
People came back from the slope with a lot of money. You saw a lot of people who were basically blue collar people being prosperous.
That’s how I saw Alaska. A land of opportunity and a real fun place to live. A place where it was possible to earn enough money to do what you wanted to do. And if that meant that you were able to get through the periods when there was no work, that was good. Cause there were busts in the construction cycle. People scrambled around for work. At those points it was good to be building a house. You could salve your conscience by acknowledging that you weren’t working for money, but you were working on the house.
