TRIBUTE TO JOHN HALE - R.I.P. | radio free big lake alaska

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TRIBUTE TO JOHN HALE - R.I.P.

Wednesday, 22 February 2012

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TRIBUTE TO JOHN HALE - R.I.P.

WE ALASKANS - Anchorage Daily News ~ August 25, 1991
Editor's Notes:
By GEORGE BRYSON
John Hale writing in his journal

The idea for our featured story today started quite differently than it ended. It began happily enough last spring when I heard that Nan Elliot and John Hale had climbed Flattop Mountain in the company of a couple witnesses one day and gotten married.

Perfect, I thought.

In our constant casting about for potential subjects for magazine stories, both people — Hale and Elliot had previously come to mind. Hale was about as colorful a character as they come in Alaska, a blue-blooded Annapolis man who'd left his privileged Eastern life behind him to homestead a raw patch of Alaska in the 1940s, since sharing what little he had with virtually everyone he met.

Elliot was a younger version of the same generous sort — an adventuring journalist/author ("I'd Swap My Old Skidoo For You") who'd come to Alaska in the pre-pipeline days and declared it her home. I imagined an article titled "An Alaskan Romance," culminating in their wedding on the rooftop of the Chugach Range. That is, until I heard the news that John Hale was We Alaskans inner cover for article on John Hale

We Alaskans inner cover for article on John Hale

dying. In the sad chain of events that followed, I soon found myself attending a memorial service for Hale with a couple hundred other Alaskans, nearly all of whom knew him better than I did.

It was billed as an old-fashioned Irish wake, full of stories and memories and good cheer. And it was. One after another, the people who knew this man best walked to the microphone to share a tale or two. I only sat and listened — regretting that I didn't get to know him better while he lived.

That's one of the reasons I'm so grateful that Nan was willing to tell her husband's story herself. The account of John Hale's life and death that follows is at once personal and painful, funny and sad. Altogether it's a measure of Nan Elliot's strength of character that she was able to tell it at all. We hope you enjoy it.

THE COMMANDER: John Hale, once a Navy wrestler of Olympic stature, died of cancer this year after an epic struggle. His wife, Nan Elliot, recounts the story of the rich life and couragous death of a true Alaskan.

My Note: (Lynus O'Brien)

What follows are excerpts from the story Nan wrote. I would have included more, but for the fact that when I scanned these I was in a hotel room in a big rush finishing my business before heading out of Fairbanks. I knew John Hale, not real well, but he was the sort that things like that didn't matter--hell, a day after meeting him he loaned me his car to drive to Anchorage to see some Doctors 'bout my arthritis.

Through the years I stayed at his house, at the Red Door (his home in Anchorage with Nan) and at the station him and his son Billy founded--KABN - Long Island, Big Lake, Alaska -- Your Voice in The Valley. He loaned me money, chewed me out a time or to and was a confidant and mentor. I partied with him, laughed with him and cried with him. He made me not fear growing older quite so much...

What follows are Nan's words:

As Nan tells it in the article, when the deal to get married was struck, she literally got married for a song. It was written to the tune of " 'S Wonderful, 'S Marvelous"
John Hale and Nan Elliot Marriage Picture

John Hale and Nan Elliot Marriage Picture

What a date! It's so great! What a day for me!
Nan said, Yes' and I guess we'll make history.
Her pen may write of other men.
But I know I'll get the last dance
in the end.
Three slash nine, mighty fine, the
day you married me.

I did get the last dance in the end. And although it broke my heart many times over, I would not have traded places with anyone.

John Hale, wrestler

With his naval background and his impressive athletic achievements — All-America athlete, captain of the 1945 Naval Academy wrestling team, 1952 Olympic finalist, Naval Academy Athletic Hall of Fame — John Hale was known to many Alaskans simply as the "Commander."

But, first and foremost, John Hale loved people and was devoted to making his friends happy, often in unorthodox ways. He'd rant and rave and swear at them one moment, and the next be hugging and kissing them. He'd argue with them, fight with them, give them his money, get them a job, build them a house, buy them land, write and sing them a song. If they were shy, he'd propose marriage for them to someone they knew — or someone they didn't know — in the middle of a bar or every hour on the hour over the air waves at his wilderness radio station KABN (pronounced "cabin") at "Radio Free Big Lake, Alaska."

"John never got mad at you unless he felt you weren't living up to your potential. Then he'd start yelling. That vein would stand out on his neck — it was horrible to watch," says Anchorage lawyer a quote about John hale

Don Mitchell. "I will remember until I go to my own grave the day a friend of ours came home and started sighing about how she'd been offered this job and that job, but they just weren't up to snuff.

"John flew into this incredible rage. `Goddammit, Patricia, the way you get a good job is you go out and get a goddamn job. And after you get a goddamn job, then you get a good job. When was the last time you saw a person who had a good job who didn't start out with a goddamn job?' "

John Hale and his boys at Nancy Lake, Alaska

John Hale and his boys at Nancy Lake, Alaska

Born in 1922 in Canton, N.Y., John was the son of a prominent judge and an Irish beauty. The Hales of upstate New York were a distinguished family. In 1945, John graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. After two years of active service, on a lark, he headed north to Alaska. He homesteaded at Nancy Lake near a whistle stop in the wilderness known as Willow. His only neighbors were two Athabascan Indians and an old Russian trapper.

John Hale carrying a sack of potatoes on the Aniak River

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Out of surgery, but still under the effects of the anesthesia and singing songs like a drunken sailor, John asked for his journal. He wrote diagonally across the page:

John serving drinks to friends shortly before his death

John serving drinks to friends shortly before his death

"It's not over til it's over. It's till the fat lady sings. She sang. Operation a success. Dori and Jeff called and made me laugh quite a bit. I love you Nan Elliot. And I love me too. xxxx0000 John."

He would write one line and then lapse into song, one that he made up in the Navy about the nurses on the hospital ship "Repose" to the tune of "Button and Bows."

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I love you in khaki
In your Navy blues
But my lips pucker
When I see seersucker
Oh, I'm in love with you...

After midnight, the doctor on the intensive care unit wanted to give John the choice to go on a breathing machine. I said, "No. Give him morphine, give him oxygen. Take the pain away. Take the tubes out. He fought so valiantly today. Let him go believing he won the fight."

They put him on morphine and turned down the lights. By morning his breathing was so irregular. He struggled for air. His eyes could no longer see.

John was filled "stem to stern," he said, with tumor. His lung was filled with tumor, his abdomen, his intestines, his bowels. His liver was completely replaced by tumor. Even his heart muscle was partly encased in tumor.

How was it possible that John had lived at all these last few weeks?

"Sheer will," concluded Joe. "He had to be living on sheer will alone. John was a fighter . . to the end."

REST IN PEACE COMMANDER, FROM US ALL

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