"Alaska Bear Tales" is a best-selling collection of edge-of-your-seat accounts of true-life encounters with bears in Alaska.
Log cabin. Snowed in. Pregnant young woman. Deer Park, Washington. Baby boy.
A month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor I joined my sister Laura Lee and our parents Vivian and Larry, thanks to my great-grandmother Clara Kralman's midwifery. A little over a year later Lana Lynne completed our family. Before long my father left us.
Vivian worked in the war effort in Everett, building Liberty ships and B-29 bulkheads for bombers at the Boeing plant. When she became ill, Vivian and the children moved to her parent's dairy farm.
Within a few years she met and married Chuck Jenkins. His love of hunting and fishing whetted my appetite for camping, hiking, hunting and fishing. Charlie spent hours playing catch and hitting fly balls to me, opening the sports arena for me.
I attended grade schools in Seattle, Kelso, Everett, Spokane and Walla Walla where I played football, basketball and baseball. Halfway through the eighth grade we moved from Walla Walla to Clarkston where I became more independent, hunting and fishing with friends.
I was a member of the football, trampoline and badminton teams and participated in the school newspaper and yearbook as well as drama and student government before graduating from Charles Francis Adams High School in 1960.
My college years were spent at Warner Pacific College in Portland, Oregon (played basketball) before transferring in 1963 to Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, where I received degrees in English-literature and education. At Warner I met Pamela Diane Timmons. Struck by her auburn-haired, hazel-eyed beauty, I later asked her to marry me.
We wed in Newberg, Oregon, August 28, 1964 prior to my senior year. In 1966 I accepted an offer to teach English and reading at Anchorage's newest school, A.J. Dimond High School. During my first years there I coached the cross-country running team and assisted Don Frantz with the wrestling program. I enjoyed teaching at Dimond for 26 years; my coaching also included football and track.
In the winter of 1967 Pam informed me that we were going to be parents and on September 25, 1968, Ginger Diane was born. Within a year and a half Jill Rose joined our family (May 7, 1970). On our 9th anniversary in 1973 our third child, Benjamin Chane, was born. By now our family had moved from Spenard to south Anchorage where we built our home "out in the country".
I began ground school in hopes of earning my private pilot's license. I passed the written exam in the spring of 1993 and began flying with Heidi Ruess and her son Rick of Arctic Flyers May 18, 1994, passing my check ride with her April 9, 1995. In March 2003 I began rebuilding a wrecked Super Cub thus fulfilling my dream to own a Piper Cub.
During my effort to entice publishers to edit a book of Alaskan adventures about prospectors, pioneers and pilots so that I'd have a text book for my literature of the North classes, I was asked to write a book of Alaskan bear stories. I began compiling stories in January 1975, continued teaching, husbanding and fathering, working with young people at church and starting a 2400-square-foot addition to the home we built in 1970. That book, Alaska Bear Tales, was completed in 1980 and sent to the publisher, reaching the public in May 1983. It is in its 19th printing.
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