Len Anderson, public radio station KSKA's local news reporter in Anchorage, is looking back on his career now, the good and the bad.
He once stood by a wet mule in a Wisconsin parking lot, wearing hillbilly clothes and promoting a new citrus pop for a commercial radio station.
He interviewed Alaska's last territorial governor, Mike Stepovich.
He covered a long summer of equal rights hearings at the Anchorage Assembly -- and a gazillion other Assembly and School Board meetings.
Anderson and his slow-paced, steady voice have become an institution in Anchorage. But he'll be retiring and signing off the air by the end of January. He is 67.
Daysha Eaton, a public radio morning host and reporter at KDLG in Dillingham, has been hired to replace him.
She'll bring new talent to Alaska Public Telecommunications Inc., the nonprofit parent company of KAKM public TV, KSKA, and the Alaska Public Radio Network, said Steve Lindbeck, president and general manager of APTI.
But it will take awhile to catch up with everything Anderson knows, Lindbeck said. "How can you count the value of this much experience and understanding of the community?"
For the past eight years, Anderson has dedicated himself to airing the issues that arise at Assembly and School Board meetings "where democracy is happening," Anderson said.
He would spend hours at a night meeting, go home and sleep for two hours, and head to KSKA at 2:30 or 3 a.m. to prepare a story for first airing at 6:35 a.m.
Recently, news director Lori Townsend asked him to start being more selective and skip some of the meetings. "I just didn't want him to kill himself," she said. And there's plenty else to cover in the city.
CAREER IN RADIO?
Anderson's first career was not broadcasting but college teaching. An English composition student one day challenged him by asking what can be done with an English degree, Anderson said.
He went to his office and thought about that question. Then he decided to see if he, with a master's degree in English, could make a career in radio. In doing so, he followed in the footsteps of his father.
His first public broadcasting job was at KEYA on the Turtle Mountain Indian Chippewa Reservation in North Dakota. After two years, he wanted to move on and in 1979 came to Alaska as manager of the Kotzebue radio station, KOTZ.
He met his wife Doris Ningy Anderson, an Inupiaq from Shungnak in Northwest Alaska.
Except for a year in Fairbanks, and three years when his wife was attending college in La Crosse, Wis., he stayed in Kotzebue until the early 1990s.
"There's a lot of history in his head," said Nellie Moore, a radio journalist who worked with Anderson in Kotzebue off and on for 15 years or so. "A lot of significant Alaska history," she said, like the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and global warming.
He also learned about Native cultures, sometimes the hard way.
Here's a story Anderson tells about himself:
"I gained my Inupiaq name through an on-air mispronunciation in Kotzebue. I was reading through a stack of Tundra Messages one late summer Friday morning. I came to one message from a little grandson to his grandmother to have fun in Point Hope where she was visiting and to pick -- in Inupiaq -- plenty of salmonberries."
"I knew the word but in haste to get through the stack, mispronounced it. I could hear the Inupiat laughter through two closed doors. I had the grandmother scouring the tundra outside Point Hope picking white owls. The next Monday, Nellie Moore announced on the air that White Owl was my new name."
HUMAN ELEMENT IN STORIES
While in these Indian and largely Alaska Native communities, he developed the slow way of talking he's known for. He's actually picked up the pace since coming to Anchorage, he said.
In Anchorage, Anderson worked at Native news outlets until he moved to KSKA in 2003.
Townsend, the news director at KSKA's parent organization, said, "Len has an amazing ability to find the human element in stories ... rather than just quoting talking heads."
He did that in stories about the controversy of Red Roof Inn being turned into housing for homeless alcoholics and in visits to homeless camps and Bean's Cafe, which feeds homeless people, she said.
Anchorage Schools Superintendent Carol Comeau, who knows Anderson from countless School Board meetings, said she liked his stories on the diverse groups in Anchorage schools, such as coverage of programs for Native kids and ones for immigrant newcomers.
One of her favorite stories is likewise a favorite of Anderson's: a tale of a blueberry-picking trip near Healy with Anderson's wife and a friend. He recorded his wife exclaiming about the berries to her friend. The berries were so big, he soon started to pick them himself, though he doesn't usually get in his own stories. While they were picking, Mary, the friend of his wife, Doris Anderson, was talking on a cellphone about her niece, who was in labor back in Anchorage. "Don't have the baby, we'll be back this afternoon," Mary said. Then, later in the day, "Lots of hair, huh."
The story showed how his wife and her friend feel when they pick berries, Anderson said.
"I thought it was pure Len. Just so human," said Comeau.
Anderson plans to write more family stories when he retires. He and Doris have half a dozen children -- his, hers and ours, he says, with grandchildren from Alaska to Pennsylvania. He wants to write about each grandchild's family so they'll all know each other.
Reach Rosemary Shinohara at rshinohara@adn.com or 257-4340.
By ROSEMARY SHINOHARA
Anchorage Daily News