Susan McKellar: "Penga Tar!"

We (Aldens & McKellars) were on a camping trip. If there were other people along with us - which is likely - I can't recall who they were. I'm not even sure where we were, but I'm certain that we were camping.

It was in the morning, and Doug, Susan and I were sitting in the McKellar's "Prowler" camper. I remember thinking the Prowler was a bit nicer and roomier than our camper, the "Taurus".

Doug and I were comparing sleeping quarters. I remember we were fascinated by the way you could sit around a small dining table inside the camper, enjoying a snack, and presto! The dining table would fold down and collapse, transforming into a plank bed onto which you'd throw some cushions and maybe a Coleman sleeping bag. It was like something out of a James Bond movie.

That's when Susan began to annoy Doug.

"Penga Tar!" Susan shrieked.

Nobody said a word.

I mean, I heard Susan, but I didn't really know what she meant. The folding table continued to hold my interest.

"Penga Tar! Penga Tar!"

To put it delicately, Susan was exuberant.

Doug sighed, but he said nothing. He pretended not to notice.

Susan acknowledged Doug's eye-rolling indifference and kicked things up a notch in accordance with sibling bylaws.

"Penga Tar! Peng Tar!"

Doug snapped. "Susan, ENOUGH ALREADY!!"

Doug made a brushing motion towards his sister, as if to shoo away a pesky mosquito.

Susan paid him no mind. In fact, I think the shooing motion merely encouraged her.

"Penga Tar! Penga Tarrrrr!"

Doug lost it.

"AAARRGH!"

In a fit of hilarious insanity, Doug started chasing Susan around the inside of the Prowler. Susan screamed and ran for the door and they both ended up outside.

I couldn't make heads or tails out of any of this. So I stepped outside to see if I could figure out what the heck was going on.

"Um, what's she saying, Doug?"

"She's saying playing guitar, playing guitar... and it drives me nuts!"

Susan did a little dance in her pajamas while gesturing with her hands, strumming on invisible strings.

"Penga Tar....Penga Tar..."

I thought it was adorable.

Douglas was positively volcanic.

Greg McKellar & The Fungus Bucket Incident

There were some interesting "folk art" hobbies which were - and undoubtedly still are - popular among many Alaskan residents.

Painting goldpans, for example. (Some people took this a step further and added clock hands on the front of the pan and a small battery powered gearbox on the back). These creations adorned many a wall in Alaskan homes.












And then there was the Fungus Movement, in which the artist would collect the fungi which grew on birch trees in order to paint colorful scenes on them:











Not just any fungus would do, however. For painting and display, the ideal fungus needed to have a smooth, flat surface for the "face" which was to be painted, and the fungus also had to be shaped in such a way that it could stand upright on a desk, shelf or mantle. The perfect fungus didn't grow on trees, you know! Well, actually...it did. You know what I mean. The perfect "painting fungus" could be hard to find.

And that is why Mrs. McKellar (Nora) sent Greg off into the woods near the Chatanika River with a large bucket during one of our camping trips. Greg was to collect a bunch of fungi from the area birch trees and bring them back to his mother, who would choose the ideal "candidates".

Looking back, Greg and his younger sibling Doug might well have been the inspiration for Bart Simpson. Using a brand new Xerox machine in an office building near their home on the north end of Ft. Wainwright (without permission, naturally) the McKellar brothers Xeroxed their bare butts before anyone gave them the idea that one could use a photocopier for that purpose. That's ingenuity, man! And that's the mildest stunt they pulled in my presence. I won't even write about some of the others.

Back to Greg with his bucket in the birch trees around the Chatanika River. Greg also took along a .22 rifle, which he liked to shoulder when he went off into the woods. Being a few years older than Doug and I, Greg was allowed to do this. He picked off a squirrel with the .22 and placed its bloody corpse in the bottom of the bucket. A bunch of fungi were placed on top of that. Greg then took the bucket back to his unsuspecting mother, who awaited her son's fungal harvest while socializing in the family camper.

Nora looked forward to sorting through the fungi that her son had so thoughtfully gathered for her. Fungus by fungus, Nora evaluated each piece.

45+ years later, I can still hear the scream that reverberated throughout the confines of that camper when Mrs. McKellar unknowingly uncovered the bloodied rodent corpse at the bottom of that bucket.

It was a scream followed by laughter.

Nora was a good sport and even though I was a child she always struck me as a gregarious fun-loving person.

With two boys like Greg and Doug, I imagine her naturally positive disposition helped her a great deal in coping with two such monsters.

Youth Hockey Days: Scouts

click images to enlarge











The original Hanson Bros?















The Scouts!















Scouts team photo #2. Darren Noble is there, as well as Randy Parsons (red helmet, top row) and my dad as coach. Was Doug McKellar sick that day? I don't see him here.















The Scouts dressing room. Reporters and ladies will kindly wait outside for autographs. The redheaded kid was named Ricky. He already looks like a hockey player with that toothless smile!



















Article dated November 28, 1975 from the Yukon Sentinel, a paper based on Ft. Wainwright which was included with the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner on Fridays.







Note the excerpt above (click to enlarge). I scored in the 1st period but it was Tommy Howell and Darren Noble who saved the day! PS - the reporter cracks me up. "Ice breaking action..." gotta love it!















Scouts take the ice for a practice session















I wore my favorite number, 11, during my first year with the Scouts. The next year I wore #21 to honor my hockey hero, Gil Perrault, a French Canadian who played for the Buffalo Sabres. When I moved on to the Hawks in the next division, I wanted to go back to #11, because it was my "personal" number, but I had to wear #8 because the person who purchased our jerseys goofed and didn't order #11. I wasn't happy, but that's life.

Dy-No-Mite!

Doug McKellar and I had a crush on the same girl in grade school.

Her name was Jaqueline "Jackie" DuVal. She may have been a grade ahead of us, I'm not sure. We used to tell her jokes and exaggerated stories in order to impress her or make her laugh.

I don't remember much beyond that, except that Doug once told me that he thought Jackie was "dynamite". The problem was, I thought so too!

Well, Jacqueline - wherever you may be - you really were dy-no-mite.

Googly Eyed Yarnball Things

This is a random memory but I remember making these googly eyed yarnball things at the McKellar household during the holidays one year. Mrs. McKellar (Nora) showed us how to put these together. The McKellars had a Siamese cat - Coco - that loved to bat these things around.

Greg sent me an email recently and he mentioned my mom's "memorable" spaghetti dinners.
"It's funny", Greg wrote, "the things that really stick with you over the years." (Hey wait a minute....what exactly did he mean by that?)

Greg's right. I told him that I recalled the gumbo dinners at the McKellars in the winter, which is probably not such an odd thing to remember, I suppose, since gumbo was pretty exotic for us Aldens at the time. The McKellars hail from Louisiana and the gumbo (like my mom's spaghetti) was incredible. There are several reasons why a visit to Louisiana is up there on my Bucket List, and good food is one of them.

I also remember the huge stack of Richie Rich comic books Doug and I had amassed, and pressing silly putty into the comic books, lifting the putty, and reading a carbon copy of the comic that way.

And wasn't there something about a baby alligator the McKellars bought as a gag gift for Lee Payne because (in part) he was a dentist? Or did I dream this up after eating too much gumbo?

Extra: Alaskan TV (Mid to Late 1970s)

Television in Fairbanks, Alaska during the mid 1970s.
Sigh. Those weren't the days.

This concept might be a bit difficult for some people to fully grasp today, but as a kid growing up in the interior of Alaska, I only had three television channels at my disposal - and two of the major networks shared one of those channels.

KTVF (Channel 11) handled CBS broadcasts. KUAC (Channel 9) was (and still is) the PBS station, beaming out of the University of Alaska campus. (PBS enjoyed healthy ratings in Alaska; I am told that at one point Alaskans watched more public television than any other state in the union when taken on a per capita basis). And KATN (Channel 2) was the oddball "hybrid" channel that offered programming from both NBC and ABC. And you never really knew when KATN would pull the rug out from underneath you by switching networks. Sometimes they changed things up right in the middle of the program you were watching. We never had a TV guide in the house; it would have been pointless.

Like most of my schoolmates, I lived for Friday nights. After Scope News at 11:00pm there was Theater 11, a time slot KTVF often used to show old monster movies. I loved Theater 11, and I can still remember the cheesy elevator music they used for the theme. It was an orchestral rendition of "To Dream The Impossible Dream" from Man of La Mancha.

We watched an unhealthy amount of television back then. It might be the reason I don't watch a whole lot of television as an adult. But television was something of a lifeline during those long, dark Alaskan winters. I also enjoyed reading as a child. There were many times during that period of my life when I really needed a place to escape, and books allowed me to shut out the rest of the world. I would disappear into my own imagination. I still remember many of the books I read as a child, but (with some notable exceptions) I can't recall most of the television I watched back then.
















My sister Aimee and I taking in a good ol' fashioned retina sizzlin'

It wasn't all bad, but it is also true that we were a captive audience. Faced with eight months of perpetual darkness and subzero temperatures which emphasized indoor activity, there wasn't a lot for a kid to do. But there were moments when TV truly brought my friends and I together. A freaky movie or a startling plot twist in a popular series always set our tongues awag on the playground the next day during recess. We shared this bond because nearly everyone saw the same show the night before. We didn't have many choices or distractions.















They don't call it the 'Land of the Midnight Sun' for nothing

Summer in Alaska meant no sleep for most of us kids because the sun never really went down. It was the polar opposite of winter. We were up all night, bouncing off the walls. When we ventured outside (often without parental knowledge, let alone approval) we liked to play the occasional game of "dodge the curfew" which was almost always exciting. Kids weren't supposed to be out on the streets of Ft. Wainwright past a certain hour. Is that MP car slowing down? Did the cop see us? Run!

Perhaps because he could not sleep himself, the manager of Channel 11 announced one summer that all-night broadcasting would commence for the months of June and July. Compeau's Marine (the local boat dealer) signed on as the prime sponsor. We were really excited about this as kids.

Forget about Theater 11 or Midnight Madness...this new idea meant that during our so-called sleepovers we could watch old movies like "The Blob" and old TV shows like "The Twilight Zone" until 5am! While we had fun at night, we were often cranky, red-eyed kids during the day. Our parents must have hated the manager of Channel 11.



















I remember one 4am movie we liked in particular - The Losers - about a misfit motorcycle gang which faced one of two choices: either go to prison or go over to Vietnam to fight as a special unit using tricked-out motorcycles. The gang chose Vietnam (well of course!) and their bikes were outfitted with machine guns and rocket launchers. Cool, man! Tragically, not all of those dirtbag motorcycle gang members made it home...*sniff*

















Another odd thing I remember about Alaskan TV in those days is that many TV programs were shown a good two weeks after the original broadcast as seen by households in the "Lower 48". I'll give you an example.

About every other summer or so, my family and I would fly down to Gunnison, Colorado to visit my grandparents. I was amazed to discover that my Nana and Gramps were watching television programs that I'd never even heard of. Thanks to satellite/tape delay (I never really figured out the technical reasons) these programs would not be televised in Alaska for another 14 to 21 days.

It was sort of like catching a glimpse of the future; you knew what was going to happen (at least in the realm of television) long before any of your friends back in Alaska did. "Heed my words. I predict that there shall be a made-for-TV Star Wars movie coming on NBC...at the end of the month!" I once said to my astonished friends during recess. It was oddly empowering.
















My grandmother and I liked to watch a game show called Tic-Tac-Dough. The show's host was Wink Martindale(!) I can't remember what I did to cross her one day (I know that she didn't like to lose at Chinese checkers) but the punishment from my grandmother was pretty harsh. She laid down the law: "Michael, you will not watch Tic-Tac-Dough tonight and you will turn in early!"

Catch you later, Wink.

I pretended to be hurt as I shambled off to bed, performing the most theatrical mope I could muster. But Grandma couldn't see that I had a little smirk on my face. For I had some inside information. I knew that I could catch that forbidden episode of Tic-Tac-Dough in another week or two after I had returned home. I congratulated myself for being so clever as I turned off the bedside lamp. Grandma can send me to bed early, but she can't get the best of me!

And then I heard my grandmother's voice boom from the living room downstairs. "And I'll tell your parents not to let you watch it in Alaska either!"

Extra: Slide Restoration Demo

These 1970s era Kodachrome slides were, for the most part, in remarkably good condition. However, many of the slides needed some rather serious restoration work.

I cleaned the "problem slides" using a solution made by PEC-12. Takes out smudges and fingerprints without leaving any residue. Some of the slides had to be removed from their original cardboard/plastic mounts and remounted. I like to use Wess full-frame slide mounts for this.

The slides were scanned with a Nikon Coolscan 5000 film scanner, then "sleeved" in archival quality slide sheets. No PVCs (polyvinyl chlorides) allowed! PVCs will damage film emulsion over time, so slide sheets must be "PVC free". Clear File's ArchivalPlus slide sheets are good.

Next step was to open the scanned images in Photoshop and go to town on them. Most of the scratches and other imperfections were removed. The film scanner software can help with this process, too. Colors have been corrected and restored to their original Brady Bunch-era glory whenever possible.

This is Fred McKellar and his awesome catch before and after the restoration. Click on this image to open it up for a better look.

Wish I had more slides to share, but I hope you've enjoyed these!