Shortly after I arrived in Fairbanks, Alaska in September of 1967, to take a job as editor with the Daily News-Miner there, because of my prior experience working with the Pennsylvania state legislature as a press officer, I was assigned to cover a special session of the Alaska legislature in Juneau called by Governor Wally Hickel to deal with the disastrous flooding of Fairbanks by the Chena River in August of that year.
The flood inundated much of Fairbanks and surrounding areas. The special flood session lasted about a week. When I returned to Fairbanks, while walking down a hallway in the News-Miner offices, I encountered a fellow I didn't know who greeted me and introduced himself as Ivan Thorall, then in his early 60s.
Ivan complimented me on my coverage of the special session. He said he parfticularly liked my reporting on a commercial fishing issue known as "incidentally-caught kings." That was a thorny problem in which some, including Ivan, contended that most of the king salmon caught by commercial fishermen while fishing for other inferior species were intentionally targeted because of their high "black" market value.
Soon Ivan and I launched into wide-ranging discussions of other fish and wildlife matters - and the attendant and inevitable "politics" that surcharged them. That was the start of a close friendship that lasted for the next 35 years until Ivan's death in 2009 at age 95.
Because of his wide and deep acquaintance in Fairbanks and statewide among the influential fish and game fraternity (and sorority), Ivan opened important doors to prominent leaders and sources for me that would otherwise have remained forever closed to a "cheechako" newsman from the Eastern seaboard.
Among other things, Ivan introduced me to the family of his dear friends , Gene and Frances Miller and their kids who often invited me over for dinner. Gene, a lawyer who specialized in fish and game matters, was for several years a member of the Alaska House of Representatives.
Twenty years later, after I returned to Pennsylvania to be with my aging parents, Ivan and I kept in touch regularly by phone, except when he stayed for weeks or months at a time at his federal homestead in Chisana, a one-time but now abandoned placer gold-mining boom town in the shadow of the Nutzontin Mountains where there were no phones, keeping in touch by snail mail. There he and his gold-mining partner, Iver Johnson, also from Fairbanks, chased the "mother lode" with limited but moderate success.
When satellite, and later land line phone service inevitably came to Chisana in the late 1990s, we "progressed" to phone communicaions. I regretted the loss of those wonderful letters from Ivan describing his daily life in Chisana. I wished in vain I could turn the clock back to the no-phone days.
A carpenter by trade, Ivan worked in construction, sometimes as a self- exployed contractor, at other times for other contractors, building structures and infrastructure, mostly in remote bush locations in Alaska's sub-arctic or arctic north, "shaking the money tree" in Alaska's burgeoning "oil patch," following the discovery of world class oil and gas reservoirs beneath Alaska's North Slope tundra.
In the years following Ivan's retirement from regular employment on the North Slope and elsewhere, he and I would alternate visitations, summering in his Chisana environs, wintering in my Florida habitat.. During those visits we would take long trips to places like Arizona, Washington state, Idaho (Ivan's home state), Nova Scotia, Labrador/Newfoundland and other Canadian maritime provinces, to the Yukon and Northwest Territories, exploring the four corners of the continent .
On his last trip back East, while I was wintering in Florida, Ivan, a lifetime NRA member, had obtained tickets to the annual NRA convention in Orlando. It was a special convention because the NRA was saying goodbye to its longtime celebrity supporter and president, Charlton Heston, then in the early stages of Ahlzeimer's. Nevertheless, Heston hobbled on stage on the arm of his lovely wife to deliver a brief, halting farewell message. Within months, he was gone.
Whenever we were together, Ivan and I observed a daily ritual involving what we called a "Sundowner," a pre-prandian libation. Years earlier, I had introduced him to a cocktail known as a "Latin Manhattan," made with rum instead of whiskey or bourbon and sweet vermouth, with a dash of Angostura bitters. I had in turn been introduced to it by my younger sister, Fran and her husband, Jim Ferko, a peripatetic chemical engineer who had become acquainted with it during a job tour in Puerto Rico.
Without fail, Ivan and I would have a Latin Manhattan before dinner where ever we were, together or apart. One of the last times I talked to Ivan on the phone, he in Alaska, I in Pennsylvania, it was just before dinner time, and Ivan told me he was in the process of imbibing his daily Sundowner. He said he had mixed two portions, one for him, one for me. But since I wasn't there, he drank both.
One hasn't eaten Alaska king salmon until one has feasted on what are known as "white kings,' a rare delicacy which consists of white rather than pink, orange or red flesh.
White kings are accidental, or incidental catches whose white flesh derives from feeding on huge random rafts of tiny shrimplike crustaceans in the ocean deep known as "krill."
Sometimes the white flesh of the white kings may be only partly white, partly colored because their diet on their ocean feeding journeys may have consisted only partly of krill as they outswam or depleted the krill rafts, partly of other fish species.
A popular restaurant known as "Mike's Place" on Douglas Island in Gastineau Channel, connected by bridge to Juneau on the mainland, was the only place I've ever been served white king (it was illegal for retailers or restauranteurs to sell or serve incidentally caught king salmon).
The restauranters would secretly reserve servings of the rare catch ( it was never listed on the menu) for special customers whom they would call whenever a friendly or cooperative fisherman clandestinely sold them the white kings for a high premium.
During my extended residency in Juneau, where I covered the regular and special sessions of the legislature for some 20 years, I happened to be a close personl friend of legendary state senator John Butrovich from Fairbanks, who served in the State Senate for more than 30 years, and his charming wife, Grace.
They would always invite me to join them in one of these rare feasts whenever they were favored with a call from Mike's telling them he'd obtained some white king and would be quietly serving it for dinner that evening.
That was many years ago. I don't know whether these intriguing practices are still ongoing.
