Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

Harry was a Friend of mine

As I was going through some things in my garage, I stumbled across of box full of old cassette tapes from my earlier radio days.

I happened upon a pair of tapes that were labeled "Harry Gaines Interview- Don't touch!" I popped the first one in the cassette deck here in the studio, and flashed back in time 21 years. I had been a new reporter for an Anchorage radio station, and when I learned that my friend Harry Gaines had late-stage pancreatic cancer, I decided to head to the Kenai Peninsula to talk to my old friend one last time.

I had known someone else who had this same disease a few years earlier, and I knew how quickly it can strike. From diagnoses to funeral, in as little as 2 or three months(at least back then). Medical science has improved in buying people a little more time now, but this is still among the deadliest forms of cancer.)

My daughter was four or five months old when Susan and I headed down to Harry's home, just north of Kenai, a short drive from the beaches of Cook Inlet. We took Allison with us, as I thought it might be good for Harry and his wife Dot to see our bundle of joy, and because I figured it would be the only chance I'd have to introduce them.

Harry and Dot were very gracious hosts. They insisted we wpend the night with them in their home, and considering the circumstances, I thought that was extraordinary. I wanted to interview Harry, but not the way most interviews go. It was personal to me, this story about a legendary man who was battling terminal cancer. He wasn't just a celebrity fishing guide on the most famous salmon-fishing river in the world. He was my friend.

Just about 6 years earlier, I was a young 22-year-old radio annoouncer, looking for work. I learned about a group of people who were planning on building a new radio station in Soldotna, Alaska, just a few miles away from Harry Gaine's campground on the Big Eddy section of the Kenai.

Now for some background:

I had been struggling after going through my roughest period of time in radio. I had gotten married in 1984, and was working at the number one radio station in the state of Alaska, in Anchorage. I was young. I was a newlywed. And I had my dream-job. I was only 21. It had all been too easy, looking back.

Less than a month after getting married, I was getting the long face from my boss. It turned out the HIS boss thought I was too young to be hosting an oldies show, and though I had done nothing wrong, his boss had hired an old buddy who happened back into town. And s I was fired for the very first time.

I had a lot of trouble knowing what to do. My ex-wife was very unhappy living in Anchgorage. She was from Kenai, and her parents still lived there along with her younger brother and sisters. She insisted on moving to Kenai, and I was given an ultimatum. Either move with her back to Kenai, or get a divorce. Heavy stuff for a 21-year-old to digest.

I decided marriage was more important than the prospect of getting another radio job(I had already gotten two offers in Anchorage in the following week). So I moved to Kenai. After a frustrating summer of no work, I found a job in Homer, Alaska, at a radio station high on a mountain-top.

I started in September, and just a month later I got the dreaded phone-call from my sister in Cordova. She said my Dad had had an aortic aneurism burst and was in grave condition. I had no money. I had just gotten back to work. And I needed to go to Memphis, Tennessee to see my Dad and say goodbye.

When my new bosses wife learned of the situation, she sprang into action. She called a travel agent, booked the next flight ot to Anchroage and then on to Minneapolis and then on to Memphis. I told her I wasn't going to be able to pay her back for quite some time, and she told me not to even give it a second thought.

I returned from Memphis a week-and-a couple days later. I went back to work, and about five weeks later, I got a strange feeling things weren't going well. I asked my new boss if everything was OK. He told me everything was fine. I breathed a sigh of relief. I needed to catch a break. But the next morning when I arrived at work, that same boss called me into his office, and explained that they had money problems, and had to cut someone from the payroll...and that someone was me.

I was stunned. I was reeling. And ten days later, I had the worst day of my life. It began with a menopausal mother-in-law, hurling insults and epithets of all kinds at me. I wasn't good enough for her daughter. I was a bum who couldn't hold a job. She hated me...(that was a quote). She said when she and her husband returned from a trip to Anchorage, she wanted me gone.

Later that evening, my brother called me from Memphis. Dad died. He had been out of the hospital fro a short period and then had another massive heart attack. He had been taken back to Memphis, but there was little they could do. He had developed gangrene and his body had just quit on him. When I went to bed that noght, I cried for the only time. It was December 16th, 1984.

In January of 1985, I learned of this upstart radio station in the works in Soldotna. I was living there, and so I made myself available. I made calls persistently, making sure these people knew I was young, ready, ambitious and highly motivated. They hired me to be the station's first program director.

I was charged with basically building a new radio station from the ground up. Studio equipment had arrived, and they had hired a contract engineer to install it, but after a week or two, he wasn't getting paid in a timely fashion and so he left.

It then fell to me to assemble the studios, wire everything, and then, oh-by-the-way, dub 5,000 songs from 45RPM records to cartridge-tapes(known as carts in the radio biz). I also had to train a staff of people, most of whom had never been on the radio before. We flipped the switch on April 6th, 1985, and 1140 KCSY was born.

One of the things KCSY would do was offer live fishing reports from the Kenai River in the summer months. Enter the legendary Harry Gaines, Kenai River Fishing-guide. Harry was a legendary guide. He and another guide named Spence Devito were the first two guides on the river back in the early 70's. By the time we met Harry and started doing fishing reports in 1985, there were some 300+ licensed fishing guides on the Kenair River, and Harry was the king of them all.

I remember introducing Harry on the air the very first time. He would do his reports live from the boat, via 2-way VHF radio. It was the beginning of a friendship that woud lead to many adventures and laughs.

Time went by. My first marriage, naturally, ended in divorce. I then met Susan. She changed my life forever. She loved me no matter what. Richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse. We had our only child, Allison on our second wedding anniversary in 1991. Just 4 months later, we were pulling into Harry Gaines' driveway.

So there I was, interviewing Harry with my wife and daughter. It's hard to know where to begin when you are talking to a dear friend who is dying. It is difficult to even contemplate doing. It would have been easy to simply never have picked up the phone and made the call. But I wanted to let Harry know that he was more than just some guy I used to work with. And I wanted to tell his story as someone who knew him and as someone who wasn't just there to get a scoop, but as someone who cared about his dignity, and paid due respect to him.

We shared some laughs about our old adventures. There were many stories, and had we elected to, we could have talked about our fishing adventures all night long. But the story had to be told, and so I asked Harry about his diagnosis, about what kind of reactions he has gotten from his many friends and fans, and about how he had chosen to battle his cancer.

As I had learned, it is difficult to talk to people about their cancer. It is frightening, and you are so fearful of upsetting them, or of dwelling on the terminal nature of the disease in such a way as to appear insensitive or as to appear to be exploiting the situation in a perverse way.

It's has to be very hard to know you are dying. It has to be frustrating when people treat you differently just because of the disease. You are still the same person, but all-of-a-sudden people treat you differently, almost as though you have already died and they are talking to a shell or a ghost.

But Harry made it very easy. I set up a tape recorder next to his chair, and left the microphone where it could pick up his voice clearly. I then sat in another chair a few feet away, and we just started talking.

We started by talking about his early years on the Kenai. How he had started his Fishing Guide operation after finding that friends and acquaintences always took him up on invitations to go fishing, but never offerred to help pay for the exenses. He though it was the right idea at the right time, and he began charging $25 for a half-day guided fishing trip.

As time went by, Harry gained a reputation as a quality guide that made his customers feel like royalty, and who also knew a little bit about fishing. By the mid-80's when I first caught up with him he was getting $125 for a half-day fishing trip.

Harry began to get calls from many celebrities who had heard good things about his fishing guide service, and he played host to many A-list celebrities like Kenny Rogers, Tom Selleck and big-league athletes from baseball and football to golf represented on the Kenai with Harry.

Harry was a good friend, and he was a kind person at heart. Where some people might have gotten a big head or adopted the mentality of a rock-star, Harry was only ever concerned with treating people with respect, and he found joy in making other people happy.

I still remember the day he passed away. His wife, Dot called me to tell me the news. She sounded tired, relieved, lonely and very gracious. She almost sounded apologetic, because she was so sweet about it. She had just lost her husband, yet she sounded more concerned with making sure I was OK.

Dot passed away in 2004. I am sure she and Harry have a perfect spot by the river.

Harry and Dot were humble, never pretentious, and they showed me nothing but kindness over the years. As I approach my 50th birthday, I find myself hoping that I can be that same kind of person to the young people I know and interact with. Harry set the bar pretty high.

God bless you all.