Author visits

Originally published in the Ketchikan Daily News, November 2018; written by Lisa Pearson.

As much fun as fiction can be, there is something particularly striking about reading a factual account of a real event. When the event takes place in a setting that is familiar to you, or involves people you have met, that story becomes even more gripping. We have two authors visiting the public library in November whose books involve real stories, tragedies that occurred here in southern Southeast.

On Saturday, November 3rd at 3:00 pm the library will be collaborating with the Ketchikan Museums to host a presentation by John Tippets about his book “Hearts of Courage: the Gillam plane crash and the amazing true story of survival in the frozen wilderness of Alaska”.

Seventy-five years ago, legendary bush pilot Harold Gillam was flying a Lockheed Electra from Seattle to Anchorage with five passengers when his plane experienced engine trouble and crashed into a snow-covered mountainside in what is now Misty Fjords National Monument. Gillam was able to alert the military airfield on Annette Island that he was in trouble, but he had no clear coordinates of his location and after two weeks of fruitless searching, Gillam and his passengers – including John Tippets’ father Joseph – were presumed dead. The really thrilling story here is not that all six initially lived through the crash, but that four surviving passengers were accidentally discovered a month after their plane went down.

The focus of Tippets’ presentation on Nov. 3rd will be the process he went through in writing this book: his conversations with his father, his research into newspaper accounts and official investigations at the time, and his dealings with publishers. He also worked extensively with local aviators, photographers, artists, and historians. He was also able to include photos of the crash site and the wreckage taken during a 2004 expedition to the site. “Hearts of Courage” was truly a community effort.

The community of Craig was the location of the other tragedy that will be highlighted this month when author Leland Hale presents his new book, “What Happened in Craig: Alaska's Worst Unsolved Mass Murder”, on Thursday, Nov. 15th at 6:30 pm.

In 1982, eight people were killed aboard the purse seiner Investor while it was anchored outside Craig. The victims included a young couple, their two small children, and four teenage deckhands. No one was ever convicted of the crime, although a former deckhand was tried twice for the crime (a hung jury, followed by an acquittal).

There are many people in Ketchikan who remember the incident and the people who were involved, and there was a lively public discussion at the library in 2016 during a reception for the photo exhibit “Lost at Sea: remembering the victims of the F/V Investor murders”. Hale, whose previous book “Butcher, Baker: the true account of an Alaskan serial killer” was made into a feature film starring Nicolas Cage and John Cusack, brings a literary quality to his account of the Investor killings and the subsequent investigation.

Both our visiting authors touch upon real events in our community, real tragedies with victims and lingering consequences. But both presentations promise to make us think not only about events in the past, but about the importance of documenting and remembering those who have been lost.