By Tom Morphet
Ron and Suzie Scollon are pulling up stakes again.
The Scollons, who each hold a doctoral degree in linguistics, are
moving to Seattle next month, 25 years after making their home in Haines. In that span,
they’ve also lived and taught in Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Washington, D.C.
The Seattle move is necessary for medical care. It ends a 40-year
Alaska adventure that started in the summer of 1968, when Detroit was in flames and Ron
was determined to leave his hometown and see the North. "I knew I was going to get
out of Detroit. With the riots and everything, it wasn’t very fun."
For the road trip, Scollon invited a buddy from Ohio, who surprised him
by also inviting along a college friend from Portland named Suzie Wong. Scollon was
skeptical. "I said, ‘Okay, but only if I can kick her out if it doesn’t
work. It’s not going to ruin my trip.’"
Ron and Suzie married a year later in Honolulu, her hometown. They
attended the University of Hawaii, which then offered Alaska students in-state tuition.
When they moved to Fairbanks in 1978 to go to work for the University of Alaska, Scollon
had his doctoral degree in socio-linguistics and Suzie was working toward hers.
Languages were a natural for Scollon, who grew up in a family of
missionaries to whom knowledge of foreign languages and travel to exotic lands were
commonplace. "I was getting languages from a lot of different directions." A
pidgin-English speaker as a child, Suzie attended Chinese school and was taught to read
Mandarin, although she jokes that the greatest skills she honed there were ping-pong and
calligraphy.
At Fairbanks in 1981, Scollon taught a statewide course about the role
of literacy in saving endangered Native languages, which he believes was the first
language class ever taught via e-mail, long before that term was coined. The computer
network he used was one the state university inherited from the U.S. military, with 20
sites statewide.
Some of the first writers and readers of Alaska’s indigenous
languages did their first work on computers. "We felt, ‘Hey, we have this
technology, let’s use it,’" he said. Ironically, university officials
resisted Scollon’s innovative teaching method. One called it a "trivial and
frivolous use of computer resources."
Seeking a break from academia and a chance to use computers for a
mail-order bookstore, the Scollons went shopping for a new place to live in 1983. "We
wanted to be in Alaska, and all we needed was a phone system that was reliable and a mail
system that was reliable." They aimed for Sitka but had trouble finding a rental,
then forgot Sitka after arriving here on a summery September day.
Moving into the historic O’Dell house on Second Avenue, they
established the Gutenberg Dump, selling books, tapes, videotapes and sheet music by mail
order and through a computer communications network called "The Source" in the
days before the Internet.
Their first mailing list of 200 was comprised of friends and colleagues
and their friends. A typical order was sending a videotape copy of "Zorba the
Greek" to the East Coast. As working by computer required a long-distance phone call
to Juneau, most business was done by mail and most of the family’s slim income came
from consulting jobs in cross-cultural communication, serving Alaska school districts,
universities and government agencies.
Loss of business from the statewide recession of 1986-87 and a desire
to see Asia led them to act on a tip from a friend in Taiwan who phoned about a job offer
there for two associate professors. "We started pulling off in that direction and
once we got there, we had to see Korea (where Ron had served in the U.S. Army) and the
rest," Ron said.
Their big break came when they were offered senior-level positions in
Hong Kong, developing English-instruction courses for businesses. Their generous salaries
covered college tuition bills for daughter Rachel and son Tom. The Scollons finished their
college careers six years ago at Georgetown University, Ron as professor and Suzie as
researcher.
But their work hasn’t stopped. Scollon most recently has been
working with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research on a project aimed at
helping normalize the lives of children who have been used as soldiers. He and Suzie also
have two book projects: one on the language aspects of world distribution of food, and
another on how narrative structures differ from culture to culture.
In Chinese stories, for example, when a story reaches a climax, the
plot heads off on a new, entirely different story line, instead of coming to a clean
resolution. "If people were aware of different possible ways of telling a story,
they’d be richer for it," said Scollon.
The Scollons are not looking forward to the big-city life. Ron, who
served a term on the borough assembly, calls Haines a "manageable world."
"In Seattle, you know only a little of what’s going on. In
Haines, you have a richer human experience because there are more opportunities for
participation. You end up talking to a lot of people you might not talk to otherwise, and
that keeps everybody’s views more tempered."
Suzie, who spent the last year sitting in on peak oil task force
meetings, says she’ll miss her cherry trees and being able to walk anywhere she needs
to go. "The community is small enough, you can figure out things to do. We may not
figure out global climate change, but you can figure out how to survive here year to
year."
Ron and Suzie will be in town until June 7. The historic O’Dell
house, with the Gutenburg Dump sign out front, is for sale.
