By Sharon Resnick
For 60 years no one ever asked Dick Aukerman about his Navy years in
World War II. But in the past few years, he’s been asked by people as far away as
London to recount "what happened out there."
First, it was former Haines newsman Dave McKenzie, who came collecting
stories of WWII veterans.
"I was under my house digging out a place for the furnace,"
Aukerman said. "I turned a five-gallon bucket upside down to sit on. As I began
telling my story, it all came back and I was living it all over again."
In 2006, Aukerman received an e-mail from an assistant producer for an
English television company working on a documentary about the war in the Pacific theater.
She asked him to recount the attack on the USS Mannert L. Abele, on which Aukerman was
serving as a radioman.
He clearly recalled watching the arrival of the "baka," a
human-guided rocket bomb that destroyed the ship during the Battle of Okinawa. The bomb
hit after a kamikaze pilot had crashed a moment earlier, breaking the destroyer’s
keel. "We were dead in the water."
The baka bomb broke the ship in half and sank it in three minutes.
"There was a plane circling just out of reach of our 40-millimeter
quads with a bomb under its belly," Aukerman wrote in a letter to the producer.
"The bomb was turned loose and it headed towards us. There was a Japanese lying on
his belly, wearing a brown leather helmet and goggles, arms stretched forward guiding the
bomb. It hit us amid ship below the water line."
One of Aukerman’s most searing memories was that of a sailor in a
life jacket, stuck halfway out an escape hatch. "That sailor seemed to glow as all
white as he and the ship sank below the surface," he wrote. The sailor was one of 73
of the vessel’s 300 crew to die when the ship went down.
"It was going down so fast, I just stepped off the deck and into
the water and started swimming," Aukerman said. He and other crew were rescued by
landing craft nearby.
Until he moved to Haines in 1948, Aukerman hadn’t lived any place
for more than 14 months since high school in Union City, Ind. During his time with the
Civil Aviation Administration in Umiat, Unalakleet and Iliamna, he had heard that Haines
was the "garden spot of Alaska."
He was transferred here and eventually bought two and a half acres for
$100 an acre on what is now Mud Bay Road after he found his home in town burned to the
ground when he returned to it one night.
At the request of his wife Wanda, he decided to build a 24-by-24-foot
"shack." He bought lumber from Frank Schnabel, father of John, and asked,
"What do I do now?"
"I didn’t even know what a stringer was," he said.
"Frank showed me how to cut studs and rafters." At some point that
"shack" was moved to town and became the Ormasen home on Second Avenue.
In 1956, Dick and his wife Wanda moved to Scottsdale, Ariz. for 20
years where Dick worked as a carpenter building houses and condominiums. After retiring,
they returned to Haines in 1976 and eventually bought four and a half more acres between
Mud Bay Road and Small Tracts. Wanda worked at a lumberyard, while Dick did freelance
carpentry until he decided to quit because he wasn’t getting his own building done.
With his grandfather’s way of life as a model, Aukerman cut trees
on his land and milled his own lumber. He’s been building ever since and keeps
"singing and whistling all the time."
"Keep a song in your heart, a smile on your lips and whistle every
chance you get and it keeps tension a far piece away," he said.
First, there was the three-story home, which included two apartments,
which he and Wanda lived in until a few years ago. They now live right next door in
another three-story house.
"We built as the money came in because we didn’t want to go
in debt," he said.
Spindle-filled banisters surround the two open floors above the main
floor of their present house. Each of the approximately 400 spindles took about an hour
each to make and finish, the shorter ones took about 30 minutes each, he said.
Right now, with the addition of a pacemaker, a second hip replacement,
a screen for a hernia and hearing aids, Aukerman, 87, is still building. This time
it’s a bathroom with a shower big enough for a wheelchair if it ever comes to that.
For a while after one of his hip replacements, he walked with a cane.
Then he bought a 21-speed bicycle last fall and started bicycling as far up Small Tracts
Road and Cemetery Hill as he could go.
"It strengthened my legs enough that my balance increased and now
I no longer need the cane," he said.
To what does Aukerman attribute his vim and vigor? Good genes for one
thing. His dad died at 98 and his mom at 102. Both were "sharp as a tack" right
up to the end, he said.
Then there’s his personal philosophy.
"Don’t smoke, drink, do drugs or chew or run around with
those who do because if you take care of your body, it will take care of you," is one
of his favorite sayings.
Aukerman loves living in the Chilkat Valley and drinking the
"Alaska champagne" that comes from the spring on Mud Bay Road. He also keeps a
close eye on what goes on across the water from him. He has a scope to watch the wolves,
goats and extreme skiers and most recently the kite surfers in front of his house.
Sometimes he writes about what he sees. Recently he typed for four
hours as he recorded all the behavior of two groups of wolves eating two mountain goats in
separate locations near the Boot Hill Slide. His next plan is to write a book.
Though he and Wanda have a flat-screen television, Aukerman says he
tries not to watch it too much. "Television can bring the troubles of the world into
your living room," he said. "And then you can’t whistle."
