What follows is not Elstun’s life story, but a snapshot of events from 1958 that laid the foundation for Lauesen’s career as a crusader, dreamer and political activist. Though he often labored in the service of lost causes, he had more than his share of victories as well.
Here is his full obituary. His family and friends will celebrate his life Sunday at 3 p.m. in the Wildbirch Hotel in Anchorage.
My favorite line in his obituary is the one that says, “After graduating from Lathrop High School in 1963, Elstun traveled around the United States philosophizing,” but that is too modest. He philosophized on a daily basis at any time, any place.
One of the first times Elstun’s name appeared in the Daily News-Miner, he was identified as “Elson Jr.” in a story that said he was fishing with his parents at Fielding Lake when the family home burned down in August 1958 near North Pole.
His 17-year-old sister Juanita, the future borough mayor of Fairbanks, and his brother Ray had to flee their 13-Mile Richardson Highway home at 5 a.m., alerted to the danger by their Cocker Spaniel.
Elstun Jr. was known to his family and friends back then as Butch, while Elstun Sr. went by Bud.
Bud was the chief engineer at Eielson Air Force Base, as well as a geologist, artist, entrepreneur, entertainer and later—owner of the Sourdough Roadhouse. Bud and Butch were both men of the word, storytellers supreme.
“You sit down and ask him about Alaska. Two hours later, he’ll stop for breath,” is how Edward Strunk of Glennallen described the oratorical gifts of Bud Lauesen, quoted by Debra McKinney in the Anchorage Daily News.
Not long after the 1958 house fire, Butch Lauesen entered the eighth grade at the North Pole public school, a pivotal year in the development of a guy who was just learning to speak his mind. The school operated that fall in rooms provided on a temporary basis by the First Baptist Church of North Pole.
On the first day of school, Lauesen met an inspirational new teacher, Dave Ray, a Baptist minister who had just come from King Cove with his wife. She taught first-grade. Elstun always said that Dave Ray helped him learn how to think for himself—the greatest lesson any teacher can impart.
Ray moved quickly and started a student council, a literary society and a school newspaper. “A good school paper is worth as much to the school as an extra teacher,” Ray said.
In that enterprise, Butch Lauesen, 13, emerged as editor-in-chief. Pat Carter, a lifelong friend of Lauesen’s, was the assistant editor.
It was the second issue of “The Long Look,” dated October 17, 1958, that gave indigestion to adults in North Pole and helped energize Elstun as a political activist.
Adult readers today might regard the assortment of school tidbits in this ancient mimeographed sheet as hardly worth a quick glance, but it marked a milestone in Lauesen lore.
As soon as the four pages of the October 17 “The Long Look” reached the eyes of North Pole’s illuminati, there was hell to pay.
The paper, printed in red and green ink, revealed plans for a Halloween Carnival, mentioned that first-graders were learning their numbers, how a school play was bound to be funny and that a checker tournament was in the works. “See Butch or Pat, they are The Moguls” for the tournament.
While the checker moguls served in management, Gloria Burger and Susan Slifer were the reporters for “The Long Look.”
Lauesen opined in his editorial that the school of 80 was improving, but there was more work to be done.
“Now then. We need ‘More Room.’ The need is greater than you people think,” Lauesen wrote. “We sure appreciate the church for letting us use these two rooms.”
“We need a GYM. We need a playground level enough so a fellow can run across it without stumbling and breaking his neck in ‘7’ pieces. We feel that someone could crank up a ‘Cat’ and level off the ground. Maybe that our new appointed Trustee to the Board will read this and THINK?”
It wasn’t the THINK editorial that irked North Pole’s elite—it was an ad for Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Ernest Gruening and some text in the paper supporting his election.
The Democratic Party paid $10 for an ad that was supposed to say, “Vote Straight Democratic. November 25, 1958. Paid political adv.” The kids had been encouraged to get ads to pay the bills.
But the newspaper did more than make that announcement. It ran a few paragraphs heralding the accomplishments of Gruening and took shots at his opponent, Republican Mike Stepovich of Fairbanks.
About one-quarter of an inside page featured a political ad that called on readers to not throw away their “birth-right by sending down to Washington a Republican to work with Bartlett.”
Bartlett was E.L. “Bob” Bartlett, a Democrat who had wide support from members of both political parties.
“The Long Look” political ad called former Gov. Mike Stepovich a “Johnny Come Lately” to the statehood movement, borrowing an attack line against Stepovich that Washington columnist Drew Pearson had created.
This took place a month before the first election in Alaska to choose U.S. senators. It was a tense political campaign and the stakes were high.
North Pole Mayor Con Miller, the Republican owner of Santa Claus House, was enraged. So was Jack Jenkins, president of the North Pole school board.
The News-Miner, which had gone all out to promote Stepovich and attack Gruening on its news and opinion pages, denounced the school publication in a high-handed editorial.
The News-Miner said this was propaganda that had no place in a school paper. The students “and those of their elders who planted political propaganda in the school paper have done a great disservice to their school and to their country.”
Stepovich’s supporters wasted no time in calling for Ray to be fired.
Miller said this was no way to treat a future U.S. senator and that it was illegal. He was wrong on both counts. Gruening won the election and it was not illegal to express a point of view.
The adults all assumed that 13-year-olds couldn’t possibly have opinions of their own and that Butch Lauesen and Pat Carter were innocent babes manipulated by Ray into doing something inappropriate.
One of the offending passages was this, completed with random capitalization and language that is the work of a 13-year-old mind: “Switzerland, said ‘If ALASKA had the ROADS it would be our greatest rival as a GREAT SHOW PLACE OF THE WORLD.’ Who has the road-building plans? Ernest Gruening, ELECT HIM TO U.S. SENATE.”
Miller was a friend of Stepovich’s and was embarrassed to have the hometown Republican hero targeted in a school sheet in North Pole.
The North Pole school board called a meeting five days after publication and told Ray to be there, but he said he couldn’t make it because he had a church meeting to attend.
That school board meeting and others that followed quickly turned into anger mismanagement sessions directed at Ray.
“He should not be tried in absentia,” said Jim Ford, the only board member who opposed firing Ray.
‘We are not trying him,” said Jenkins. “We are firing him.”
“It’s like totalitarianism,” said Ford.
The board fired Ray, which was not the first or the last overreaction in the history of North Pole.
Butch Lauesen, Pat Carter and the other North Pole students decided to fight back on behalf of their teacher and quickly organized a protest.
“Yesterday noon 25 of the 80-some pupils of the school let it be known on whose side they stood,” reporter Albro Gregory wrote in the News-Miner. “They paraded in the business area, wearing placards. One read: ‘Unfair school board,’ and another ‘We want Mr. Ray’ and another, ‘Dear North Pole, we would like Mr. Ray to continue as our school teacher.”
In the News-Miner coverage by Gregory, Lauesen was incorrectly identified as “Butch Carter,” a student editor, an amalgamation of Butch Lauesen and Pat Carter.
The children also distributed flyers thoughout North Pole, saying they needed Ray because of the newspaper, the student council and he has “helped us in our public speaking by starting a literary society.”
The local Boy Scout leader said he would banish any boys who took part in the protest. Two boys did, including Lauesen. The scout leader backed off the threat because they were not wearing scout uniforms.
One protest card was attached to Con Miller’s station wagon pleading for Ray to get his job back. I would be surprised if Butch and Pat didn’t have something to do with the placement of that notice.
Ray hired attorney Warren A. Taylor, who spoke to the school board and said the firing was illegal. Ray did not get proper notice and the board would be on the hook for paying his salary if they did not reverse the firing.
The board complied, Ray returned to the school, but the board members were not happy and continued to argue about all this.
The adults didn’t distinguish themselves with their comportment. “This meeting is about as orderly as a fistfight,” Pat Carter complained to the board.
At one meeting board members Jenkins and Ford were each arguing for the right to speak when Jenkins screamed to “local gendarme” Walter Durham to remove Ford from the meeting. There was pandemonium, Gregory wrote, and shouts of “liar” emanated from various parts of the room.
(The Baptist Church later cited this exchange as a reason for ordering the school to vacate the building, writing: “A meeting was held when U.S. Marshals were said to have been standing by with loaded guns in case of trouble.”)
When Jenkins demanded that Durham arrest Ford, a man in the crowd, wrongly identified by the News-Miner as “Elton Lauesen,” a “bewhiskered property owner and Ray backer,” warned that Durham “wouldn’t go out in one piece,” if he accosted Ford.
Jenkins’s wife leaped up to defend her husband, who the News-Miner said was shouting at the red-faced bewhiskered property owner Lauesen.
“Stop acting like a bunch of kids,’ thundered Lauesen as he lumbered to his feet. Then, speaking more calmly, he said, ‘Let’s bury the hatchet. Let’s carry on from here.’”
“I’ll be happy to,” said Ray.
“Lauesen smiled.”
Jenkins was not ready to do so, however, the News-Miner wrote.
There were more harsh words and back-and-forth and the meeting ended after midnight. “About par for the course at North Pole,” Gregory wrote.
Sixty-odd years after this contretemps, Elstun wrote about how that year with Ray made his life better than it would otherwise have been. “Dave Ray shall always be my favorite teacher, he said.
“When I was 12-ish I fancied myself something of a tough guy. It turns out nobody else saw me that way at all. I was told by Dr. Ray that while I tried to be a tough guy, I was a tender-hearted boy. I was so embarrassed by that assessment that my face burned. But it turns out he was correct,” Elstun wrote.
He always remembered that on the first day of eighth grade, Ray taught him some lines from Tennyson:
“That beauty, Good, and Knowledge, are three sisters that doat upon each other, friends to man. Living together under the same roof and never can be sunder’d without tears. And he that shuts Love out, in turn shall be Shut out from Love.”
