It’s hard to remember Fourth of Julys in Haines without thinking of Dick Flegel and Erwin Hertz.
Hertz organized arm-wrestling competitions, nail-pounding, and the Mad Raft Race while Dick put on the games for youngsters at Tlingit Park. Between the two of them, they held down quite a bit of our fun on the Fourth.
Of course, Flegel’s connections and commitments to the town were deeper and broader than just the Fourth. In the wake of his death in January, town poet Christy Tengs Fowler memorialized Dick in the Chilkat Valley News as “the banker with the poet’s soul.”
I didn’t write about Dick at the time because I didn’t know him personally and most of what I knew was already said by someone else. I knew Dick as most people knew him, as an interesting, curious and hard-working guy who lifted up people discreetly – through quiet transactions at the bank that gave them some purchase here.
Despite its natural beauty and a relative abundance of wild foods, our town is not an easy place to live. It is expensive, middle-class jobs are few and a person’s family support network often is thousands of miles away. Many of us make it because someone lends us a hand, or money.
Dick came through with the latter. He floated people he liked and he liked a lot of people. One story I heard related to fisherman Karl Johnson. Dick didn’t know Karl, but he had taken notice of Karl’s tightly-stacked woodpile on Small Tracts Road.
So when Karl came to the bank needing a loan, Dick figured a guy who paid such attention to a woodpile was a safe bet for repaying a debt. In truth, Dick’s lending policies stretched flexible to the point of elasticity.
Each spring, he made a personal loan to Guy Hoffman, an elfish hippie who went broke every winter and needed a stake each spring before heading out to a Bristol Bay set-net site.
Guy worked only a few months a year, drove old trucks and lived in a drafty house off the grid with a cable spool for a kitchen table. He read broadly, went skiing or traveling or boating whenever he wanted and became a lifestyle role model to many people for his spontaneity, zeal and generosity.
It turns out a big part of Guy’s bliss was our town’s friendly banker.
Dick once offered to loan a girlfriend of mine, a newcomer to town with a lousy credit history, $8,000 for a truck she needed if she would just look him in the eye and tell him she would repay it.
Many similar stories were told at Dick’s memorial, all a credit to the man, including that his “heart loans” frustrated his bosses in Anchorage. What small piece perhaps was overlooked when Dick’s generosity was being eulogized was how he pulled it off.
Dick did not have ESP. He had years of experience getting to know the people who lived here, and perhaps the types of people who live here, what they were made of and what they were good for.
After Dick retired in 2008 after 35 years as town banker, and after that job changed hands a half-dozen times, most of us came to appreciate that Dick’s biggest gift to us was his longevity. He lived here long enough to know us, and by knowing us, he was able to serve us generously.
That’s not how things work in professional banking or in many other professions. Professionals hired in places like Haines are expected to get their entry-level experience in a few years then move up the ladder to more responsibility and pay in bigger cities.
That’s the corporate model and it doesn’t much fret small towns like ours.
But Dick Flegel didn’t take the bait, or the model. Despite offers from Anchorage headquarters to advance, he dug in here and got to know the place.
And many of us are literally richer for it.