I didn’t know Gene Kennedy much in the early 1990s.
Just that he was a rough-hewn guy who built Model A cars from old chassis and cut a curious figure carrying a boxy, old briefcase as chairman of the Mud Bay Land Use Service Area. The effect was that he was coming into city hall to craft a new ordinance and maybe fix a transmission.
Out of the blue, Gene invited me to his place on the Park Road for a Saturday morning snowshoe hike in Chilkat State Park. But the day’s heavy snow was turning to rain, so we waited out the weather.
The snow stayed rainy, Gene boiled up a pot of tea and we started chatting about the weather, Gene’s antique cars, Haines politics and MBLUSA, about music and women and single life in our tiny town, about so many topics that before long we’d used up all the short day’s light.
Gene uncorked a bottle of wine and asked if I’d like dinner and we talked into the night, swapping stories.
Snowshoe hikes don’t get much better than that.
Gene was so many things in his life it’s hard to cite them all: Longtime bachelor, supportive husband and dad, plumber, mechanic, carpenter, welder, heavy equipment operator, actor, musician, politician, puppeteer, writer, satirist, the list goes on.
I’m sure I’m missing many things Gene accomplished. It was almost as though new roles came to him and he put them on like the day’s clothing, without fuss.
He was very Alaskan that way, getting done what was necessary to do.
When I was elected mayor in October 2023, Gene called and told me to stop by his place on Soapsuds Alley, that he had something for me.
Turns out it was Louie Nelson’s briefcase, the same one that Gene used for lugging around Mud Bay zoning code.
The case had a colorful history. It first belonged to Mud Bay homesteader Louie Nelson, father of Paul Nelson and Carol Tuynman.
Louie had acquired an actual homestead at the head of Mud Bay when that was still possible, parlaying a fortune his family had made on the “Nelson tester,” an automotive diagnostic tool.
The way that Gene explained it, the briefcase either was the one that Louie carried as he made his rounds in the Lower 48, selling the tester to mechanics and garages, or the briefcase itself was used in tandem with the tester, containing electrical equipment for tester demonstrations.
Either way, it represented an interesting slice of Haines history, just as his creations that survive him represent Gene’s flair for whimsy: Like the full-sized “Gypsy wagon” in his front yard on Soapsuds Alley or the wrought-iron dog and trailer statue he sculpted on the waterfront.
Kennedy possessed a knack for keeping one foot planted in reality while stretching the other foot far into the heavens of imagination.
The late Guy Hoffman, who specialized in mirth and once signed a wedding certificate “Vicar of Mud Bay” after serving as a couple’s lay minister, expressed it well at one of his annual, bacchanalian birthday parties.
Showing off a beefy, oversized barbecue grill that Gene had welded together for him, Guy boasted, “John Norton has a Weber, but I’ve got a KENNEDY!”
My favorite Gene memory was of him driving a skidder to tow a wanigan a mile to a property I was buying at Rutzebeck. About a foot of snow, an undulating old logging road, two flat tires and my attempt to guide that shack from inside, using a steering wheel that emerged from its floorboards, made for a madcap ride and a near crash. But we got there.
I hate funerals but I plan to be at whatever memorial is planned for Gene Kennedy. I’d like to hear more stories of the man.