Maggie Holeman - Woman in the Locker Room: An Alaskan Womans Journey for Change

Woman in the Locker Room

An Alaskan Womans Journey for Change

Maggie Holeman

PO Box 221974 Anchorage, Alaska 99522-1974

ISBN 978-1-59433-576-1

eISBN 978-1-59433-577-8

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2015959977

Copyright 2015 Maggie Holeman

First Edition

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in any form, or by any mechanical or electronic means including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, in whole or in part in any form, and in any case not without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Dedications

This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents. I hope they have found peace wherever they may be...

And to my two children, Joshua and Brittany. You gave me a reason to find happiness.

To Joseph my forever friend.

To Gail Sisters of the Forest

This is dedicated to my sister, Virginia. Although the violence of our past separated us, the search for its reasoning brought us together as adults. You are my hero.

And to all the men and women who work in Emergency Services. Without their vigilance over us, it would be a darker world.

Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your own experience or convictions.

Dag Hammarskjold

Acknowledgements

T o Shawn Butler, thank you for your technical support with the computers. Without your help, my computer would have several bullet holes in the screen.

To Andrea Petitfils, thank you for your editing and suggestions. They were excellent.

To Micheal Holmes, although our lives crossed only shortly, the impact of your words were everlasting.

To William Mulcahey, a 25-year veteran and Captain of the FDNY who gave me my first chance to be published through his magazine Aviation Fire Journal. Without your encouragement and words of affirmation, I may have never continued.

To Carlton Erikson and Jim Fleming, former co-workers who gave me insight and technical assistance. I am thankful for our re-acquaintances. Both your patience and ability to edit what I think as well as what I write.

To James Misko, my mentor, friend and B&B guest. Thank you for listening and guiding me through some of my worst fears. You are an excellent teacher.

To Carol Mousley, thank you for reading and correcting my stories. You gave me hope I could do this.

To Charol Messenger, a writer and editor. I had problems with time lines and tenses and you gently guided me through a web of confusion to an organized text.

To Joe Knyszek, thank you for the title.

To Evan Swensen, publisher and a patient man.

Prologue

M aggie, dont come in here, Sergeant Siegmann insisted. You really dont need to see this.

I moved him aside as he attempted to block my entrance to the fire-station stall. The sight of the five opened body bags lying on the floor seared a gruesome image into my memory. A lifetime of shelving pictures, tucking them into the back of my mind, trying to suppress what I was seeing. Still I remember them. And the smell of death. These were once menwalking, talking, and living. Now they lay in body bags, mutilated. Some missing half their heads, their brains exposed; eyeballs dangling from what were once their sockets. Blood-soaked clothing ripped and shredded as though a monster grabbed, then tossed them into the air like string puppets. They lay heavy under their lifeless masstheir substance gone.

The stark reality of death staring me in the face. I had never seen anything like this before. And when I walked out, I hoped I would never see anything like it again.

This story is about change. Changing the rules, changing attitudes, conceptions, traditions and roles. Its about spirit, drive, tenacity, independence, and human growth. And its about bravery. Not only in the sense of our chosen careers, but in the sense of accepting personal strengths and the ability to let go.

Introduction

I was born in the Territory of Alaska in 1951, at that time dad had already been in Alaska on and off for twenty-one years.

My father was born Ben Rapley Holeman on March 26, 1908, in Memphis, Tennessee. His father had been a judge. But dad was a maverick and left for Alaska at the age of 22 with a brother, one of five. Dad worked as a civilian and helped to build Ft. Richardson army base. Then the gold fever lured him to Nebesna, Alaska, where he worked for four years at one of the largest gold-producing mines in the 1930s. Although his brother finally left Alaska, dad remained until he died.

My parents married in Seattle, Washington in 1937. My mothers life turned from having household help and upscale social parties to living in a one-room cabin with no running water at the Nebesna Gold Mine in the Wrangell Mountains of Alaska and more than two hundred miles away from any real civilization.

Alaska is a rugged place to live, with harsh winters and desolate remoteness. The Athabaskan Indians gave my mother two huskies to protect her from the bears during her daily trek from her one-room cabin to the gold mine to give dad his lunch. What an adventurous and strong spirit she must have had to cope with such conditions. My parents left Nebesna in 1940 when the mine was closed at the beginning of WWII when the price of gold plummeted. Dad worked the next thirty-two years with the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA out of Anchorage) which was then called Civil Aeronautics Authority (CAA).

I can still see my thin father sitting in his dark-green vinyl recliner in the corner next to the double-pane windows in our Anchorage house. It was his chair and no one else was allowed to sit in it. On the days he traveled with his job as a maintenance inspector with the FAA, his chair would remain empty.

Dad was one of the first white men to speak the Athabaskan language fluently in Alaska, even before it was a written language. On the nights when he drank his whiskey, his legs crossed in his green recliner and chanting Athabaskan, I didnt appreciate the language. In fact, I hated it because he only chanted it when he was intoxicated. Beside him in the green chair were his un-filtered Lucky Strikes and an ice-filled glass of amber-colored destruction, which he constantly refilled until the spirits consumed him into an unconscious state.

Margaret Loomis David, my mother, was born in Mobile, Alabama on December 25, 1912, and had always been robbed of gift-giving extravaganzas. We tried to make her feel special by wrapping presents in birthday paper as well as Christmas paper, and baking her birthday cake.

I remember her crooked smile and red lipstick, her gray hair and dark eyes. The scent of her perfume, Shalimar, stayed with me for years after her death. I can still see her sitting on the end of our couch, cigarette smoke wafting in the air, her left leg securely tucked under her. Once a week my mom would visit the beauty parlor just up the street to have her hair shampooed and curled. The bounce and color in her hair was eventually replaced with bobby-pins and hairspray and blue dye.

When the three of us kids came home from elementary school we tossed our school books onto the fireplace mantle, wired from our day and desperate for play. But our excitement would disturb her peace, and our world would become darkened like hers. Only moments after arriving into the 1953 flat-roofed house my father had built, we felt her damaged spirit as she sat there sipping on her whiskey, her near daily ritual. Her empty words How was your day? were a vacuous question.

The population of Anchorage in 1951, the year I was born, was 47,000. Located 61 degrees north latitude, it is just north of Oslo, Norway and St. Petersburg, Russia. It is a subarctic climate with the Northern Boreal Forest. Anchorage is located at the base of the Chugach Mountains and alongside the treacherous Cook Inlet waters of South Central Alaska.