Slim Randles
June just might be the first month of summer … to most of us. But for some of this planet’s people, it’s the dead of winter. That would be those wonderful folks who live south of the equator, of course. While we are busy cremating some cow or pig on the backyard barbecue, they are still holed up and wondering if they can make it to penguin season without starving.
And I’m just kidding of course because 1. I’m fairly certain no nation has a penguin season, and 2. penguins don’t need any more problems. Hey, they already live where it’s too cold and they walk funny.
I thought I knew all kinds of things about sleds and dogs. Hadn’t I already won a 100-mile race? Hadn’t I darn near won a 300-mile race? Didn’t I live 12 miles from my car and have to use the team to get to town and to file my columns. Heck yes! Well, in those days I was married to Pam, who ran race headquarters for the Iditarod Race. That was a long, cold 1100-mile camping trip from Anchorage to Nome.
This finds us in race headquarters in Anchorage, which looked an awful lot like a borrowed room in the Roosevelt Hotel. Just before the second race, which was in March of 1974, we were sitting in the room and in walks a very finely dressed gentleman with a Boston accent, and introduced himself as Norman Vaughan.
He sat down and asked some race questions, and I’m afraid I answered them all. Never did learn to stop talking about dogs. A couple of hours later, Norman left and we both remarked how polite and kind he was. Well, about an hour after that, we were listening to the radio and the announcer said, “Our special guest speaker for the mushers’ banquet tonight will be Colonel Norman Vaughan, who drove a dog team to the South Pole in 1929 as a safety back-up for pilot Richard Byrd.”
I wasn’t able to speak at all after the biggest embarrassment of my life. But Pam made up for it by laughing her head off.
Finally, I had to laugh, too, after my coaching talk to an old guy from Boston. I said to Pam, “Well, at least he now knows the right way to do it.”
Norman and I were close friends for the rest of his life. But there really should be a lever or something that you could pull and have the floor open up and swallow noisy dog mushers, newspaper columnists, and other blights on humanity.
Brought to you by “Dogsled, A True Tale of the North” which I wrote because someone had to. It’s online.
