November 24, 2014
Monday PM

I just want to comment on the Malaspina and on one wonderful Ketchikan pioneer woman that I love dearly and will always call mom. She was mom to everyone and worked on the Malaspina till the mid 2000s and her family racketed the town with parties along with all of my hometown family. Alvina Elizabeth Shayen, the mother I remember at six or seven, as I was the seventh child of my family born on the earthquake day, a few years later.

I didn't grow up in Ketchikan. However, I spent a few short visits there to date. Yet i have many loved ones and memories and my late husband who is buried in the Ketchikan cemetary.

My family lived around the corner from the house that Alvina actually bought from my parents' best friends and I as a newborn and a grown womanslept in the room that was the Webber's room. Under the old paint across the ceiling you could still see the words CHET in Alvina's room. I was always at peace in her bed for whatever reason she loved me as Chet Webber did and his wife - ultimately my father's widow, Jan Wagoner. I always hated that I was sleeping in that bed while she slept on the couch.

My father sang many songs in those Ketchikan bars and his sister (my other hero) ran Tongass Trading and currently resides in Ketchikan - my aunt Norma Jean. She and her sister are how I was named Norma Anne Wagoner -- only to become MEANNE on Easter Sunday 1970 as my 15 month old brother could not say Norma, he said Me for his and Anne, thus giving me my name I go by MeAnne Malek.

The Malek family also lived just three houses from me when I made my debut in life. I later met Anthony Edward and married him only to lose his precious love far too early in life. I brought him home to Ketchikan and buried him in the new part of the cemetary in 2006. He was almost 39.

Received November 24, 2014 - Published November 24, 2014

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