The Parents of Sarah Palin

The Parents of Sarah Palin
In pursuit of the truth – www.cinopsbegone.com – Thursday, December 24, 2009

“Go West young man, Go West and North to Alaska”

The southeast Alaska winters are brutal. In Skagway, icy winds tear relentlessly through town… Mom had agreed to give Alaska a one-year trial run, but our “short stint” in the quaint old tourist town inaccessible by roads turned into five years of Dad teaching and coaching, working summers on the Alaska Railroad & tending bar in seasonal tourist traps.

Mom stayed busy herding four small four small kids and driving a seasonal tour bus, and was active in community theatre and the Catholic Church. Both our folks loaded up for activities like hunting, fishing, and hiking, carting us on sleds or in backpacks …

Sports and the outdoors were Dad’s passion, but his parents thought they were a waste of time. Dad had a choice: he could either abandon his passion or fend for himself. So he road the bus 15 miles every day to Sandpoint High School (Hope, Idaho), and hitchhiked home every night after practice. He became a standout athlete, excelling in every sport.

He held the school record for the 100-yard dash for 44 years, until 1998 (Dad sent the boy who broke it a letter of congratulations)… Dad worked in a local lumberyard, staying with different families… Dad became his own man early on, and would pass that independent spirit on to his kids…

Smack in the middle of this jovial clan, my mom grew up in a very conventional life of Richland Bomber pep squads, piano lessons, and sock hops. After high school, she attended Columbia Basin College and worked as a dental assistant. When she met my dad, he had already served a stint in the Army. They were lab partners at CBC…

Dad loved teaching and coaching all kinds of sports, but he had grown up reading Jack London novels, and he craved adventure. London himself arrived in Skagway from California in the fall of 1897 and set out to hike the Chilkoot Trail…

My appetite for books connected my schoolteacher father and me, too. For my 10th birthday, his parents sent me “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” and Dad read to us at night. I appreciate that now even more, realizing he spent all day teaching elementary school science and coaching high schoolers and then came home no doubt a bit tired of kids…

Ever since I can remember. Dad would take us up to Mt. McKinley National Park … A vibrant sanctuary for most every bi-game animal, woodland creature, and bird in Alaska, the park is also the home to the highest peak on the continent, Mt. McKinley

Every spring, Dad would bring his sixth-grade class up to the park on the Alaska Railroad for a weeklong field trip to experience what they’d studied all year about animals, geography, geology and the environment. I was happy to tag along and appreciated that what his students learned during the school year in Mr. Heath’s classroom was what I got to learn every day from Mr. Heath, my dad. Dad would give us a quarter for being the first to spot a moose or a bear on our hour-long drives into Anchorage…

Dad had many opportunities to leave teaching and start making real money on the oil-pipeline, along with thousands of others … But he loved teaching and he loved his students, so he chose making a difference in kids’ lives over making money…

Dad wasn’t into organized religion so much, and he was usually busy Sunday mornings getting ready for our afternoon ski trips or hunts or hikes; he said it was in the outdoors that he “did church.” But he did his fatherly duty, making us answer to him if we ended up skipping church for any reason. And Mom never let us get by with weak excuses. Looking back I’m grateful to them for “forcing me” to go. Without that foundation of faith, we would never have been able to get through some of the tests and trials that have come our way.
Merry Christmas,
George Kubeck. the above from Sarah Palin’s book, Going Rogue, An American Life