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"Niilo Koponen-age 76-came to Alaska to homestead -arrived Feb.1952 with wife,Joan -Worked as elecrition on Gold dredges,taught school, surveyed,etc.active in community,helping organize Northern Schools Fed.Credit Union,Chena-Goldstream Fire & Rescue,"

"The problem with politics is not just the presence of a few 'bad apples,' " Koponen wrote in a parting letter to his colleagues. "The process itself is archaic, cumbersome and largely incomprehensible to those not directly involved."

Last summer, the members of the Alaska Civil Liberties Union -- an organization that Koponen and two other Alaskans co-founded in the early 1970s to combat what they perceived to be the political intolerance of the day -- voted to award him their Charlie Parr Lifetime Achievement Award.

She told of his experiences as a Depression-era scrounger in the '30s, a Quaker-inspired pacifist in the '40s, a reverse desegregationist in the '50s (becoming the first white graduate of a formerly all-black college in Ohio) -- all before he and Joan ever departed for Alaska, where they've lived on their homestead ever since.

The oldest part of the home is a historic cabin first used by the prospector Felix Pedro, who discovered the gold that gave birth to the town.

Thirty years later, Joan published a book called "Building From Within," in which she interviewed neighbors who'd built their own homes. One chapter tried to make sense of her own experience. At first, she and Niilo wanted to build a grand house of log and stone, she said. But after they raised the initial log cabin, their most immediate need was a small, attached barn for a Jersey cow.

Five years later, with three young children under the roof (Karljala, Sanni and Chena), the cow got bumped outside so the barn could be turned into a bedroom. Then a newer, grander barn was built onto the house to provide an attached stable for Joan's horses. Five years after that, with two more children (Heather and Alex), the livestock got bumped again, and half of the barn was converted into a new kitchen and family room. And that's how the homestead kept growing, she said.
It was her idea to have the living room and barn share a wall, Joan said. It saved walking across the yard to feed the animals on winter nights when the temperature fell to 40 below (they also kept goats and chickens in the basement). The body heat of all the animals helped warm the house, but she enjoyed the aesthetics of it too.

"I like to hear them snoofling and snorting on the other side of the wall," Joan wrote. "I like the feeling that they're part of our scene."

A constant stream of visitors and friends was part of the Koponen homestead scene as well -- as soon as they built a proper Finnish sauna.

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That would have been his frugal Finnish side talking. It amazes Koponen to hear people use the phrase "tax-and-spend liberals" when he's so loathe to spend money himself.

"I'm a 'cheapskate Democrat,' " he said. "You put your money into good things. You don't just throw it around." When he was a boy, Koponen recalls, his family bought food at the Harlem co-op. There was a community garden in their neighborhood where they could grow some vegetables. He helped tend the garden, then combed the streets for deposit bottles and gave his mom the money.

His friends included all the Finnish kids, a few secular Jews, an Irish kid, some Germans -- a multicultural street gang. He attended the local public school, PS 82, and spent a lot of time in the public library.

When he reached secondary-school age, he began attending the New York High School of Music and Art. He liked to draw, Koponen said. He was always sketching. He remembers that someone signed his yearbook, "Whenever the lesson begins to bore, Niilo doodles by the score."

He graduated from high school in 1945 and went to work at a wholesale co-op. He stocked shelves, repaired office equipment and painted posters for sales. After two years, he began attending night classes at tuition-free Cooper Union College in New York, studying civil engineering.

Koponen was a newly fledged pacifist, partly due to his growing association with the Quaker Church and partly in response to the U.S. decision to drop atom bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed more than 100,000 civilians. So he applied for "conscientious objector" status with the draft board, though it was never officially confirmed.

In 1948, Koponen quit his job and college to join the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker version of the modern-day Peace Corps, and journeyed to southeastern Finland to help build shelters for Karelian refugees (Finns whose land on the Karelian Peninsula of pre-World War II Finland was seized by the Soviet Union).