About this user
"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).
Interests
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In his 10 years in the House, Koponen compiled one of the most liberal voting records in the Legislature. He succeeded in strengthening Alaska's worker safety laws. He introduced a bill to guarantee to all Alaskans the availability of an abortion. He championed crime prevention over the high cost of incarceration. ("Criminals don't come out of the woodwork," Koponen said during one legislative debate. "They come out of the second grade.") He introduced a bill to afford "whistle-blower" protection to Alaska workers. He tried to make Alaska "a nuclear-free zone" (following reports in the 1950s of fallout that drifted to the North Slope from open-air tests done elsewhere in the world, resulting in health problems for Alaska Natives). He backed a bill to raise taxes on title insurance companies. ("Anything you can get out of those buggers," Koponen said, "I'll support it.") In 1990, he was one of only three legislators whose voting record one year after the Exxon Valdez oil spill received a "100 percent" approval rating by the Alaska Environmental Lobby.
COMING HOME
"I don't throw much away," Niilo Koponen said recently, leading a tour around the perimeter of his cabin and barn.
It's a habit he carries from the old days in Fairbanks, when supplies were short and replacements were expensive.
"We didn't have junk," he said airily. "We had components."
If that's true, then the inside of the Koponen homestead cabin these days is especially rich with components.
There's a great, white blizzard of correspondence and other unattended slips of paperwork in the region of a desk. There are shelves and shelves of books that wrap from room to room. There are old pizza cartons filled with photographs that document family travels to places ranging from Finland to Fairbanks.
In the bathroom is a haunting picture of Gemini, the young gray wolf that Joan raised for two years as part of a research project for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
In the now-horseless barn is an elaborate filing system of well-cataloged magazines and old newspaper clippings.
Above the table in the kitchen is a forest of old campaign buttons from local, state and national elections: "Dissent is Patriotic." "I'm a Notti Body." "Bread Not Bombs." "Mild About Anchorage."
None of the rooms was ever really finished, Joan wrote in her pre-accident book about the homestead. Somewhere along the way, their lives as builders lost momentum.
"But I've made peace with the unfinished state of things," she wrote. "After all, I'm not finished -- why should the house be?"
After the tour, as Niilo settled down at the kitchen table, Joan walked in the door with her caregiver and joined the conversation. A visitor asked her when was she born.
"It was 1931 ... April 13," Joan said. "So I'm an old lady now."
She still suffers some of the aftereffects of her accident, though the "equine therapy" the family pursued immediately upon her homecoming almost worked miracles.
In the hospital after emerging from her coma, Niilo said, Joan slowly began to use her muscles again. Eventually she was able to sit up and the family could bring her home. Until then, Niilo said, she'd only spoken a few words.
"So we wheeled her toward the barn and opened the door to the stables. And the horses were there. And she took a deep breath and she uttered her first words: 'Ohhhhhh,' she said. 'That smells nice!' "
Koponen says that's when he decided to resign. That's when he came back home.
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