|
 When the distinguished-looking elderly gentleman
walked into the Iditarod Race headquarters (a room at the Roosevelt
Hotel in Anchorage), I had no way of knowing this smiling man was
going to lead me to my most embarrassing moment.
It was during the 1974 race, and my wife, Pam, ran race
headquarters. I'd run the race in 1973, without managing to impress
anyone. But hey, I was a dog musher, and here was a guy with a
Boston accent, asking about the race.
His name, he said, was Norman Vaughan and he had just moved to
Anchorage.
Well, I taught Norman Vaughan for the next hour how to drive a dog
team. He smiled and nodded and listened patiently. Before he left,
he told me we were probably going to see a lot of each other in the
future and thanked me for the information. [to top of second
column] |
Not 20 minutes later, the radio announcer let everyone know that the
guest speaker at the mushers' banquet that evening would be Colonel
Norman Vaughan, who drove a dog team to the South Pole as part of
the safety plan for the Byrd Expedition.
Byrd named a mountain in
Antarctica for Norman, and Col. Vaughan took some young people down
there and climbed it on his 100th birthday.
Embarrassing? I suppose, but at least he learned the correct way to
handle a dog team, right?
[Text from file received from
Slim Randles]
Brought to
you by Dogsled: A True Tale of the North, Slim’s first book.
Available at Amazon.com.
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