newsminer.com

FAIRBANKS — Jim Parry keeps a silver-framed photo on the shelf.

It shows a 1-ounce nugget of gold. The nonagenarian can’t remember exactly what year his worker found the nugget, but he certainly remembers the worker’s name — John Huyler — and said he’s occasionally bugged the University of Alaska Museum of the North to add that information when showcasing the quartz-encrusted nugget on display.

“Unusual nugget,” he said of the find, which Huyler made years ago at a small gold mine the 90-year-old Parry once ran near Salcha.

Gold was on Parry’s mind when he first arrived in Fairbanks in 1937. But it would be decades until he and his various helpers started regularly pulling gold from the site, a job that served as one stretch of a life with many twists and turns.

“I was busy trying to get enough money together, I guess,” Parry said Tuesday of the time between his arrival in Alaska and his decision to finally start mining gold.

Parry has become one of the more recognizable faces in town since arriving in Fairbanks more than 70 years ago. Friends of the family call him Grandpa Jim.

“He’s become a part of a lot of families in Fairbanks. He’s a treasured friend,” Fairbanks resident Carol Brice said last week.

Parry was born in New York state. In his late teens, he found himself working as an apprentice machinist near Syracuse, N.Y., but he grew bored. A few acquaintances were talking about taking a trip and chose Alaska somewhat on a whim — he said they also had thought about going to Venezuela.

It was the prospect of gold — which was discovered almost four decades prior in Interior Alaska and had been heavily mined since — that drew them north.

At the time, miners in Interior Alaska used a steam-point to thaw frozen ground, a process in which metal pipes injected steam into frozen soil. Parry looked for work but bumped into a discouraging mining manager, who remarked at at the newcomer’s slight frame.

“He took one look at me and said, ‘You couldn’t handle a steam-point,’” he said.

Almost flat broke, Parry walked down Cushman Street and spent his last money on something to eat. Then he stopped by the N.C. Machinery shop and talked to a foreman who said he’d pay Parry the present-day equivalent of around $15 an hour — more than twice what he’d been making as an apprentice machinist on the East Coast — to sweep the floor.

“That was all the money in the world,” he said.

Things were different downtown in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The Cushman Street post office and courthouse, now an office building and historic landmark, was still just a post office and courthouse. Parry said in those days work crews working for the electric utilities would cut trees on land east of town and float the timber down the Chena River so it could be stored at Weeks Field and later burned in the electrical plant. The community was largely seasonal, he said, and all but shut down in the winter months.

“The only ones that drove cars around (in the winter) was the utility system” drivers, he said.

Parry said he rose to work as a machinist at the N. C. Machinery shop before joining the Army in 1943. He did his basic training on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. He trained with, among others in the unit, Bill Egan, a future three-term governor.

“He had a thousand hours of flying experience, and they put him in the infantry. Leave it to the Army,” Parry said of Egan.

Parry eventually tried to be a tailgunner and applied to the U.S. Army Air Forces for an assignment as an aviation cadet. He remembers an Army captain trying to convince him to stay, an offer he turned down.

After spending time in Seattle as a cadet and in Utah working as a machinist, Parry said he finally returned to Fairbanks after the end of World War II in 1945, arriving with friends as part of a convoy.

After his return, he worked in a number of careers. He was a machinist with a local operators union and spent a few years at a federal radar site at Pedro Dome northeast of Fairbanks. He also worked as the sewer system foreman for the city of Fairbanks.

Parry would eventually join the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he worked as a machinist and supervisor for years in the Geophysical Institute’s machine shop.

This summer, when school officials dedicated a green-space plaza project at the campus’ West Ridge, they also celebrated the reinstallation of a popular milepost marker. The post sprouts markers pointing in every direction. It’s an update of Parry’s popular, original design — one he built 35 years ago and remained on campus until a construction project six years ago forced it down.

After establishing himself as a jack-of-many-trades in Fairbanks, Parry finally took steps toward gold mining. He bought property at No Grub Creek near Salcha, a site that he said had been heavily mined during the gold rush period.

Last week, Parry and a handful of friends gathered at his southwest Fairbanks home as he recalled the adventure that accompanied the purchase. He had trouble remembering exactly what year he bought the land, but he did remember learning after the sale that the property had actually reverted back to the state and that the previous owner had done almost nothing to maintain the site.

“So I just moved right in, and (friends and I) staked and filed claims,” he said. “Then we started to build up equipment for the mine.”

He named his mining company after his then-wife and his granddaughter, Kristie Taylor.

Parry is also part of a group in Fairbanks that restores old engines, the Hit and Miss Club, club named after the flywheel “hit-and-miss” engines used in mining during the first part of the 20th Century.

The group met occasionally to work on old engines, which friend Al Brice said fits Parry like a glove. The team is currently tinkering away at a 1918 Mitchell touring car. If the group had trouble finding the right part for a classic engine — an engine piston, perhaps — the gifted machinist often had the answer, Brice said.

“Jim just built them, made them,” Brice said of hard-to-find classic parts. “We found what we could find and built what we couldn’t find.”

The new hobby fits Parry’s varied career and offers him a challenging and rewarding turn in a varied and interesting life.

“It brings back a lot of memories,” he said.