Sunday, February 28, 2010
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- Kirby Olson
- Upstate, NY
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7 comments:
The first LS koan.
http://www.last.fm/music/Steve+Poltz/_/You+Remind+Me
You Remind Me
Lovely song!
He wrote the song that made Jewel famous fifteen years ago, You Were Meant For Me. Jewel's grandpa was Alaska's first lieutenant governor. She was living in her car in San Diego when he wrote it.
My great aunt Elsie taught school in Anchorage. She moved there after she got her teaching certificate from the normal school in 1918 and before she got married to a guy from Aberdeen, South Dakota in 1931. I think she was still teaching there when Alaska became a state in 1960. I never met her so I don't know if Jewel's grandpa was one of her students. He was a Swiss German and he married an opera singer who wanted to live on a farm out in the country.
My dad's sisters were both English teachers and their dad was a minister. Before she died my aunt told me that the town where my dad was born, Juda, was full of Swiss Germans. She said they liked to make cheese and yodel and they were really good at it.
Jewel tends to mythologize her Alaskan roots family melodrama a bit and isn't always precise with the details.
The first Lieutenant Governor of Alaska was Hugh Wade. He was a graduate of the original FBI training class when it was first established by J. Edgar Hoover. He was sent to the Alaska territory to enforce federal laws out of Juneau. He died at the age of 93 in 1994, the year that Jewel burst onto the San Diego music scene.
Jewel's grandfather was Yule Kilcher. He was born in 1913 and left Germany and/or Switzerland shortly before, during or after the Nazi era and moved to Alaska. He advertised for a mail-order bride in Europe and his wife-to-be, Ruth, decided she would rather brave snow and ice in Alaska with someone she'd never met than sing Brunhilde for Adolph Hitler.
Yule was one of about fifty delegates from local constituencies who served on the committee in 1955-56 that drafted Alaska's petition for statehood. Alaska's first governor, Thomas Egan, also served as a delegate on that committee.
Jewel's first cousin, Q'Orianka Kilcher, is half Peruvian and was born in Alaska, but was raised from the age of two in Hawaii where she learned to dance before moving to the Swiss-German border by way of California. When she was fourteen in 2005 she starred as Pocohontas opposite Colin Farrell's John Smith in the Terence Malick film The New World.
It appears Q'Orianka and Jewel have the same grandmother, Ruth, the green-eyed German opera singer who married Yule Kilcher, but Q'Orianka's mother claims descent from the noted Alaskan mountaineer, Ray 'Pirate' Genet.
The population of Anchorage when my great aunt Elsie moved there to teach was less than 2,000 people. Currently half of Alaska's half million citizens live in Anchorage. By 1920 it was already the main port on the Cook Inlet and the primary railhead for the Alaskan interior.
I saw The New World in December over the holidays. Q'Orianka's Pocohontas is arguably one of the best dramatic performances of the past decade. She stole the show.
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