“You don’t have to get elected mayor or donate a million bucks to the university to make history,” John Pender of Fairbanks said of his uncle Bill Pender, who was “a regular guy” who lived through extraordinary times and knew it, from World War II and the Cold War to construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline.

William Dwight Pender died March 23 in Juneau’s Wildflower Court of kidney failure due to diabetes. He was 82 years old. “Just about everyone that met him liked him,” wife Vi Bieleski said.

Pender and Bieleski were married March 26, 1998 at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church not long after Pender arrived in Haines in an RV. He had been a friend of Bieleski’s first husband and they courted over lunches at the Senior Center.

Friend Dick Flegel said Pender reminded him of the elders in his family. “He was an old-time Alaskan who gold mined and lived in the villages when everyone mushed dogs. I had a lot of empathy for him.”

Born in Johnstown, Pa. on July 23, 1926 to John William Pender and Erma Caroline Walbeck, Pender joined the Navy in World War II, training as a ship fitter. He served in the South Pacific where he saw much bloodshed.

“He wasn’t a combat Marine, but spent every battle retrieving dead and wounded on stretchers with medics,” John Pender said.

Pender learned to weld in the Navy and after the war joined his brother Bob in Fairbanks. They spent winters taking university classes and summers gold mining around Central and Birch Creek.

Pender also worked construction in Fairbanks and around the state. In 1962 as the government developed mobile nuclear power plants to run remote military installations, Pender was accepted into a program to learn how to operate them, traveling to Virginia for 18 months of schooling and returning to operate the Fort Greely plant.

“He enjoyed it, and was good at it, but he quit because they were doing everything wrong,” his nephew said. “(They were) venting into the atmosphere, dumping stuff into Jarvis Creek. It was kind of like Homer Simpson.”

In 1969, Pender took a job building rural sewer and water plants. He and first wife Jane, a journalist, lived in Kotzebue, Barrow, and Delta before buying a home in Fairbanks.

He worked on the pipeline and was doing maintenance at Pump Station 8 in 1977 when “somebody knocked a valve off, and it ignited and the whole thing blew up,” his nephew said. “Bill was right there, and he called Jane and she wrote the story for papers all over the state.”

           Jane died of lung cancer in 1989, and Pender, then retired, bought an RV and drove back to Johnstown, where he married a childhood friend. Lib Pender died shortly afterward, also of lung cancer. In 1995 he drove his RV back to Alaska, met Versia Bieleski on a road trip to Haines, and stayed.

“Bill Pender was a real Alaskan but he was quiet about it. He did not wear that on his coat sleeve,” Flegel said.

Pender didn’t have a religious bone in his body and asked that there be no service, his nephew said. “He was a nice old man, and will be missed.”

Pender’s ashes will be scattered on Birch Creek where his brother’s also are. In addition to Versia, he leaves two sisters, numerous nieces and nephews, and their children.