Steve Leavitt arrived in Haines this spring with a backhoe, a trailer full of tools and a dream to build a cabin.
“Nothing big or fancy, but something homey and fun.”
Until about a week ago, the 66-year-old retired ironworker also had a partner in the venture, Jimmy Gojdics, a fellow retired ironworker and reality show character from Fairbanks who bought a forested acre of land off Mount Riley Road years ago.
This week, Leavitt was trying to fit back together the pieces of his dream, following the May 7 shooting death of Gojdics at his home in Fox, outside of Fairbanks. Gojdics, 69, died after an apparent confrontation with a renter’s acquaintance on his property, Leavitt said.
“We’re just shocked. Jimmy wanted to come down here and have a fish camp. He was saying he was hanging up all this gosh dang work. We’d planned this for a couple years. We just kind of got chopped off,” Leavitt said.
The men started clearing the lot more than a month ago, putting in a driveway and getting the Haines property connected to grid power. They plugged in freezers full of pork and venison Gojdics had harvested on a friend’s Texas dude ranch and knocked down trees they planned to have milled up for lumber.
About three weeks ago, Gojdics went north to bring down a bus and trailer and to sell other property to help pay for the Haines cabin. Leavitt returned to Brinnon, Wash., to bring up a 26-foot aluminum boat he built and to clear out his home and shop there.
The friends were out of communication when the shooting occurred. A friend in the Lower 48 relayed word of it to Leavitt. State troopers in Fairbanks say Gojdics’ shooting is being investigated as a homicide, but no charges have been filed. Leavitt said he believes he knows who killed Gojdics, but there were no eyewitnesses to the slaying.
Leavitt and Gojdics met in 2001 as fellow ironworkers working on a jail building in Everett, Wash. Leavitt, an ironworkers’ union representative, said Gojdics was a lifetime bachelor and a happy-go-lucky character who traveled the world and would do anything on a lark. Gojdics used Leavitt’s place in Washington as a base on trips out each winter.
“I did all the work and he had all the fun,” Leavitt said of his friendship with Gojdics. “They say different personalities conflict, but sometimes they don’t… If Jimmy got the chance to do anything, he did it,” Leavitt said, including finding a Lithuanian-speaking girlfriend to take to Lithuania to investigate his family roots.
Gojdics was a blacksmith who shoed horses, played fiddle and banjo, and owned a Russian motorcycle sidecar he drove in Haines parades, Leavitt said. “You can get every good-looking girl in town to ride in a side car, he’d say.”
Gojdics’ adventures included a stint on the National Geographic Channel TV program “Ultimate Survival Alaska,” a show that follows teams of outdoorsmen in a backcountry race. Leavitt said Gojdics recently had interested a reality TV crew to film the building of the cabin in Haines. A mutual friend in Texas was talking about bringing up a portable gold dredge. “It would have been fun. It would have been a lot of fun.”
Tributes posted on the Internet this week described Gojdics as a gentle soul. Janine Thibedeau, a friend from Fox, said Gojdics would dress in period garb at events featuring historic guns. “Whatever he did, he was in character when he did it. Everybody he met thought they were his best friend.”
For now, Leavitt is staying in Haines. He said he has leased a house for one year, and still wants to host “a continuous flow” of Gojdics’ friends who were planning to visit this summer.
He figures the investigation of Gojdics death and settlement of his estate will mean at least a year delay to the cabin project.
Leavitt said he’s been impressed by the generosity of locals. A stranger recently offered him free use of a cabin.
“What do you do? I’m going to be here a year,” Leavitt said.