Ray Menaker, an Ivy League-educated school teacher and Haines Borough Assembly member who founded or fostered a half-dozen civic institutions including launching the Chilkat Valley News, died Tuesday morning at his Haines Assisted Living apartment. He was 93.
“He was a man for all seasons. He had a foot in everything,” said resident Georgia Haisler, who recalled community French dinners hosted by Menaker’s high school language class. “Also, he did things in a calm, capable, methodical fashion. He and (wife) Vivian, they saw life in terms of things to be done.”
Menaker and high school student Bill Hartmann launched the CVN on Jan. 3, 1966, a few months after they started printing the Chilkat Breeze student newspaper using typesetting equipment dating to 1911. Menaker and Hartmann’s dad, Rev. Henry Hartmann, had just published a broadside supporting formation of a third-class borough.
“Ray said, ‘Hey, I think we can probably put out a newspaper,'” Bill Hartmann recounted this week. The newspaper for years operated on a shoestring, and Menaker turned over all its income to staff. “He never took a dime,” said former bookkeeper Sheri Loomis.
Although Menaker had no formal training in journalism, he proved to be a “very fair-minded” publisher, Hartmann said. “Most things bounced right off him. He was wonderful to work with.”
Menaker was a founding member of Lynn Canal Community Players, Lynn Canal Broadcasting, and Lynn Canal Conservation. He called square dances, acted in local plays, and produced and narrated an hour-long weekly radio program.
Menaker’s political involvement spanned from creation of the third-class borough in the late 1960s to consolidation of the city and borough governments four decades later, and included a hand in forming the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve.
His calm demeanor belied strongly held political views. He withheld his federal income taxes in protest of the Vietnam War, wrote to every U.S. president, and never voted for a presidential candidate who was elected, family members said this week. Menaker donated his assembly pay to the Chilkat Valley Preschool and sported a bumper sticker saying “Question Authority.”
Visits he made to Russia and China at the height of the Cold War led some residents to brand him “Red Ray,” but Menaker was returned to office by voters, serving eight terms on the assembly.
Explaining his political longevity, son Allen Menaker of Fairbanks said his father was “definitely of a socialist political bent,” but also a pragmatist.
“I think he wasn’t necessarily trying to push an agenda as much as trying to get people to think about the effects of their choices and make sure they were making good choices… He was enough of a realist to know he wasn’t going to change things. He had to get in there and work with what was there, and he wasn’t there for himself. He was looking out for everybody,” Menaker said.
Local author and planning commissioner Heather Lende, who served with Menaker on the assembly, said he was genuinely interested in other perspectives. “He loved to know why people thought the way they did. Even people who disagreed with him. He wanted to know their thought process. He was interested in the discussion. That’s rare now.”
Lucy Harrell, who also served on the assembly, said Menaker once phoned during a borough assembly campaign in which government consolidation was an issue. Menaker told Harrell he didn’t know if he could vote for her, but asked her up to his house for lunch.
“They asked me all the questions and how I felt about this and that,” Harrell said. “I thought it was a good way to find out what they wanted to know, to go right up to the source and ask them. Ray was a grand old gentleman. He was very much committed to the welfare of the community.”
Raymond Robert Menaker was born in Philadelphia on Jan. 25, 1922, the youngest of three sons of accountant George Menaker and wife Sara. He grew up in New York City, where he watched construction of the Empire State Building from his kitchen window.
A heart murmur kept him from athletics, and he took up singing, tap dancing and fencing. He also attended an uncle’s summer camp in Massachusetts. “They always put on plays, and in the evening there were talent shows and singing. He developed his love of the arts there, I believe,” said Allen Menaker.
Ray graduated from Columbia University in 1943 and enlisted in the Navy, serving as a communications officer on training ships offshore Miami.
Following World War II, Menaker and a friend drove from Florida to San Francisco, where Menaker earned a master’s degree from Stanford University on the GI Bill and found work at an elementary school at Menlo Park.
While teaching there, he met Vivian Jones, a fellow teacher and single mom. They married in 1949. After a change in school administration, they considered a move to New Zealand, India or Alaska. On the advice of a friend, the Menakers and their three children drove to Alaska in 1954 to teach school in Pelican, leaving their car in Haines.
A year later, they took teaching jobs here, in part because the school district had a music teacher. They built a house at the end of Allen Road and settled in.
Resident Annette Smith, a former student of Menaker’s, said he clicked with junior high students. “Someone would ask, ‘Can we do this?’ or “Can we do that?’ and Ray would say, ‘You can do anything you want as long as you don’t infringe on the rights of others.’ He’d set you up and make you think about things.”
Menaker called square dances for the Glacier Gliders, a local dance group. He became treasurer when the group became Lynn Canal Community Players in 1958, Smith said.
On stage, Menaker’s great timing and confidence made him a regular in local productions, including as Porcupine Pete in the summertime melodrama, “Lust for Dust,” Smith said.
Menaker helped form Lynn Canal Conservation in the 1960s when a large iron mine was proposed near Klukwan. Patricia Blank was one of just a handful of residents to launch the group. “Ray was wonderful. He was a patient person who listened to both sides and then made his decision. It’s the end of an era,” Blank said this week.
Menaker retired from teaching in 1972 and sold the newspaper to Bonnie Hedrick in the mid-1980s.
Like Menaker, Hedrick had no newspaper experience when she took over. Menaker’s example of staying calm in the face of mechanical breakdowns and political controversies helped, she said. “Ray was a good teacher. He gave me the confidence to carry on his legacy… If not for him, Haines probably wouldn’t have a weekly paper, certainly not one with a 50-year history,” she said.
Up until a few years before moving into Haines Assisted Living in 2010, Menaker kept a large garden and livestock, and carted and spun wool at the Southeast Alaska Fair, where he’d served for years as a board member and volunteer.
Former HAL manager Vince Hansen said Menaker was a voracious reader who stayed in a good humor and was easy to care for.
“We’re all supposed to think globally, but Ray’s life showed what a person can do locally. You think of what he did for this little slice of the earth. He was focused on his hometown,” Hansen said.
Menaker is survived by son Allen Menaker of Fairbanks, daughter Terry Lambert of Cumbria, England, and by eight grandchildren. He was preceded in death by wife Vivian and by stepson David Menaker.
Funeral arrangements are pending. Daughter Lambert, who was heading to Haines this week, said other family members would be coming to town in the coming weeks, and a memorial tribute may be held at that time.