Borough Mayor Menard dies

    WASILLA — Borough Mayor Curt Menard died early Tuesday morning from the cancer he’d battled since 2003.

    He was 64.

    “For me, personally, Menard was the constant professional,” said his son, Steve Menard. “He was a good barometer of what a good Christian man should be.”

    Steve said his father had recently started a new round of chemotherapy treatment and just ran out of strength.

    “He fought as hard as he could fight and we lost him at 4:45,” the younger Menard said.

    Curt Menard was a pilot, a dentist and a legislator. He served on the Mat-Su Borough School Board from 1984 until 1986. From 1986 to 1994 he represented the Valley first in the state House of Representatives and then in the state Senate. His term as borough mayor began in 2006.

    He was also the patriarch of a family of dentists and local politicians. Steve Menard is a former Wasilla City councilman. Menard’s wife, Linda, currently represents the Valley in the state Senate and is a former member of the Mat-Su Borough School Board.

    Curt Menard Jr. was an orthodontist in Wasilla until he died in a plane crash, Steve Menard said. The ice arena at the Wasilla Multi-Use Sports Complex is named in his honor.

    Menard came to Alaska as an Air Force dentist. Steve Menard said shortly after settling in the Valley, his father bought a homestead in the Wasilla area. The land had a cabin built in 1952, a milking house and a field Menard used as a landing strip.

    In 1975, worried that he couldn’t quite see an overhead powerline running between the two buildings while landing his plane at night, Menard decided to try and mark the line himself. Lines that appeared to be insulated were not and Menard took a blast of electricity that cost him his right arm.

“It should’ve killed him,”  Steve Menard said. “It’s remarkable that he lived after that.”

    What’s also remarkable, Steve Menard said, is that his brother Curt Jr. survived. He let go of the aluminum ladder they were using.

    “We got another 27 years out of him,” Steve Menard said.

    His father was a right-handed dentist, Steve Menard said. With a new mortgage and three kids, though, he couldn’t afford to let the injury end his career.

    “He self-taught himself on some very tough Valley patients how to be a left-handed dentist.”

Mike Szymanski, who held the Senate seat encompassing the district Menard was elected to represent in the House, said he and Menard often talked about being amputees. Szymanski lost a leg in a snowmachine accident.

“I think he was a symbol to many other amputees,” Szymanski said. Menard’s example showed that, “There was no reason to slow down and not do what you want to do.”

    Szymanski said he and Menard had similar legislative styles, emphasizing talking to and caring about their constituents.

    “Curt and I had a kind of a special relationship, I always felt,” Szymanski said. “When I decided to leave the Senate I looked to Curt to take my seat.”

    And he did.

    The seat represented a district referred to at the time as the “donut district.”

    The area it covered basically surrounded Anchorage, encompassing Girdwood and a large piece of the Kenai Peninsula, Valdez and Prince William Sound, Mt. McKinley and the Mat-Su Borough.

    “It was very diverse and it was a difficult district to represent at the time,” Szymanski said.

    Johanna Munson, who now works in the office of the director of the Bureau of Land Management in Washington, D.C., got her start in public service working as an aide on Menard’s resources committee.

    She and Szymanski agreed that among Menard’s great passions were parks and public resources.

    Because his district was so large, Menard was the senator representing Prince William Sound when the Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred.

    “All of those communities will remember Curt,” she said.

    It was between his stint in the Legislature and his term as mayor was when Menard was diagnosed with cancer.

    “We were lucky to have him because he could’ve said I’m gong to go home and fight this health problem alone but he didn’t,” said Borough Spokeswoman Patty Sullivan.

Cindy Bettine, who represents Big Lake on the Borough Assembly, said Menard was a joy to work with.

    “Of course I’m very, very sad. I’ve already had a good cry this morning,” she said of Tuesday of Menard’s passing. “But I just keep on focusing on the good things that he had done for the Valley,” she said.

    She said his biggest legacy was probably the Wasilla Multi-Use Sports Complex. Menard was instrumental in putting the bond issue that eventually paid for the complex’s construction on the ballot.

    She said she’s known Menard since before he became a legislator.

    “I felt very honored that he thought of me as a community leader in the business community of Wasilla at the time,” Bettine said. “He took me to coffee when he decided to run for state House.”

    Sullivan said that, toward the end, Menard started to fade away, looking less and less himself.     

    Still, she said, that didn’t stop him from coming into work. Just last week, she said, she sat down with him to record what would be his final “Mayor’s Minute” podcast.

    “Whenever we recorded ‘Mayor’s Minute’ I would turn the tape off and then he would tell me these stories from the Legislature,” Sullivan said. “They were funny and irreverent and there were a lot of them.”

    Just a couple weeks ago, she said, she and other staff were practically begging the mayor to stay home. But he wouldn’t.

    “He didn’t look good and we all wanted him to stay home. But there were Girl Scouts that wanted to shake his hand,” Sullivan said.

A memorial service for Curt Menard will be Saturday at 1 p.m., at Wasilla High School.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.