New book chronicles Joe, Vi Redington’slives, contributions to Alaska

WASILLA — Katie Mangelsdorf’s new biography of Joe Redington. Sr. started with a long pause.

When she called Redington one day 14 years ago, shortly after her retirement from teaching, to pitch him the idea of a biography. She laid out her idea in detail and on the other end of the phone, silence — until Joe finally replied:

“Well, when do we start?” Mangelsdorf recalls.

“I thought for sure he was going to say ‘no, I don’t have the time for it,’ because the man is always so busy,” the author said.

Redington, credited as the founder of the storied Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, did have one stipulation: he didn’t want a book about himself unless his wife, Vi, was a part of it. He told Mangelsdorf his wife was always behind the scenes helping him do everything he did.

“I said that’s not going to be any problem,” Mangelsdorf recalled. “Vi was always behind the scenes, taking care of the dogs and writing letters.”

Mangelsdorf finally released her book — “Champion of Alaskan Huskies — Joe Redington, Sr., Father of the Iditarod”— on July 26. She’ll sign copies at Fireside Books in Palmer today from 4 to 6 p.m. She’ll also have copies for sale at the Alaska State Fair at an authors’ booth in Raven Hall. She’ll make an appearance Saturday from 1 to 7 p.m. at the GRRdwood Pets and Mushers Supply booth on the purple trail. Finally, she’s participating in a homeschoolers’ conference at Pandemonium Books in Wasilla Sept. 10.

She said she had a wonderful time interviewing Joe and Vi, the Redington clan and everyone else she could get hold of. She took her time, she said, but never expected the effort would take as long as it did. Things kind of got in the way.

“I was homeschooling and we were building a house and moved back to Washington, D.C., for three years,” she said. “Just life.”

The book was necessarily on the back burner, but then last year her last child graduated from high school.

“I said, ‘I started this when you were in kindergarten, I guess I better graduate out of Joe’s book like you’ve graduated out of high school,’” Mangelsdorf said.

In that time both Joe and Vi had both passed away, but Mangelsdorf said she got more than she needed in their many conversations. It wasn’t easy, however. Just ask her about the photos.

“Joe and Vi and I had looked through lots and lots of pictures they had taken and they picked out pictures they thought would be good in the book,” she said.

Somehow those were lost.

“Vi and I started again looking through pictures and we started making another box of pictures and somehow those disappeared. We don’t know where they went,” she said.

So they went to the Anchorage Museum where the Redingtons had donated more than 10,000 images.

“I said, ‘I really need some help,’” Mangelsdorf said. “They jumped in and we ended up with 158 pictures for his story.”

The pictures were important, she said, as part of her plan to draw in young readers.

The whole idea behind the book began when Mangelsdorf was teaching sixth grade.

“For some reason my sixth-graders weren’t always that excited about biographies,” Mangelsdorf said. So she went looking for some characters that her kids might relate to — Alaskan characters on Alaska adventures.

“We really have some great characters in this state that I might be able to find some biographies on,” she said about what she thought at the time.

But when she went looking she came up short.

“There weren’t many and no one had written anything about Joe,” Mangelsdorf said.

That has since changed. In 1999, Lew Friedman put out a Redington biography, “Father of the Iditarod — the Joe Redington Story.”

Mangelsdorf said she’s working to get her book into the hands of kids. She thinks Redington’s life should be an example for people to follow.

“Those qualities of sticking to something and being creative and patient, trying not to give in to discouragement and not to give in to fear, those kinds of things our children need to hear about,” Mangelsdorf said. “I wanted to take that kind of an angle and I wanted to have a lot of pictures because I had a lot of reluctant readers. I thought if I could have a lot of pictures with a lot of captions I thought maybe they could at least read the captions and learn about the man and maybe get sucked into the story.”

She said Redington didn’t give in to fear and wouldn’t let his family give in either. Be it a plane crash or a backcountry injury, Mangelsdorf said Redington saw calamities as opportunities.

“I had no idea some of the pickles that the man got into until we started interviewing,” Mangelsdorf said. “He would be the first person to say he would get discouraged about something, but he knew it would get him nowhere.”

Asked to pick an anecdote from the book that stands out to her, Mangelsdorf settled on Redington’s 1979 trek up Denali, the first and only time sled dogs reached the summit of the mountain. Redington wanted to get up the mountain with dogs to prove huskies can work even in high altitudes.

“People said he was crazy, dogs can’t go that high, and Joe said, ‘I know they can,’” Mangelsdorf said. “He always had a reason and he climbed McKinley to prove what these dogs could do, not to prove what he could do.”

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