Joe Redington didn't start racing in the Iditarod until he was 57. "He represents what a lot of us admire as far as our ideals and Alaska," said Iditarod executive director Stan Hooley. (BOB HALLINEN / Anchorage Daily News)

Redington's father of the Iditarod

Death in 1999 ended half century of supporting mushers, sled-dog racing

By CRAIG MEDRED AND FRANK GERJEVIC
Anchorage Daily News reporters

A mountain of a man in a lovable, elfin package, Joe Redington Sr., the Father of the Iditarod, died at his Knik home in June. He was 82.

His death came after an 18-month battle with esophageal cancer. His wife, Vi, and children were with him at the end.

Diagnosed with cancer in late 1997, Redington underwent months of chemotherapy, and the disease appeared for a time to be in remission. Up until just a couple of months before his death, he was training for a commemorative run along the Iditarod Trail to mark the millennium.

He didn’t make it, but per his wishes, he got his last ride in a dogsled. He was carried to his grave that way.

Redington’s passing was felt across the state. Hundreds turned out for a memorial service in Wasilla that went on for hours as friends and mushers brought laughter and tears with their recollections of the man most knew simply as ‘‘Old Joe.’’

Redington’s unfailing determination and constant good humor are what turned the improbable vision of an 1,100-mile sled-dog race from Anchorage to Nome into international glory as one of the world’s most famous wilderness challenges.

He didn’t do it alone, but he was a driving force behind the Iditarod through good times and bad.

He helped seed the careers of five-time champion Rick Swenson and four-time victor Susan Butcher, hustled the first purse while mushers were on the trail in 1973, and fought to keep the race growing but true to its roots.

His Knik home and dog lot became part of the Alaska landscape, a starting point for countless mushers and dreamers. Redington seemed to make room for them all, helping almost anyone who asked, always ready to get someone else on the trail and into the life he loved.

Along the way, he endeared himself to everyone.

‘‘There’s probably no higher compliment you could pay somebody,’’ said Stan Hooley, executive director of the Iditarod.

‘‘If it wasn’t for Joe Redington, I wouldn’t ever have come to Alaska,’’ Swenson said. The two men corresponded, and Redington advised the young Minnesotan to come north to a land of adventure and opportunity.

‘‘It was like calling a guy for a tire for your bike and he says come on over, ‘I’ve got it right here,’ ’’ Swenson said. ‘‘There was no tire, but you knew by the time you got there, he’d have it somehow.’’

Swenson got the tire and more. He ended up doing five times what Redington yearned to do just once – win the Iditarod. It was one of the things the men discussed in a nearly daylong conversation just a few weeks before Redington’s death.

‘‘We talked a lot about the race he almost won in ’85,’’ Swenson said. ‘‘Probably none of us ever accomplish all our goals in the end.’’

Redington came close. He led several Iditarods and four times finished as high as fifth – the last time in 1988 at age 71.

Unfortunately, said longtime friend Dave Olson of Knik, the handicap of age was more of an impediment than even the spirit of Old Joe could overcome. The daily beating of the trail, the constant tending to dogs’ feet in the bitter cold, and the lack of sleep wore heavier on the old man than on his younger competition.

Last March, Doug Swingley, at 45, became the oldest musher ever to win the Iditarod. Redington was already 57 when he started racing.

‘‘His age kept him back a little bit,’’ Olson said. ‘‘If he would have been the age of those guys who started out nowadays, he would have been a Swenson.’’

‘‘Joe understood dogs,’’ Swenson said.

Riding behind a string of crackerjack dog teams, recognized equally for their speed and their need for better lead dogs, Redington was a legitimate Iditarod contender through the ’80s despite his senior-citizen status.

In 1997, at 80, he joked that he ‘‘used to be considered pretty tough.’’

Then he went out and ran a 13-day, 4-hour Iditarod. It was fast enough to have won the first eight races. It was more than two hours faster than Swenson’s first victory in 1977.

Though Redington helped Swenson get started, he played an even bigger role in nurturing the career of Susan Butcher, the winningest woman in Iditarod history. Her four victories from 1986 to 1990 – coupled with the bitter rivalry with one-time Manley neighbor Swenson – helped boost the race to a new level of visibility.

The story, like so much else connected to the Iditarod, began in Redington’s dog lot. Butcher spent four years there as a dog handler, learning the dog driver’s art, taking a team of huskies to the top of Mount McKinley with Redington and obtaining from Redington a once-in-a-lifetime dog named Granite.

Granite was the rock that powered Butcher to her first Iditarod victory and helped her dominate the race the next five years. It made her, at the time, the biggest and brightest star in Alaska sled dog racing.

But Redington was always the sky against which the stars shone.

Before there was an Iditarod, there was Redington’s idea for an Iditarod. After there was an Iditarod, there was Redington’s intervention to save the race time and again.

No matter how bad things got – and the Iditarod teetered on the brink of bankruptcy more than once – Redington found a way to set things right.

‘‘He’d jump right up there and say this is the way it is, and that’s the way it would be,’’ Olson said.

Forged by the difficulties of life as a migrant worker during the Depression and tempered by 40 years on Alaska’s winter trails, Redington believed a man could accomplish almost anything through perseverance. His philosophy was simple: If you can get through today, you are well on your way to tomorrow. Thus he planned little but accomplished much.

‘‘If there’s no plan,’’ he once told musher Max Hall, ‘‘that’s one less thing to go wrong.’’

When Redington guaranteed $50,000 for the first Iditarod, the race was penniless. The threat of financial obligations scared other race founders.

‘‘My (race) committee quit,’’ Redington said. ‘‘I went to banks, and they turned me down cold. They said, ‘Joe, you’re crazy. You’re butting your head against something like that.’ ’’

Redington just tried harder until he came up with the money. The rest is history.

Today the Iditarod is a $2.3 million-a-year enterprise and an Alaska institution.

In 1979, climbers scoffed when Redington, Butcher and photographer Rob Stapleton set out to mush a dog team to the 20,320-foot summit of Mount McKinley, the tallest peak in North America.

None of the three knew beans about climbing. But aided by legendary guide Ray Genet of Talkeetna, Redington said, they would learn. And they did.

Redington reached the summit at age 62 with a pack of his best canine buddies.

‘‘I’ve always felt these dogs, the husky, could do almost anything I wanted them to,’’ Redington said. ‘‘I’ve always tried to prove that. I thought, ‘Someday I’ll show these people what these dogs can do.’ ’’

Show them he did.

Redington said Genet later confessed, ‘‘I underestimated Joe Redington.’’

It was easy to do. Standing 5 feet 6 inches tall, he was as light and lean as the sled dogs he bred. He looked frail to those who didn’t know better. But until the end, he was as strong physically as he was psychologically.

‘‘He’s go, go, go all the time,’’ said Tim Sonnentag of Eagle Pak dog foods, a longtime Redington sponsor. ‘‘He’s up at 1 o’clock at night. Then he’s up at 6 in the morning. He’s learned to live his life with five or six hours’ sleep.’’

Sleep was one of those things Redington seemed sometimes able to ignore, like the cold.

‘‘Cold never did bother me,’’ he once drawled in an accent left over from his Dust Bowl childhood in Oklahoma. ‘‘I’ve mushed dogs at 60 below zero. It’s not a real pleasant deal, but you can do it.’’

‘‘You can do it’’ was a Redington motto. In 1993, he sold six neophytes on a dog-sled tour to Nome and then led them there.

‘‘You know,’’ Redington said when the group pulled into Nome, ‘‘a lot of people doubted we’d make it.’’

Born Feb. 1, 1917, on the Chisholm Trail in Kingfisher, Okla., Redington first set out for Alaska in 1934. He got as far as Seattle, ran out of money and went back to join family in Bucks County, Pa.

Then came World War II. Redington spent four years in the Army, served on Okinawa, weathered a typhoon that he recalled had winds almost as bad as McKinley’s, and returned to Pennsylvania.

He tried jobs as a welder, a car repairman and a Jeep demonstrator – showing farmers what the vehicles could do. That lasted until 1948, when Redington abruptly decided that he belonged in Alaska.

Redington and his brother, Ray, loaded their wives and children, along with their father, James, into a couple of the Jeeps and headed north. At a border trading post, Vi Redington, then Ray’s wife, acquired the clan’s first Alaska husky, a puppy. The Redington family kennels expanded from there.

Meanwhile, Joe and Vi Redington both ended up getting divorced and then married to each other. The marriage lasted 46 years until Joe’s death. Joe and Vi, short for Violet, became renowned partners in the mushing world. They had a son, Keith, who died at age 9.

The family homesteaded land near Knik and Flathorn Lake. From the latter homestead, they had to commute to the road system by dog team. Soon Joe got jobs hauling construction supplies by dog sled to DEW Line radar stations, salvaging crashed airplanes and helicopters, and doing whatever dog freighting he could find.

In the summers, he did some mining and commercial fishing, which also helped to feed the dogs. As Vi’s children grew, they took an interest in sprint-dog racing – the dominant form of Alaska sled-dog sport in the 1950s and 1960s.

With the snowmobile taking over rural Alaska, though, their father worried that sled dogs would fade. He helped start the Iditarod, for the most part, to prevent that from happening.

The race became more successful than Joe ever dreamed, and his fame grew accordingly.

He was ‘‘an icon in a lot of ways,’’ Hooley, the Iditarod’s executive director, said. ‘‘He represents what a lot of us admire as far as our ideals and Alaska.’’

‘‘It is,’’ said Swenson, ‘‘the end of an era.’’

Daily News reporters Craig Medred and Frank Gerjevic can be reached at cmedred@adn.com and fgerjevic@adn.com.

Redington gets a hug from fellow musher DeeDee Jonrowe at the home of Skwentna's Joe Delia after they arrived on the first night of the 1997 Iditarod. (BOB HALLINEN / Anchorage Daily News)