It should be a crime against the state for a guy like Bruce Merrell to go free. The man knows too much.

He and the Z. J. Loussac Public Library go way back -- back to the days of little drawers full of index cards and electric typewriters with correction ribbons.

In the 32 years since his arrival fresh out of library school, this caretaker of the Loussac's Alaska Collection has been stalking some of the most obscure details of the state's most obscure past from its most obscure sources. And all the while he's been squirreling stuff away in the back pockets of his brain.

Calling him a walking encyclopedia of Alaska history would be a cliche. But if the shoe fits ...

Because he's such a valuable resource, you'd think once his retirement party had wrapped up -- after he'd been presented the reference librarian equivalent of a gold watch -- gift certificates to Title Wave Books and REI -- that the Posterity Police would Dewey Decimal him, carry him down into the basement and file him on a shelf in the vault. Maybe next to the Captain Cook journals -- 225-year-old, leather-bound, hand-printed volumes that were stolen from the library and MIA for more than a year before mysteriously reappearing, providing Merrell with about the worst and best days of his career.

But he isn't donating his brain to the archives. After a lifetime immersed in other people's research projects, he's got places to go, things to write about.

"I am interested in a little bit about everything," he said. "I mean, public librarians, we're the last of the generalists. We can get away with having knowledge that's a mile wide and an inch deep."

He's especially drawn to the period between the 1867 Alaska Purchase and the gold rush, when there were very few non-Natives in Alaska and those who did come up came for reasons he finds fascinating. John Muir, for instance.

Merrell has already published a couple of books. He and Robert Engberg co-edited Muir's "Letters from Alaska" in 1993. And in 2006, he and Frank Norris put together "The Alaska 67," a book about 67 of Alaska's most important books.

What he'll write about next remains to be seen. And he's seen a lot.

COZY AND RIPE

Merrell grew up in Juneau and landed in Anchorage in a roundabout way.

He was wrapping up his library studies degree at the University of Minnesota, hanging out in the college library there, when he picked up The Anchorage Times and came across a want ad for a librarian. He called to ask if he could interview over the phone.

He couldn't.

So he went back to his apartment, gave away all his stuff, hopped in his 1970 Saab with his stereo and sleeping bag and not much else, and headed up the highway. Five days later he was in Anchorage.

It was November 1976.

Merrell got the job overseeing magazines and periodicals. He remembers it as very cozy. He shared an office at the old Loussac with four others, a room so small that every desk drawer had to be closed for people to get in and out the door.

He then ran a couple of branch libraries, including the one at Grandview Gardens off DeBarr where Out North theater is now. It was a neighborhood library so he got to know everybody, including these two chain-smoking mystery fans, both named Patricia, who'd show up in a '63 Thunderbird with two huge poodles in the back.

"The Pats," he called them.

But the characters Merrell remembers most are the homeless guys who hung out at the old Loussac downtown, guys with names like Mr. Gray and Smiley, back before Bean's Cafe provided a warm place for street people to hang during the day. Some stashed their empty booze bottles in the magazine racks, and one left his ivory carving tools hidden behind children's books since he had no safe place to store them.

One regular, rumored to have been a concert trumpet or trombone player, often left a little gift. "Instead of washing his socks," Merrell said, "he'd buy new ones and put the old ones in the wastebasket at the reference desk."

The old library, among other unappealing attributes, was over-heated so the place could get to smelling pretty ripe. One day, an older woman in circulation couldn't take it anymore.

"She found a can of Lysol spray and walked around the reading room with the can held high, spraying everything and everyone she could reach. She looked like an angry Statue of Liberty."

MYSTERIES AND MASTERY

By the time Merrell became caretaker of the Alaska Collection he'd already spent countless hours perusing its tens of thousands of books, magazines, maps, charts, government documents and microfilm reels. He amazed people with what he could pull out of his own head.

In addition to excavating information for the general public, he's helped a whole lot of writers, which is why his name routinely shows up on acknowledgements pages.

"The man's a genius," says Mr. Whitekeys, who could always count on Merrell to dig up bizarre ditties for his parodies. "He knows everything in that library. You want to know anything weird, you'd call Bruce."

Merrell dug up a story for Whitekeys about the demise of "Nimrod," a turn-of-the-century miner in Eagle who'd lost his teeth to scurvy and fashioned a spare set from Dall sheep, caribou and bear teeth. Apparently, this guy was so afraid of being devoured by wolves, that when he knew he was dying, he lay down in a creek so he'd be encased in ice.

Merrell also introduced him to the story of Buzzsaw Jimmy, a woodcutter in Whitehorse who managed to cut off own leg twice -- first the real one, then the wooden one that replaced it.

Bestselling mystery writer Dana Stabenow goes on and on about Merrell's "incredible institutional memory."

"Bruce has helped me on many, many projects," she said from Homer. "I don't think I've ever stumped him."

Her way of paying homage was to give him -- as well as librarian Dan Fleming -- a minor role in one of her Kate Shugak books.

"In 'Blood Will Tell,' Kate goes to the library and somebody has to help her; it might as well be Bruce and Dan," Stabenow said.

Merrell even endeared himself to her father, who had an old gold camp about 100 miles south of Denali and had heard a story about some Navy lieutenant taking a mule train through the area long ago.

"Bruce not only found a log or diary or whatever, but he found him a map that he let him reproduce. Dad just thought Bruce hung the moon."

As a researcher, Merrell does love a good mystery.

One day a woman, given up for adoption as a baby, came in looking for information about her long-lost biological father. She had just learned his name.

Merrell tried several databases and indexes before getting a hit in a newsletter for the Alaska State Council on the Arts. The woman followed him to the shelf, where he found a short article about the man, an accomplished artist, and his photograph.

"When I showed her the page, her legs gave away and she grabbed my arm and started crying. It was the first picture she'd ever seen of her father."

RETIREMENT -- NOT

Now that Merrell isn't spending his days answering everybody else's questions, he'll have more time for answering his own. But first, some travel. At his send-off party, someone joked that his retirement was going to last all of 12 hours.

Almost right.

Merrell clocked out for the last time at 6 p.m. on Jan. 30. By 9 the next morning, he was in training for a volunteer gig with the Alaska Business Development Center, which sends teams to villages to help people prepare tax returns. It was a chance for him to see parts of the state he's only read about, like Allakaket and Anaktuvuk Pass.

That gig has wrapped it up, but he plans on doing it again next year.

So now what?

Well, there's a road trip around Southern California with his 80-some-year-old parents, bird-watching with his son in the Pribilof Islands and his daughter's wedding in June.

And then?

Once he rebuilds the dock at his cabin and maybe reads "Moby Dick" and "The Brothers Karamazov," who knows?

"I'm inventing it new every day," he says.

Find reporter Debra McKinney online at adn.com/contact/dmckinney.

ADVERTISEMENT