Anchorage Daily News

Eric Deeter was an artist, a jazz and blues piano man, a carpenter and a founder of Radio Free Palmer, an ongoing grass-roots effort to bring community radio to Sutton and the Greater Palmer area.

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Eric Deeter was at the starting line of the Iditarod in 2008 when his son ran the race.

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He was a man committed. For years, he and artist friend Diann Haist kept a weekly painting date. He was supposed to show up at her house on Thursday with pictures from his trek in Nepal, inspiration for their work session. He never made it.

Deeter, 50, died in a rush-hour crash at Minnesota and Tudor.

Witnesses say Deeter, driving north on Minnesota, had stopped in a turn lane, then inexplicably went through the red arrow, either intending to make a U-turn or a left turn west onto Tudor. That put his Toyota Corolla square in the path of a Dodge Ram pickup driven by George Frenzel, 67, of Anchorage. Frenzel had the green light, according to police.

Deeter was dead at the scene.

Jim Sykes, a Radio Free Palmer board member who'd worked with him the day before, was a few blocks away, pulled over in a parking lot making a cell-phone call, when he heard the sirens and watched traffic pile up. He saw scenes from the accident on the evening news, but like a lot of friends and acquaintances, he found out the next morning who had died.

"It's one of those things that hits you in the gut."

Deeter leaves behind his wife, Gretchen Diemer, a poet and teacher at Pioneer Peak Elementary; his son, Iditarod musher Jeff Deeter, and a crater in the Valley arts community.

Deeter had a way of getting people to join together for a cause. Like the artists friends he rallied to help build a cabin near Talkeetna for a fellow artist and her husband who had no place to stay one winter.

"It was literally a house that artists built," Haist said.

He did endless legwork getting local musicians and voice actors for Radio Free Palmer's "Prairie Home Companion" knockoff variety show and fund-raiser at the Palmer Train Depot in the spring of 2006. He also wrote scripts for the radio actors and made sure all the details came together for the production.

"He was a vibrant member of the community," Sykes said. "He will be deeply missed."

Besides his family, art was Deeter's passion, friends say. He worked in watercolors, acrylics and oils.

"Winter Bones," an oil painting of a windblown, dilapidated barn, got a Rasmuson Foundation Museum Purchase Award, and now hangs in the Palmer Museum of History and Art/Visitor Center.

"Like music, a good painting has harmony and rhythm," he wrote on his Web site. "My goal is to be fluent at a wonderfully different language, the music of form, value, and color."

Deeter spent time living in the Bush, where his wife worked as a teacher, including on St. Paul Island, where he was instrumental in getting a local playhouse off the ground. Village life, people and landscapes greatly inspired him and became the subjects of many of his paintings. His Impressionist-style portraits really captured people's spirits, Haist said.

And then there was his music.

Her husband, Tom Swanson, never got to hear Deeter play.

"If he had, he would have worshipped at his feet," she said. "He was amazing. It was as though music just flowed out of him. Effortless."

And he cooked a mean salmon.

"I kept calling him a Renaissance man because everything he did he did so well."

That would include carpentry. Deeter recently did some remodeling for Lee Henrikson and Palmer City Councilman Mike Chmeilewsi, which left them both impressed.

"He brought his artist sensibility to his carpentry work," Henrikson said.

He was a natural fundraiser, too.

"He just had a very comfortable way with people," she said. "And he was not at all shy to ask for money."

Chmeilewsi, another Radio Free Palmer board member, was with Deeter the day before he died, during a meeting and fund-raising phone blitz. Deeter, he said, was in good spirits.

"We just had as wonderful a time as can be when doing that kind of thing. Working for a non-profit, you have the ability to go the long distance, and Eric had that quality."

The Radio Free Palmer Web site offers a taste of Deeter's sense of humor. Rather than his own picture for his board member bio, he used one of his paintings, a portrait of a dog -- a Dalmation, that classic, dependable, firehouse icon.

"Anxiously awaiting the call to duty... brave, honest, and fixed, Eric Deeter sits, ready to serve in the pursuit of local radio," he wrote.

That pursuit will now go on without him.

A fund has been set up for Deeter's family. Donations can be made in his name at any branch of the Matanuska Valley Federal Credit Union.

Find Debra McKinney online at adn.com/contact/dmckinney or call 257-4465.

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