PROJECTS: Drew Scalzi, who recently died, was force behind Seafarer's Memorial.
HOMER -- The new brass bell at the Seafarer's Memorial on the Homer Spit tolled for the first time Friday in honor of Drew Scalzi, the commercial fisherman and legislator who was a main force behind the memorial to local fishermen lost at sea.
Scalzi died July 21 after a 10-year battle with cancer. His name won't join those lost seamen on copper plaques, but the beachside cupola with its fisherman statue and 350-pound bell was described Friday as one of many projects for which Scalzi, 53, will be remembered in Homer.
Some 300 fishermen, politicians and friends gathered on the Spit on Friday afternoon to celebrate Scalzi, who was described as dogged, generous, upbeat and irreverent. The local fishing organization honored Scalzi, a commercial halibut and cod fisherman and salmon tender operator, with a wreath built of groundline, seine net and fireweed. "He hauled for us all," said the sign below.
Parked by the memorial was a metallic blue 1968 Oldsmobile 442 convertible, which Scalzi bought over the Internet last year and in a last hurrah drove across the country with friends and his son Luke. He also left a daughter, Lacey, and his wife, Barb.
Scalzi served on the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly for eight years and represented Homer in the Legislature in 2001 and 2002. He was also a longtime member of the International Pacific Halibut Commission and other fishery organizations.
Among the projects he is being remembered for are local bike paths and expansion of the local campus of the Kenai Peninsula College.
"When I think of Drew, I think of honor," said former state Senate president and fisheries veteran Clem Tillion of Halibut Cove.
A native of Connecticut and Florida, Scalzi moved to Alaska in 1975 to work on the trans-Alaska oil pipeline and migrated to Homer in 1978, where he got into fishing. He bought a boat of his own in 1988 and named it the Anna Lane after a beloved grandmother who had a summer cottage on Long Island Sound.
In 1989, Scalzi brushed with notoriety when the Anna Lane, under an Exxon Valdez oil spill contract to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, found a scene of massive seabird carnage at Gore Point off the Kenai Peninsula. Defying direct orders, he burned the birds in a driftwood funeral pyre rather than risk his crew's safety carrying the heavy birds through the heavy surf and back to Homer. Scalzi and crew spent two days pulling 676 birds from a half-mile-wide swath of shin deep oil.
"You'd see a little bump in the oil and push it with your foot," Scalzi said in an interview at the time. "Sometimes it was a rock. If it was soft, you dug down and lifted up a head or a feather."
Scalzi was fired, his boat expelled from Exxon's computer, when he returned to Homer. But after showing a videotape of the murres and cormorants carefully lined out on the sand in a cold rain, he was restored to the government's good graces. They conceded that some circumstances call for an exercise of judgment.
"Our job description was to get this stuff out of the food chain," said a nonplussed Scalzi.
Scalzi began work on the Seafarer's Memorial near the end of the Homer Spit in 1995, the same year he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. In 1999, he went through a grueling stem-cell transplant, which kept the cancer at bay for four more years.
Recently he designed a concrete three-legged pedestal to hold the new bell. He saw the first form of concrete poured before going to the hospital for the last time. After his death, friends hurried to finish the project. The bell was hung Thursday.
The inscription on the pedestal, chosen by Scalzi, reads: "This bell tolls for all the souls set free upon the sea."
Late Friday afternoon, with gulls wheeling under a sunny sky, the bell was finally rung as the ceremony ended. In the background on Kachemak Bay, fishing boats were heading home to safe harbor.
Daily News reporter Tom Kizzia can be reached at tkizzia@adn.com or in Homer at 1-907-235-4244.
