Joe 'the Waterman' Shults, North Slope curator of Alaska curiosities, is dead at 62

A local personality and keeper of history passed away last week in Utqiaġvik.

Joe "the Waterman" Shults died in the town he loved at the age of 62 after a long battle with cancer, those close to him say.

Shults was known far and wide as the proprietor of Joe's Museum, a hodgepodge collection of curiosities, Alaskana and local artifacts he collected over the course of more than three decades. Visitors from Outside who had heard about the man would come to his apartment and for a small donation, if they were able, would peruse the shelves and tables packed to the gills with Arctic memorabilia.

Those in town knew Shults by the way he earned his "Waterman" moniker. He drove the water truck in Utqiaġvik (known for most of that time as Barrow), through snow and ice, come wind and rain and fog, for 28 years, making deliveries to his neighbors.

It was on those trips across town he started his collection of found objects that eventually became his one-of-a-kind museum. He'd see a little bit of something sticking up out of the ground and pick it up, bring it home and put it on display. He bought other items, like a giant stuffed polar bear, that he knew would add character to the place.

[In Utqiagvik, Joe the Waterman made an Alaska museum like no other]

The passing decades brought new ways of preserving objects and memories, some of which Shults adopted, some of which he did not. Tubs of items soaked in motor oil were stashed on the ground. Others were carefully mounted to the walls. He had history both recent and old — possibly dating back nearly 2,000 years in some cases — carefully tucked away in his small, quirky place.

The Waterman was funny, his friends remember. "We'll miss his jokes," several people wrote on social media after they found out he'd passed.

In one picture of Shults, whom many knew as Ipiqsi, shared over the last week, he's smiling and holding open his coat to show off a black shirt.

"And then I woke up!" it announces, in bold white lettering.

Friends say his mother, Fran Tate, ordered it for him after he'd been hospitalized following a particularly difficult bout with his illness and medications. The way the story is told, he hadn't been doing too well and many feared it was near the end. Right before they were thinking of pulling the plug, they say, true to form, he woke up with characteristic good humor to face another day.

His mother, like her son, was a personality in town. She now lives in a care facility in Anchorage but, in her heyday, lived in Utqiaġvik, where she worked as an engineer, then in the water business, then managed Pepe's North of the Border. Shults made a lot of friends through Pepe's, which burned to the ground several years ago and was never reopened.

In the years since, Shults' health had been on the decline. He suffered a series of strokes and underwent heart surgery. Despite the setbacks, his good humor and dedication to his collection persisted.

In an interview with Alaska Dispatch News in January, he said he hoped he'd leave a legacy in town.

"Two hundred years from now, I hope people would go there and say, 'Boy, that Joe the Waterman put all this together, collected all this," he said. "That must have been quite a time to be here.' "

The doors to his museum stayed open to all, by appointment, until the very end.

This story first appeared in The Arctic Sounder and is republished here with permission.