If you're downtown and in the mood for a hot dog today, M.A.'s Gourmet Dogs is donating the day's proceeds to the effort to locate Monty Dickson, a University of Alaska Anchorage graduate missing in Japan after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Michael Anderson, who owns the popular stand at the corner of Fourth Avenue and F Street in front of the old Federal Building, is friends with Dickson's sister, Shelley Fredrickson. He said Sunday he wanted to help her get to Japan and look for her brother, or at least get closure in some way. He's open until 6.
"Sitting here waiting, three weeks plus, it's got to be torturous," Anderson said.
Fredrickson and others have been working the phones and doing what they can from Anchorage. She hasn't been to work since the first few days after the quake. She, Monty and brother Ian are especially close because their mother died when the boys were in high school and they moved in with her.
Dickson, 26, was in Takata to teach English to Japanese children. He called his girlfriend minutes after the quake but then the huge tsunami swept through the town. He hasn't been heard from since.
Maybe he won't be found, Anderson said. But his family needs to learn what they can.
"Just find some sort of peace over there, even if it means going over to where he used to live, finding one speck of something that is his."
Anchorage Daily News / adn.com