CONCORD - The Hotel Concord just isn't the same this year. Old Bill Allman didn't come south for his annual winter visit, and I don't guess folks around these parts will ever see Bill again.
Bill Allman was a genuine character. I first met him in January 1983, and I have to count myself lucky, because he was a fine old fellow - 82 years old then, tough as whalebone, as independent as the mountain men who turned their backs on civilization in the early days of this nation to explore whatever lay beyond.
Bill Allman grew up in Cabarrus County, but left home at 18 to go west. He had done everything. He worked in lead mines and on Scandinavian whaling ships, was a cowboy in Arizona and a lumberjack in Washington and finally made his way to Alaska. That vast, unexplored wilderness, rich in game and fish and gold, intrigued him when he visited in 1921. Two years later he moved there.
In Alaska he carried the U.S. mail cross country by dog sled, prospected for gold and trapped. He was a bush pilot, flying by the seat of his pants. Occasionally he would crash, which he regarded as a minor inconvenience. Once, he landed in some woods
and broke his arm. Another time he ran through a cabin before he could stop. On another occasion he wrecked his plane when a bear ran in front of him while he was landing on a frozen lake.
Two years ago Bill suffered head injuries in a little confrontation with a grizzly bear. After that he started having occasional blackouts.
Several years ago, Bill decided Alaskan winters were finally getting to be too much for him. He began coming to Concord every winter to spend four months living at the Hotel Concord, shooting the breeze with other residents in the lobby of the old
hotel, and visiting friends and relatives.
"Every August or September he'd write and tell me to save him a room,"' says hotel manager Phelia Drye.
"He loved the food here," she recalls, "but he knew so many people that he got a lot of invitations to go out. Somebody was always coming by to get him. At Christmastime people would send him fruit-cakes and things, and he'd tell me to put them in the refrigerator and share them with the other folks who stay here."
She had been concerned about his health since the attack by the bear. "I knew he suffered blackouts sometimes," she says. "He was getting too old to live the way he did up there. Several of us tried to persuade him not to go back to Alaska the last couple of times he was here."
This year the annual letter asking for a room did not arrive. Bill Allman has disappeared. "I'll miss him," Phelia says.
One of Bill's closest friends in Alaska was Don Hunter, 68, of Marshall, Alaska. I talked with Hunter the other day. He has abandoned hope now that even a master woodsman and survivalist like Allman can still be alive.
"I've known Bill since 1922," Hunter said. "He disappeared last July. He was out on a trip by himself. He had flown in and was supposed to be picked up on July 18, but he didn't show up at the pickup point. I personally went out on a helicopter, and we flew over all of the places he might have been. I would like to have gotten into that area on the ground, but I don't get around like I used to.
"There was a ground search, but it had been an unusually warm winter and you couldn't get in there with snow machines. It's at least 40 or 50 air miles up to that area, and it's rough terrain. His son-in-law and I flew another air search later over all the places I knew Bill might travel, but we never found anything at all.
"One cabin he used for storage had burned, but there was no sign that Bill was in it. His main cabin eight or nine miles up the creek was OK. Somebody had come back to the burned cabin and stacked the sheet metal from the roof and had picked up all the nails and other stuff that could be used again. I think Bill did it. Nobody else would have likely done that.
"Bill just wasn't the man he used to be. He had no business going back out by himself. I tried to talk him out of it. He was getting very forgetful, he was hard
of hearing and he was losing his eyesight.
"It's possible that he had a blackout and came out of it disoriented and wandered off in the wrong direction. He was a good friend. I feel pretty sad about it."
I remember Bill sitting on the edge of his bed, showing me charts of the unsettled land he loved, grinning and rocking back and forth and slapping his knee
when he burst into a huge laugh.
I guess Bill knew that one day he would die in Alaska and that was what he wanted. I hope death came on tiptoe.
