Termite TV - Life Stories

Hi my name is Spencer Severson I was born in October 14th '44 in Tacoma, Washington. father was in the navy there and shortly after I was two months old they moved back to Wisconsin which is where all my family is from. Mostly second generation Norwegian immigrants in Wisconsin there. But my father left when I was two years old and my mother remarried when I was two years old in between time we lived in my grandfather's homestead in Chipa Falls, Wisconsin. We moved to Clifornia when I was six years old. And I pretty much grew up in Southern California on the beach and we spend most of my life in the water and on the water which is what I still do. But,when I turned seventeen, let me mention that I had a lot of accidents,when I was four years old I' broken my leg jumping off a Merry-go round because the big kids would not let me off. And then when I was fifteen I got run over by a friend's car, I was riding on the hood of his car right after we'd been in a surfing protest where it was close to the beach and I was standing on the hood of his car trying to do a surfer trick and I fell off the front,and he ran over me with his '51 Buick. It took me over a year of getting skin grafts of my left leg to save it. Well, it turned out to be a good thing in a way because I'd been becoming quite a hoodlum and a lot of my friends were on the edge of being in a lot of trouble. And during that period, I discovered a lot of literature and started doing a lot more thinking about a lot of issues. But, as a result of that time I wanted to get on the road and I'd really taken a, become an amerade of hobos and fret trains. So, between the eleventh and twelfth grade, I still was walking on a cane, I took off with my best friend Bobby Johnson and we hopped frets all over the United States and we hitch hiked all over the United States. And that was the summer, at the end of the summer in September, I hoped a fret from Paulina Montana, cross the Cascade mountains and ended up in Tacoma where I went and met my real father for the first time, who was an alcoholic, but a poet. He had redeeming virtues but we basically did not get along very well and that relationship did not go anywhere. I went back, finished high school, and took of on the road again and hoping frets and ended up in Florida, working on a shrimp boat, And New York City and working in Greenwich Village in a coffee shop- did an awful lot of stuff. But I wanted to get school so I ended up going to college in Kansas City for a year, of all places I was cutting lead up on the dakotas and guy who owned the Combine, offered to let me live with them and go to school, so I ended up living in Kansas City for one year and during that time I got myself a motorcycle and afterward I was going to go to Alaska, I started on the highway upto Alaska but ended up in an accident in San francisco and broke both my knees. So I went back to. my parents put me up for a while. That was Vietnam war stuff was beginning and my father was alone how I was going to be shot as a traitor for posing our involvement there, and I ended up going to living with my sister in Palm Springs. And afterward I ended up riding the motorcycle up to Guatemala and turned around and finally did get up to Alaska. I ended up living there for two years worked on an oil rig, worked on an A deck as a carpenter apprenticeship, then I left and went to a commercial diving school down in Washington for two years. And afterward I started sailing out of there and I went to San francisco and eventually down into Mexico and to Hawaii and back to bay area. That does not get us too far a long, but anyway that's a quick summary of a lot of stuff. I think I'll elaborate a little bit on " Tenderly" which was my sail boat. It was a twenty six foot, wooden ketch built in 1933. It didn't have an engine, had canvas hand made sails, it had all natural fiber lines, that was just,I guess, being over authentic at a certain point but it seemed to me like, the hemp I was about to get in Mexico, to Manilla lines in more to keeping in character with the boat so. But, when I was in Sandiego I met a woman and we talked a lot about sailing off together and homesteading and living happily after together in some remote Pacific isle. But, when we went to sea together tried to go to Mexico together, she was sea sick and terrified, and I got her back to Sandiego and I went off by myself to Hawaii. She came over to Hawaii to see me there, and a lot of things happened in Hawaii it was a difficult place to be, there was a lot of animosity towards the colonists that had taken over the people's lives and I ended up having a lot of problems, and it took the desire out of me to keep sailing and to go on further at that time, unfortunately. But, we ended up making a decision to have a child and move back to Northern California and buy some land and live back to go back to the land of existence. We made it to this little place called Mckanzie beach for fasting for three days, and we conceived Ida my daughter. Well, the same things that had kept her unable to sail , kept her from enjoying living on a twenty acre parcel , thirteen miles away from the nearest paved road. Once we had some bears go through our trash can and she decided she could not be outside by herself. We had a lot of rattle snakes and we had to move and take them out to remoter places. She was generally not happy and after two years she went back to Sandiego. And consequently ended up with a daughter, who we spilt half the year between us up until fourth grade. I went back to diving, and I went to commercial abalone diving, and I went to Santa Barbara and Half moon bay. Dove abalone for several years and half the year with my daughter. And when she was seven years old we took off and came to Alaska to examine the possibility of a sea urchin fishery that was getting started in Ketchikan and participate in an abalone dive fishery. So we came upto Ketchikan, fell in love with Alaska and we didn't want to leave, there was no going back to California after that. Even though , I had lived in the northern part of Alaska for two years, I had not discovered south east before and had all these inside water ways and incredible boating that takes place here was paradise for me, it still is. Well, my daughter and I lived in Ketchikan for almost eleven years. In fourth grade she decided to move in with me full time. In the meantime I took a job for six months in Tonga, I went there supposedly to run a lobster boat but that fell through, with the Tonga man I was supposed to be co- captain with it, it just didn't not work out, though we remained friends. I went ahead and started diving for black coral with a local lord, there is only thirty five noble families in Tonga. One of the nobleman had married a Japanese woman, who had been buying our lobster and I ended up diving with him- diving off his boat for six months. We went to New Zealand for six weeks and we came back to here and my daughter in the meantime had decided that we should start sailing again, who was twelve years old at the time and we came home and I got Tacarome which is the boat I have right now. Unfortunately, she turned fourteen and with puberty came a change of attitude and direction and no longer interested in a sail boat and going off with her dad to go sailing. So, the boat kind of sat idol and did'nt really do much of anything except wile I continued to make my living in diving and she continued to go to school. We came to Sitka in 1990 to start doing an urchin fishery with Alan Marine out here and stayed ever since. I've always loved Sitka and always wanted to live here, but there wasn't a dive fishery before. We got that urchin fishery off the ground and my daughter went to school upto she was seventeen but then she, decided on her own that she wanted to take off and she went and rode her bicycle down to all through United States and is twenty five years old and has made me a grand pa. We're still very close.But during this time I met Elen, and Elen was living on a boat down in the harbor from me. Elen had come up here to make a film. She just seemed like one of the most interesting people I'd ever met in my entire life. I took off sailing by myself, coz I still wanted to take that sailing adventure even though my daughter was not going with me. And when I got down to Washington, I came back and did one of my fisheries and Elen had come back to Alaska. She'd gone off after making a film in Alaska but then she had taken another job in Sitka and had come back to do that job. I ran into her again and we started hanging out together and eventually she came down and started sailing with me. The boat was in Mexico and she came down and she crossed the whole south pacific. We were going to cross the Marquises to the societies down over to Tonga, left the boat in Tonga and came back. She got started on one of her films which end up taking two and a half years. We went back to the boat to New Zealand and last year we went upto fiji but the boat has sort of been stationed in New Zealand for three and a half years because of her projects. Hopefully, we are going to get a window of opportunity soon and we're going to sail on from here. So I think that brings us pretty well upto date and has covered my life story. Thank you very much for listening.