Voice of the Times
(Published: April 7, 2004)
A MAN OF MANY SEASONS . . . Jim Parsons
MANY
PEOPLE are active as volunteers working to make Anchorage a better
place to live. Some are involved in a limited number of things, but
their contributions are in no way small. Others take part in a great
many different ways, and their efforts all help the city move ahead.
But in
measuring volunteerism over a long span of time, it may well be that no
one in Anchorage ever participated in a wider variety of community
affairs than Jim Parsons.
When it
came to getting involved, this witty and charming activist was a dynamo
— in the arts, in civic service, in education, in government. You name
it, and in his more than 50 years in Anchorage, he was into almost
everything.
That
service, and that remarkable record of community involvement, came to
an end last Sunday morning when he died at home, a victim of cancer
that all too quickly took his life.
Many who
have come to Anchorage only in recent years may not have known him or
known of him, because the passage of time had made him less active and
less publicly involved. Too bad. They missed the joy of seeing and
working with a man of vision and exuberance, whose interests touched on
all aspects of Anchorage life in his younger years.
A native
New Yorker, Jim Parsons came to Anchorage in 1953 — a staff sergeant in
the Army Medical Corp in World War II with undergraduate and graduate
degrees in psychology at Pacific Union College, the University of
Minnesota and Columbia University. He pursued his career in important
assignments with the state Division of Mental Health, the Anchorage
School District, Alaska Methodist University and the Municipality of
Anchorage. He founded the Alaska Mental Health Association and served
on the executive committee of the National Mental Health Association.
He was
elected to the Anchorage School Board in 1954, and to the state House
of Representatives in 1959, serving two terms in the Second and Third
state Legislatures. He was elected to the Anchorage Charter Commission
in 1975, and helped pave the way for merger of the old city and borough
governments.
But it
was in other areas of service that he was best known — as president of
the Alaska World Affairs Council, as president of the Anchorage Concert
Association, as founding chairman of KSKA public radio, as a board
member of the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts, as president of
the Anchorage Kiwanis Club, and as one with enduring commitments to the
Salvation Army, to the Citizens Advisory Committee of the University of
Alaska Anchorage, to the Anchorage Ski Club and to a host of other
activities.
Jim Parsons was a mover and a shaker. He made Anchorage better than it might have been.
