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Fifty years after graduating in 1966, Alan Straub, at right, reunites with Bill Mendenhall, professor emeritus of engineering, during the UAF Alumni Association's Nanook Rendezvous reunion event in 2016.

By Sam Bishop

When Alan Straub’s older brother turned 16, he wanted a car. He found three for sale at a nearby police impound lot in Pittsburg, a small town in central California. None worked.

The brothers didn’t let that stop them. 

Their uncle had an unused shop on the family’s 10-acre walnut farm with two drive-over pits for working on vehicles. So they got a tow strap and, using their mother’s car, Straub’s brother drove them to the impound lot.

One at a time, Straub and his brother hooked the strap to the dead cars, checked their brakes and headed home.

“He towed me, and I drove the towed cars back to our shop,” Straub said. “I was 12.”

His brother then got to work. “He put one good car together out of three,” Straub said. Inspired by such ingenuity and the left-over spare parts, Straub soon was working on his own vehicle.

“There was this bare ’37 Chevrolet frame sitting there, and the engine was all torn apart,” he recalled. “I said [to my brother], ‘Could I have the rest of this stuff?’ He says ‘Yeah.’”

So Straub put together an engine and found a Roadster body to attach to the frame. “And that was my car,” he said. “I drove it to my friend’s place, up and down the street, down the railroad tracks. I used to race my brother out in the orchard with it."

'Building stuff’

Straub has been creating things ever since. After a successful career, he’s now helping build up the civil engineering program at UAF, from which he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1966.

Straub’s achievements and generosity have earned him the 2025 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the UAF Alumni Association.

With annual donations of about $100,000 starting six years ago, Straub has created a scholarship, contributed to the annual ice arch construction effort on campus and supported the steel bridge competition team. But the biggest share has gone toward enhancing the civil engineering testing lab, he said.

That generosity has been sparked by Straub’s memories of the support he received from the engineering college faculty members in the 1960s.

“By the time I started going to school there, I was several years older than most of the students, and I’d had a lot of experience building stuff,” he said.

So a professor put him to work on creating two small laboratories that would simulate cold weather — “down to minus 100,” he recalled.

When Straub first applied to the college, he said, the head of the civil engineering program looked at his records and said “You’re just kind of average, aren’t you?” But when he graduated, the college named him its outstanding student.

“There were smarter guys than me, but they just liked the way I did things,” Straub said.

One of the things Straub did that graduation year was create the first ice arch on campus. The three-legged, 40-foot-long arch rose 15 feet above the center of Cornerstone Plaza.

Initially, Straub and fellow student Mark Fryer ’66, ’67 had planned to spray wooden forms with layers of water in the cold to create the ice.

A warming trend changed the plan. They packed the forms with wet snow instead.

“There was no rebar or anything in it — just packed, frozen snow,” Straub said.

When they finished, they removed the forms and hung up a seat loaded with a few hundred pounds. The arch held.

“Then we got Miss Alaska to come sit on it,” he said.

An interest in bridges

Straub arrived in Fairbanks not to attend college but to work as a mechanic for A&B Auto Sales at the corner of Cushman Street and Airport Way. He had attended junior college in Modesto, California, but was working as a mechanic in Stockton. A co-worker mentioned that he’d heard A&B needed someone.

Straub got the job, so he and his then-wife, Linda, bought a station wagon and drove to Fairbanks.

After arriving, “I saw this school up on the hill and I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve got to go sign up,’” he said.

During subsequent summers in college, Straub worked on surveying the new road being built to Chena Hot Springs. Professor Bill Mendenhall, who served with the civil engineering faculty from 1955 to 2005, taught him that skill.

Straub developed a particular interest in bridges. So after graduation, he continued work for the state, helping to build bridges along Chena Hot Springs Road and across the Tanana River at Nenana.

Shortly thereafter, the couple returned to California, where Straub earned a master’s in engineering at Stanford University in 1968.

That launched a career that sent him across the country. He helped build jet hangars in Los Angeles, the Aloha Stadium in Hawaii and the tallest bridge in California, which crosses 730 feet above the North Fork of the American River. He even returned to Alaska to help build the docks at Valdez, where tankers began taking on Prudhoe Bay oil in 1977.

“I’ve got a little vessel of oil with my name on it that came through the pipeline in the first barrel that arrived in Valdez,” he said.

In 1980, Straub joined two former co-workers as an owner of Christie Constructors in Richmond, California. He worked with the company until retiring in 2001.

‘Can’t forget that’

Just before retirement, Straub took up auto racing. He set a class record with his Porsche GT3 at a track in California.

“Even for an old guy, I could drive,” he quipped.

He also remarried in the 1990s, and he and his wife, Rosemary, took up RV travel around the country before she passed away in 2018.

Driving remains a passion — he conducted a recent interview from his RV while on the road in Oregon with his partner, Gloria Piscoran, whom he had dated in high school. Their first date as adults was a surprise road tour in his latest Porsche, an SUV-style Macan. “The suspension is awesome on it,” he said. “It’s fun to drive”.

They also drove the RV up the Alaska Highway in 2022 and attended the summer Nanook Rendezvous reunion in Fairbanks.

Straub, who now lives in Point Richmond on San Francisco Bay, said he hopes to attend the Rendezvous again this year to accept the Distinguished Alumnus Award. That’s because UAF and the people who helped him here continue to evoke fond memories, even almost 60 years after graduation.

“They just looked after me,” he said, “and I can’t forget that.”

Sam Bishop is a writer and editor with UAF University Relations.