Digital Bob Archive

Richard G. Willoughby, a resident of Juneau for more than 20 years, was a memorable man. He was frequently known as \"Uncle Dick,\" and even more often as \"The Professor.\" The fact that he was memorable is not to say that he was a civic leader or an outstanding citizen, as that term is generally understood. Willoughby's name never appeared as a member of the street committee, or the one to raise funds for the Fourth of July. On the other hand, neither did it show up on the sometime lengthy list of those who had been siwashed for being nuisance drunks.

But he was sufficiently memorable that, when the City Council in 1913 decided to build a new street northward along the beach from the foot of Main Street, the name Willoughby Avenue was chosen although Uncle Dick had been dead for a dozen years.

A rational for that choice was the fact that Willoughby had lived for many years in a cabin at the toe of the hill, where the city parking lot is today. But a main reason that Willoughby's place of residence was remembered, after a dozen years, was that he had been one of the town's more colorful characters. He had, in fact, worked hard at being colorful.

A man who had known Willoughby for many years was Emery Valentine, a long time mayor of Juneau. In a 1913 interview, Valentine said: \"Dick had an idea he was a show man, and indeed he was a rather clever sleight-of-hand artist and could play the banjo and the violin. He had some puzzle rings and other trick apparatus with which he could entertain a crowd.\"

He was also something of a ventriloquist, according to the late Frederick \"Fritz\" Willard who grew up in Juneau where his parents operated the Presbyterian Mission on Fifth Street. Fritz said that Willoughby had whittled out a crude figure of a man's head and shoulders. It was four or five inches high and he had glued a piece of deer skin, hair on, under the figure's nose for a mustache. The mustache hung down enough to cover the mouth so that it was impossible to see whether or not the mouth moved as the dummy \"talked.\"

Willoughby didn't use the dummy in his shows. Fritz thought that he probably didn't have enough skills as a ventriloquist to impress that kind of audience. But he did use it while on his prospecting trips. On those trips, which took him all over the northern part of Southeastern Alaska, he more often than not traveled by dugout canoe with a Native crew.

At the end of a day's travel, when they went ashore to make camp for the night. Willoughby would place his dummy on the bow of the canoe and talk to it. And the dummy talked to him, giving directions as to what each man was to do - this one to unload the canoe, another to set up the tents, a third to chop wood, and so forth. Apparently the dummy's orders were obeyed without question.

Willoughby was ingenious at dreaming up stunts and hoaxes. The most widely known of these was \"The Silent City,\" but that will have to wait for another issue.