This week we’re hearing from Shawna Rudio in Unalaska. Rudio is a high school English teacher at Unalaska City School.
RUDIO: Well I actually moved up here because my “now” ex-husband got a job offer out here so we came out here. I remember my mom telling me, “You’ll be there a year or two tops.” And it was an adventure and it was definitely… when I came to Unalaska there was a real mystique about Dutch Harbor. I was always really curious about it. I always knew I wanted to come out here. And I’m glad I did. I’m just closing in on my 18th year out here, 18th year teaching out here.
We lived in Helena, MT, for a while, and my dad would take me to the auction, I think it was every Saturday, and I just was fascinated with what I saw, what I heard. And I was just looking at all that merchandise and just thinking, “Wow! Some lucky person gets to go home with some of that stuff.”
The nice thing about living in Unalaska, if you’re somebody that likes to talk and is not afraid to speak publicly, you get a lot of people that are saying, “Hey. Would you auction for us at our next fundraiser?” And so, I started doing that, and found out that I really enjoyed it. And there are a couple of other people in town who do it, and I really enjoy working with them.
I had the opportunity, two summers ago, to take an auctioneering class at the Western College of Auctioneering in Billings, MT. Really not sleeping because I was running numbers up and down, backwards and forwards. All kinds of tongue-twisters. (She goes on to perform a pretty unintelligible tongue twister) Obviously I’m out of practice there.
I’ve always had eclectic interests and I definitely am a firm believer in… if you’re interested in something you should pursue it. You know I yodel, so that sort of goes into it a little bit. Anything you can do to sort of mess around with your voice is fun.
(She proceeds to yodel.) Let me see if I can get a good run here… (continues to yodel)
Wesley Early covers Anchorage life and city politics for Alaska Public Media. Reach him at wearly@alaskapublic.org and follow him on X at @wesley_early. Read more about Wesley here.
Zoe Sobel is a reporter with Alaska's Energy Desk based in Unalaska. As a high schooler in Portland, Maine, Zoë Sobel got her first taste of public radio at NPR’s easternmost station. From there, she moved to Boston where she studied at Wellesley College and worked at WBUR, covering sports for Only A Game and the trial of convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
