Have Pen, Will Travel
Welcome. Enjoy the adventures & misadventures of author Hank Nuwer with photos by wife Gosia Nuwer. Scroll down to very bottom of this main page for archived stories.
Bio: Hank Nuwer is the 2023 Alaska Columnist of Year and 2021 Ohio SPJ Columnist of the Year. His current books in print are Hazing: Destroying Young Lives, Wrongs of Passage and The Hazing Reader (Indiana University Press).
Hank pens weekly columns for the Cordova (AK) Daily Times and. teaches as an adjunct at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Contact UAF Professor Hank Nuwer at Hjnuwer@Alaska.edu
A leading international expert on hazing in youth and adult groups, Hank Nuwer was honored to be named an “Alaska Champion” by the Alaska Children’s Trust in 2024. He has appeared as an actor in eight plays in Fairbanks in the last 18 months, including Ed in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Prince Escalus in Romeo and Juliet, and Kris Kringle in The Miracle on 34th Street. His database on hazing deaths has been cited by many scholars and included in numerous scholarly publications and doctoral dissertations.
Gosia Nuwer photographs Alaska and its wildlife. She and Hank reside in Fairbanks, Alaska, with 20 acres in remote Alaska. She hold a master’s degree in Economics. She and her family hail from Warsaw Poland, and she is a U.S. citizen.
Hank Nuwer stories
Alaska’s Sid Charles: Back When Newsmakers Were Characters
By Hank Nuwer When Ketchikan Daily News publisher Sid D. Charles died in 1959, he had just taken a few weeks off for illness. Prior to that, he was a working stiff in newspapers from a youth nearly to his last trademark briar pipe puff at age 88. He hailed...
How they celebrated New Year’s in rural Alaska
The First Masquerade Balls By Hank Nuwer Masquerade Balls were about the most popular social event of the year in pioneer Cordova. Guests braved winds, snows, and icy trails to gather for food, drink and comradeship. The first ball was put on in 1912 by the Eagles...
This Story Passed for News in 1951
Humor by Hank Nuwer Now I know that the subject of transplanting fish and game into area where they previously never existed is a serious topic. It’s discussed in university wildlife management classes, Alaska Department of Fish and Wildlife...
Death of a Cordova Merchant and Banker
by Hank Nuwer Samuel Blum in his time was one of the wealthiest Alaskan pioneers, making his money primarily as a mercantile store owner, banker and investor. A devout Jew, he earned statewide respect as a philanthropist. Born and educated in San Francisco, Blum...
An Unlikely (But True) Love Story
From the Cordova Times pf November 29, 2024 My wife Gosia and I enjoyed two Thanksgiving meals this week. Only a few days remain before our community theater Christmas comedy opens. So, the cast members came over to our kitchen last Sunday to run lines and scarf...
Setting a writing agenda
One essay project is a memoir on a savage attack on me with a baseball bat at Cheektowaga Town Park by a street hoodlum named Dale August Fechter. . .’m also writing about multiple disgraced priests at Buffalo’s Diocesan Preparatory seminary, again as a memoir.
General Willis P. Richardson: From Alaska Road Builder to Commander in Siberia
By Hank Nuwer Alaskans and Alaskan visitors by automobile evermore owe a debt to General Wilds Preston Richardson for building the roads more traveled. A native Texan, he was born March 20, 1861, three weeks before Confederate troops fired the first shot of...
Nevada Artist Robert Cole Caples
Robert Cole Caples is an enigmatic man. Seldom photographed, a lover of privacy: he became one of Nevada’s best-loved artists. By Hank Nuwer (1973) Much of the information available on Caples exists preserved in an intriguing essay by writer Walter Van Tilburg Clark...
EPA must determine extent of problem
By HANK NUWER, It’s a story as old as the story of human progress. A new discovery or innovation heralded for its efficacy is suspected to have harmful effects that require ingenuity on the part of researchers to find an antidote to the unintended causes. I consider...