Roy Peratrovich, Jr. 1934-2023

“Time is an enormous, long river, and I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it. My elders were the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to and every song they created and every poem that they laid down flows down to me. And if I take the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world. Bridges: from my time to your time, as my elders from their time to my time. And we all put into the river, and we let it go, and it flows away from us and away from us until it no longer has our name, our identity. It has its own utility, its own use, and people would take what they need and make it part of their lives.” ~Utah Phillips, Bridges

By: Aaron Unterreiner, PND Marketing Manager

Roy Peratrovich, Jr. was an engineer. He was an artist. He was Tlingit Indian, Raven Moeity. He was a husband, brother, father, and grandfather. He was a businessman. He was a pioneer. He was an author, a sculptor. He was a storyteller.

Roy was a man of many talents, chief among them his dignity, grace, humility, kindness, and wonderful sense of humor.

Roy Peratrovich, Jr. died Sunday evening, November 26, 2023. He was 89 years old. He is survived by his wife, Toby; his children, Mike (his wife, Barbara) and betsy (lowercase b); his two grandchildren and one great grandchild. Roy’s son Doug predeceased him. 

“With everything going on, he still had a good sense of humor, and he always tried to express appreciation,” Roy’s daughter, betsy Peratrovich, said after her dad’s passing following his long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. “He’d thank people for helping him, and even though he couldn’t straighten his fingers, he’d try and fist-bump the nurses and others assisting him. 

“My dad,” betsy said, “was such a good guy.”

Roy Peratrovich, Jr. was the P in PND Engineers, Inc. and the last surviving co-founder of the original Peratrovich & Nottingham, Inc. His dear friend and business partner, Dennis Nottingham, died in 2022 at age 84. Together, they founded PND in 1979. Two years later, Brent Drage – the D in PND – became a stockholder and principal engineer, facilitating the firm’s name change. Brent died in 1988.

Roy and Dennis met in Juneau, Alaska, in 1962. After graduating from Denver South High School in Colorado, then the University of Washington in 1957 with a civil engineering degree, Roy went to work for the City of Seattle, designing many of the municipality’s first bridges, overpasses, and interchanges. He returned to his home state in 1961 as the bridge design section squad leader for the Alaska Department of Highways. One year later, Dennis moved up from Montana and worked as a bridge engineer in Roy’s department at what is now known as the Alaska Department of Transportation & Public Facilities (DOT&PF).

“For those of us who are familiar with the opus of their work,” former PND Principal Engineer Jena Gilman said, “I don’t know how many bridge engineers in the world can boast to the number of bridges that those two guys did.”

The Alaska Innovators Hall of Fame credits Dennis with more than 300 bridge designs in Alaska, while Roy’s resume earned him a distinguished spot as one of 32 “Great American Civil Engineers” in a book authored by engineer Richard Weingardt and published by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 2005 that identified a select list of “Engineering Legends” from the past four centuries combined. Roy was the last living legend.

When Roy and Dennis first teamed up, Alaska was only three years removed from being a U.S. Territory; Alaska officially became the 49th state in 1959. Roy, Dennis, and the nascent Department of Highways were responsible not only for designing much of Alaska’s transportation infrastructure but for designing some of the state’s most iconic bridges in what proved to be an exemplary score of achievements.

Consider their career accomplishments from the 1960s and 1970s, many of which preceded computer programs to conveniently verify complicated design calculations:

• Cordova Ferry Transfer Bridge: design of the first modern, all-steel, all-welded orthotropic bridge in Alaska, replacing timber dolphins and setting a new marine engineering standard.
• Knik-Matanuska Vehicle Crossings: design of four steel plate girder vehicular bridges on the Glenn Highway, linking Anchorage to the Matanuska Valley and northern Alaska.
• John O’Connell Memorial Bridge: design of the state’s (arguably the country’s) first cable-stayed vehicular crossing; the 1,255-foot bridge crossing the Sitka Channel was designated an ASCE Alaska Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 2022.
• Hurricane Gulch Bridge: design of a 551-foot arch vehicular bridge on the Parks Highway crossing the canyon divide, 258 feet above Hurricane Creek.
• Gulkana River Bridge: design of a 400-foot tied-arch vehicular pipeline bridge on the Richardson Highway using steel piles driven into permafrost, instituting a new arctic engineering standard.
• Yukon River Bridge: design of a 2,297-foot-long vehicular bridge on the Dalton Highway, the longest bridge in Alaska at the time, featuring unprecedented aboveground twin oil and natural gas pipelines and believed to be the first bridge in the world to include modern seismic design.

Roy helped develop Alaska’s annual bridge inspection evaluation process, creating a rating system that cataloged existing conditions of the bridges and highways Alaska inherited from the federal government upon statehood. He also led the engineering studies and helped design the first municipal transportation systems for Anchorage and Fairbanks.

In 1988, Roy co-founded the Architects & Engineers Insurance Company (AEIC), the first architect- and engineer-owned insurance company in the nation. PND was AEIC’s first client.

Even some of their less-heralded bridge designs are beautiful in the eye of the beholder.

“Roy can’t take credit for the gorgeous glacier in the background of the bridge, but that (Brotherhood Bridge) is just one of the most beautiful bridges you can imagine,” Gilman said of the Juneau vehicular bridge that crosses the Mendenhall River with Mendenhall Glacier as its backdrop. Roy designed the bridge – and the 10 hand-crafted bronze medallions depicting the Eagle and Raven moieties of the Tlingit people adorning the bridge rail – in 1965 while working for the Department of Highways. It was named the Brotherhood Bridge to commemorate the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood, a pair of organizations founded 50 years earlier to fight racism against Alaska Native people. Roy’s parents served as grand presidents of each respective group. The bridge was replaced by DOT&PF five decades later to accommodate Juneau’s growing demand, and Roy was a guest of honor for the rededication in October 2015 as his former employer unveiled the new bridge with his bronze medallions occupying their old spot on the rail.

“Part of that is the scenery,” Gilman continued on the Brotherhood Bridge, “it’s so easy to express art through a bridge, and certainly Roy and Dennis expressed art through their bridges and bridge designs they worked on. The Hurricane Gulch bridge is gorgeous. The Sitka cable-stayed bridge is gorgeous. Even our funny little Kalama River Bridge down here in Washington, which was the first bridge we did out of the Washington office, is a pretty little bridge,” said Gilman, who acted as PND’s first office manager in Seattle when the company expanded its operations to the Pacific Northwest in the late 1980s. “I have a hero worship thing with Roy and Dennis, but it’s well deserved. They are heroes of the engineering profession, for sure.”

To fully appreciate the arc of Roy’s career, to build the bridge over a river of time between his elders, Roy’s story, and his kin, you must first understand his roots. Roy was born in 1934 in Klawock, Alaska, the oldest of three children to famous civil rights activists Roy Peratrovich, Sr. and Elizabeth (Wanamaker) Peratrovich. His family moved to Juneau in 1941 so his parents’ advocacy could reach a wider audience from the territorial capital.

The move paid immediate dividends. After struggling to find housing arrangements among the pervasive anti-Native zeitgeist of the early 1940s, the Peratroviches soon discovered that their three children wouldn’t be allowed to attend the all-white public schools, either, and would instead be relegated to the substandard government school in “The Indian Village” on the outskirts of town. After a persuasive face-to-face conversation with the school district superintendent, Elizabeth secured a spot for Roy to become the first Alaska Native student in Juneau’s public school system. 

Elizabeth was just getting started. Roy’s parents helped draft the original Alaska Anti-Discrimination Act, which failed to pass the predominantly white Alaska Territorial Legislature in 1943. If the “No Natives” signs were going to come down and equality for Alaska Native peoples realized, Roy’s parents knew they had to actively recruit Alaska Native individuals to run for office to get seats at the legislative table, and they knew they had to encourage Alaska Native individuals to vote in greater numbers if the bill was going to pass in the next legislative session two years later. So, they hit the campaign trail. By way of a Grumman Goose by air, boats by sea, and dog teams by ground, Elizabeth traveled across the state to push the plan forward.

Roy and his younger brother were left behind at an orphanage.

Annie Boochever, who authored “Fighter in Velvet Gloves” with Roy’s collaboration, a book published in 2019 about Elizabeth’s true story (and where much of this information can be attributed), said people are generally surprised by that fact on the Peratrovich timeline.

“I do presentations about the book, and a lot of people are really kind of shocked at that, but you have to understand: There was no daycare; things were a lot different then,” said Boochever, who recalled Roy’s recounting of the event while writing the book. “He was pretty terrified at first. He said he felt like, at the time, that both he and his brother understood that his parents were doing important work, and this is what they needed to do to support them, which is pretty amazing for a 9-year-old kid. But he was an amazing guy; he was an amazing kid and just comes from this incredible family.”

The sacrifices, of course, ultimately led to the historic passing of the Alaska Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945, with Elizabeth’s legendary testimony the coup de grâce of racial segregation in Alaska, delivering full and equal accommodations, facilities, and privileges to all citizens. Seventy years after the bill passed, Alaska designated February 16 as Elizabeth Peratrovich Day in perpetuity. In 2019, the same year Boochever’s book was released, Elizabeth became the first Tlingit Indian person enshrined in the National Native American Hall of Fame. One year later, the U.S. Mint released a $1 coin with Elizabeth’s likeness on one side of the commemorative Native American piece.

In memory of their momentous accomplishment on February 5, 1945, Roy sculpted a pair of bronze busts of his parents, both of which reside at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. The sculpture of his mother also permanently rests in the foyer at the Alaska State Capitol in Juneau. Roy’s “Flight of the Raven” statue, 10 feet tall with a 4-foot wingspan, is the centerpiece of Elizabeth & Roy Peratrovich Park in Downtown Anchorage. The self-described “futuristic totem pole” was dedicated in 2008 to honor his parents’ role in the bill’s passage.

“I had no idea that he was recognized that way,” said Boochever, who was familiar with Roy’s artwork but not his engineering exploits when she first befriended her book’s co-conspirator. “It’s just phenomenal, and all of the sculptures he did and the public installations around the state. He was just really remarkable. To have so many talents, he was just really remarkable.”

Boochever, who grew up in Juneau, said she wouldn’t have written Elizabeth’s story without the family’s blessings. When Roy agreed to help, the former Alaska educator learned a wealth of new information, including never-revealed family secrets, such as Elizabeth’s incredibly poignant birth story. She also discovered her childhood home was on Roy’s newspaper route.

“I’m so glad that I got to do that book with him,” Boochever said. “It was really an incredible experience. It was hard, even with Roy being my main person, because he was just a kid when all that happened. A lot of his recollections were from a kid’s perspective, as an adult looking back.”

Roy wrote the prologue for Boochever’s book, where he recalled his mother’s final remarks from her famous speech at the hearing:

“Alaskans of all ages, Native and non-Native, stood shoulder to shoulder, some on chairs. It was only the second time in the history of America that a bill to end discrimination had come up for an official vote, and the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 was still two decades away. Mom looked first to the gallery, then to the legislators behind their wooden desks. When she was confident she had everyone’s attention, she began to speak. This is the story of how my mother came to give a speech that helped Alaska lead all of America in the battle for civil rights.”

Roy was the first Alaska Native individual to earn a professional civil engineering license in the State of Alaska, “AK-CE-1100: I’m pretty proud of that one,” he said in 2019 while reminiscing about PND and its humble beginnings as the company celebrated its 40^th anniversary. His registration came in 1962, the year he met Dennis, still 17 years shy of the firm’s founding.

“I think of Roy and Dennis almost as one person,” said Gilman, one of PND’s first employees. “Dennis would be the left-brain type, and Roy would be the right-brain part of the partnership. Roy was so artistic, such a good speaker, he was a good writer – a really good writer. Dennis was a good writer, too. But, you know, Dennis was definitely more the genius engineer type. So, that’s how I thought of them, as left brain/right brain.”

Gilman was working for the U.S. Forest Service in Petersburg, Alaska, when she interviewed with Roy and Dennis at the Juneau airport in the spring of 1981, two years after PND was founded.

“Roy and Dennis gave me a time to meet them – at the bar, naturally,” Gilman said with a good laugh. “They sat me down and I thought they would interview me and ask me questions about my experiences at the Forest Service and the highway department in Washington, stuff like that, but they didn’t. They just sat there and told me about the story of them forming their company.

“They had just gotten this big job on Prince of Wales Island building a dock facility, and they needed somebody to be the resident engineer. So, that’s what they were looking at me for. … But they didn’t ask me any questions at all. They just sat there and told me about their background, the stuff they worked on, all those bridges that they built after the ’64 earthquake, the cable-stayed bridge in Sitka, all this cool stuff that they’re working on. So, at the end of the interview, they basically said, ‘Well, you’re hired if you want to come work for us.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll think about it.’”

Gilman also interviewed with two other competitors at the time and received offers, as well, including her dream job at Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton (TAMS) for more money than what PND was offering.

“As I thought about it on the plane ride back to Petersburg and then the next day or so in Petersburg, I thought, ‘Man, I really want to go to work for TAMS and go build dams all over the world, but those two guys were so interesting! I’ve gotta see how that story ends!’ So, I went to work for Dennis and Roy, and it changed the rest of my life. They just told a really good story.”

Gilman and Bill Gunderson were two of PND’s original employees. Gilman worked at PND for 22 years. Gunderson, who was hired in 1980, now works at PND as an on-call consultant.

“We worked hard, and we played hard, that’s for sure,” Gunderson said. “We got to work in places that most people only dreamed of. We got responsible-charge right out the gate; there was not this you have to work 5-10 years under the principal before you get to sign a document. You were expected to get out there and get your hands dirty right away and learn from that.

“They allowed guys like myself to basically keep their eyes open,” Gunderson said of Roy and Dennis. “When you came up with a need or idea, they just said go after it, think about it. … It was, ‘Take that idea as far as you can. That’s a good idea. I like that idea. That makes sense.’ It was a really creative atmosphere those first 10 years or so, and we had a lot of support to do that sort of thing.”

Gilman helped PND open its Seattle office in 1988.

Roy followed in 1991, then made his home in Gig Harbor, Washington, where he retired in 1999 at age 65 and founded Ravenworks Art Studio.

“We got this project to rebuild the Bell Street Pier complex on the downtown (Seattle) waterfront, part of it was for cruise ships,” said Gilman, recalling one of their early marquee projects. “It was also going to have a marina … and a rigid-thin wave barrier sitting on piles in deepwater to protect the marina that was adjacent to the cruise ship dock. Roy took a big part of the design. … On the outside of the wave barrier we had fenders so that the cruise ships could dock against the pier. Well, about three to four weeks ago, a barge got loose in Elliott Bay in a windstorm … and basically did a 90-degrees slam right into our Bell Street Pier wave barrier!”

Gilman first read the story in the newspaper, then immediately sought out the video footage from the November 2023 incident.

“I was sitting there watching that thing – I had provided the coastal engineering for the barrier – and it was like, *GULP! It hit our breakwater head on! As far as I know, at this point, it did very, very little damage. … Roy designed those fenders and how they attached to the wave barrier itself.

“PND, it was not an individual thing; it was a team effort. We always drew upon what each other knew. That was Roy’s design. That thing smashed into his design, and I thought, ‘Wow, that did really good!’ It was, again, another affirmation that by damn I wasn’t wrong about this guy; he was a really great engineer.” 

Gilman still lives in the Pacific Northwest. She remembers her time at PND fondly: “It was a pretty important 22 years.” She’s close to retirement now, but she said she still leans on the lessons learned and the wisdom gleaned from her late friends.

“It wasn’t just a job,” Gilman said. “Like I said, TAMS was a company I’d wanted to work for for a couple of years, offered me more money, and yet I couldn’t take it. I had to go see what Roy and Dennis were up to. It was more than the money. Particularly in those early years, I think we felt that we were just the greatest to be working with Roy and Dennis. We were working on these fantastic projects, mostly in Alaska at that point, but they were all high-profile port projects, bridge projects, foundation projects. All of us were attracted to it. If it had just been Dennis, I don’t think it would have been the same. If it had just been Roy, it wouldn’t have been the same. The combination of the two, and then they added Brent about the same time in 1981, and he certainly leavened that relationship out, too.”

There’s an age-old saying, betsy joked, “Never give a Tlingit a microphone.”

Roy loved telling stories. He was a storyteller through and through. He told stories through his art. He told stories through his children’s book, “Little Whale: A Story of the Last Tlingit War Canoe.” He told stories through his stamped engineering designs.

Gilman cherished those stories.

“Roy was probably one of the most well-developed, well-rounded people because of both his engineering side and his artistic side,” she said. “He was just brilliant at so many different things.”

One of those things included marketing, being the face of the franchise, the soundpiece willing and able to tell PND’s story.

“Roy was fun to take marketing, because he smiled and he talked. He liked doing that kind of thing,” Gilman said. “He was a warm person. It was easy to connect with Roy on different levels other than just engineering. He just had a magnetic personality.

“There are individual things that I can still think of today that I learned from Roy. One of them, and I think it was more of an instinctual thing I learned from Roy just watching him work from interviews, is you had to tell a story. … Roy knew how to frame things, how to say things, how to tell the story. He was really good at that. Maybe that’s a Tlingit thing, I don’t know. But it definitely was a Roy thing.”