Alaskan art and Clark County aviation lore come together Saturday in a 1 p.m. presentation at Fort Vancouver’s Visitor Center.
The link is Lois Chichinoff Thadei, a former bush pilot and student of Wally Olson, who was a Clark County aviation icon for decades.
Thadei, who now operates an art studio in Olympia, will discuss both career tracks at the Visitor Center, 1501 E. Evergreen Blvd., in the northeast portion of Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Her lecture is at 2 p.m.
Heritage played a key role in her art career; Thadei was born into a Tlingit and Haida community in southeast Alaska.
Thadei already was a pilot — she and a partner operated an air service based in Ketchikan — when she met Olson at Evergreen Airport.
“I got a seaplane rating in Ketchikan. I thought it would be good to get a wheel rating, to land on the ground.”
She got the opportunity during their annual winter hiatus.
“We’d shut the air service down the day after New Year’s. We always came south in the winter,” she said.
As Thadei sought to expand her flying skills, “I asked around. Someone mentioned Evergreen Field and Wally Olson.”
She showed up in 1975 or so and liked what she saw.
“It was an airport with no controls, and I was accustomed to very uncontrolled air space. Wally had a tail-dragger” that gave her experience in flying an aircraft with landing gear.
There was a bigger difference than you might expect, particularly with what Thadei called a “fuss-pot” float plane she’d been flying in Alaska.
“It never liked to start. It was a nuisance to rev up. Float planes don’t have brakes. You unhook it from the dock and you’re at the mercy of the wind and the current. I’m drifting around with a big tail and wings sticking out on three sides, trying hard not to get blown into things. I was thinking it would be good to get rid of that thing before it killed me.”
Olson, who died in 1997, also gave Thadei a chance to do some shop work.
“I got really interested in it. I like to build things. Wally was always tinkering with something back in the hangar. He didn’t stop me when I picked up some tools. It became easier and more enjoyable.”
That knack for hands-on work shows up in Thadei’s art. Some of her work will be on display at the event, which is presented by the nonprofit Friends of Fort Vancouver and the National Park Service.
“I’m involved in glass and jewelry now,” she said, thanks to “abundant and dependable electricity.”
Her basketry work, however, reflects traditional materials and methods.
“Wild beach grass has been used for thousands of years. It’s used for everything.”
In one nod to modernity, she said, “I use Irish linen sometimes.”
Like the wild beach grass, it’s a fabric based on plant fibers that benefit from a bit more processing.
“We take one stem of grass” — usually about 2 feet long, she said — “and split it into however many pieces we needed. The Irish found a way to take plants and process them and wind them on spools.”
Tradition also influences techniques and patterns.
“There are only so many ways to twiddle a thread,” she said, “and every culture has its preferred way.”