This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.
Ken Hill opened Juneau Bike Doctor in 2018, but he’s been part of Juneau’s cycling scene for much longer. Hill wants to get as many people on bikes as possible and values giving back to the community. That includes supporting his favorite local performers from Juneau Drag as much as he can.
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This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Ken Hill: I’ve been involved in bike stuff, starting back in the late 80s when I moved to town and was just part of the bike community. Started out sweeping floors and changing tires.
Biking here, in general, it’s almost like the community is perfectly made for someone to be a cyclist or to use a bike for transportation. You know, from one point to the next is typically not very far.
One thing that we’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to do is we do trade-ins with bikes where somebody has an old bike that they’re not going to do anything with. We may not necessarily put the bike back on the floor. We’ve taken a number of those types of bikes that, during the fall, we have time to kind of refurbish and get them up and running, and we’ve used those to get people on bikes that maybe don’t have the wherewithal to find a bike.
We had a teacher from [Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School] who wanted to do something to help kids get back engaged with education. She’s a bike person, and we’re certainly bike people, and so we thought that we would do a special bike for them.
And then I thought, it’s cool to have one bike, but there’s a lot of need. There’s a lot of kids in schools that need a bike. So we kind of reached out to our audience and got a bunch of bikes that people donated to us.
And we were able to do — I think it was 17 bikes, is what we got, built up and donated through that program.
One girl received a bike, but, turns out she already had a bike. But she wanted to ride her bike with her mom, and mom didn’t have a bike, so that bike was, you know, transferred over to her mom. And so now we’ve got a family riding bikes together.
Then we had another young man who had a bike, but his best friend didn’t have a bike. And so now he’s got a riding buddy.
We work with groups like that — we work with the Juneau Drag crew, and do a lot with that group. NAMI does a Pride Outside event that we’ve been doing for, gosh, since the beginning.
This is where I get emotional. That group when — so when my wife and I started dating, it was totally not something that I was involved in at all. I mean, I had queer friends, I had friends that were performers, but I just didn’t feel like it was a place where I was welcome. And not that any of them wouldn’t be welcoming to me. It was just my own perception.
And I went to a show with a couple friends, and had just the time of my life. And I told my wife, I’m like, “Now, what do I do? I don’t want to just sit in the crowd,” because I’m not going to, you know — not everybody has a group that wants to go to every show, but I wanted to be in every show.
So I worked the door there for five or six years, every show. And then when we did the big Glitz programs, I gave myself a title: the head of VIP transportation and security. So when we have out of town guests come. And I just met the most amazing people.
They’ve been super welcoming to me, and there is kind of a non-traditional family, in a sense, with that group. And so I love them to death.