Michael O’Callaghan/mayormikeoc.com

One of Anchorage’s most unforgettable characters died in Portland on Wednesday when he was struck by a Max Light Rail train.

Eighty-one-year-old Michael O’Callaghan was one of those rare do-gooders who walked the walk far more than he talked the talk. A man of little means, he did so much for so many.

The Anchorage Daily News in 1987 ran a headline that labeled him “Alaska’s hero.”

The then 43-year-old O’Callaghan was already at an age that led Daily News reporter Debbie McKinney to describe him as someone who should have matured into a “yuppie along with other aging hippies who’ve decided oyster shooters and self-improvement seminars are more gratifying than trying to save the world. But O’Callaghan’s social consciousness has withstood all cultural assaults. It never stopped bothering him that people were going hungry.”

And it never would.

O’Callaghan became famous in Anchorage for convincing grocery stores to give him the perfectly edible food they were throwing out: Fruit and vegetables too unattractive to sell, leaky milk cartons, squished bread, loose grapes, salad-bar leftovers and more.

He used the food that would have gone to waste to create a food network that sent food to nearly a dozen nonprofit agencies. In 1986 alone, it was estimated that the network distributed about 450,000 pounds. McKinney calculated that was enough to provide two meals for every person then living in the state’s largest city.

When Newsweek magazine in 1987 tallied “unsung heroes” in 50 states, O’Callagahan took Alaska’s place on the list. His response, McKinney wrote, was simple:

“Whatever.”

O’Callaghan was, at the time, supporting his family in part by dumpster diving, raiding the Anchorage dump for recyclable materials and working odd jobs – landscaper, fishing guide, snow shoveler – while his wife, Lydia, worked part-time as a graphic artist and computer consultant, and home-schooled two of their four children.

Having met in Portland in the early 1970s, they split up in Anchorage around 2010. Lydia stayed in Alaska, Michael went back to Portland, where he grew up, and took to living on the street to try to help the homeless.

He ran for mayor of the city last year on a pledge to “advance ideas…that will see Portland safer, cheaper and everyone housed.” He came in 10th among the 20 candidates on the ballot.

Alaska legacy

In Anchorage, he’d left behind a rich history.

When O’Callaghan first popped up as a candidate for Portland’s mayor, Alaska historian David Reamer remembered the former Alaskan as someone who was “for several decades…one of Anchorage’s most colorful activists and political gadflies. His causes were myriad and wide-ranging.”

“With him now in Portland,” Reamer went on to ask, “is there anyone left in Anchorage who combines his mixture of humanism, flair for the dramatic and quixotic inclinations?

“When described simply, his causes are always noble, whether peace on earth, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, protecting wildlife, addressing pollution or something as prosaic and useful as bicycle access. What made him a memorable character was how he went about advocating for those causes. To this day, he continues to display a penchant for the outrageous, a tenacious willingness to brain himself against the walls of bureaucracy and a gift for the colorful quote. The latter trait made him a media darling.”

O’Callagahan was a media darling mainly because he was impossible to ignore.

In the late 1990s, he went on a 48-day hunger strike to protest a state decision to allow commercial fishermen to strip valuable roe from pink salmon and dump the then-worthless carcasses.

When that didn’t work, he sued Alaska Commissioner of Fish and Game Frank Rue, arguing that Rue had permitted roe stripping in violation of a state law against wasting fish and demanded salmon carcasses be saved for distribution to feed the needy.

Though he was not a lawyer, he acted as one in that case, which ended up going all the way to the Alaska Supreme Court. O’Callaghan lost there, but the state suffered a serious black-eye.

The Supreme Court criticized the state’s massive, industrial-scale hatchery program that led to a tripling of salmon numbers and the subsequent collapse of the salmon market.

“…Hatchery fish comprised a greater percentage of available fish, (and) market prices for some species of salmon have dramatically declined,” the justices wrote. “Especially depressed are the markets for pink and chum salmon. The Department of Fish and Game (the Department) and salmon hatchery operators thus claim that roe stripping, the practice challenged in this appeal, is necessary to the economic survival of both individual hatcheries and the entire PNP (private-non-profit) program.

“Although the practice was traditionally disfavored, increases in the number of hatchery chum and pink salmon and corresponding decreases in market value for these fish, together with increasing value of caviar, have made roe stripping more attractive.

“…In recent years, the harvests of chum and pink salmon have been so large that hatchery owners claim they have been unable to sell all of their salmon. Thus, faced with unmarketable salmon filled with lucrative eggs, hatchery operators find that their best economic option is to roe strip.”

The state argued that, by law, the Commissioner of Fish and Game had broad latitude to alter state regulations to do whatever necessary to help hatchery owners ensure the “maximum and wise use of the [salmon] resource.”

“We believe that the question presented is both close and difficult,” the justices wrote and then rationalized Rue’s action as legal because he “only permitted roe stripping where there are no other practical permitted uses of the carcass.”

O’Callaghan thus lost the legal battle, but he won the bigger war. The state took so much heat for Rue’s decision that roe-stripping died. It is now a thing of the past.

Many admirers

Tributes to O’Callaghan have been piling up on his Facebook page since his death.

“He was a man who served others and lived his convictions,” long-time Alaskan Hal White wrote there. “Gone too soon.”

“Michael O’Callaghan was a humanitarian icon,” observed Anchorage musician Shane Russell. “He showed compassion to everyone and if we could just carry an ounce of his courage and love with us, the world would be a lot better. Love you brother.”

Anchorage’s Duke Russell remembered O’Callaghan from when they worked on a municipally funded free-bike lending program in Anchorage at the end of the 1970s. It was a precursor to the e-bike sharing programs now operating in many major U.S. cities.

The Anchorage operation ended because back in the ’70s and ’80s there was no way to satellite track the bikes, and as a result many of them disappeared.

O’Callagahan was in many ways ahead of his time.

With concerns about car exhausts polluting the Anchorage air in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he floated the idea of a toll to enter Anchorage.

“Why don’t you put a booth out at the Knik River and charge $1 to come to the Anchorage zoo,” he told the now-defunct Anchorage Times. “It’s a buck to get in. Free to get out.”

A congestion pricing program now in place in New York City is nothing but a copy of O’Callaghan’s decades-old idea. 

But probably the most notable thing about O’Callaghan was that his passion never waned with age.

“When Mike moved to Portland, he helped start the Right to Dream homeless camp and garnered headlines when he represented himself in a lawsuit against the city over the camping ordinance,” Jonathan Maus wrote on the BikePortland website. 

“And he showed no signs of slowing down, as he ran an inspiring campaign for Portland Mayor just last year.”

Maus was himself struggling to figure out how O’Callaghan ended up dead.

“It’s still unclear what exactly happened before Mike was struck and killed,” Maus wrote. “He lived along the Springwater Corridor, very close to the rail crossing at SE 8th and Division, and had likely made it across that same intersection countless times without any problems.”

What is known is that he went around a crossing gate and ended up in front of a train in the early afternoon at an intersection where the road crossed two sets of parallel tracks.

“This double-threat posed by two separate sets of tracks has been a concern of TriMet (the Portland transit authority) ever since the Orange Line opened,” BikePortland said in its original report on an unnamed cyclist being struck and killed by a train.

“When service first began on the line in 2015, TriMet worked with Portland Police on targeted enforcement of cyclists crossing the tracks. Where the bike path crosses the tracks, TriMet installed special swing gates and caution signs that state, ‘Look Both Ways.’

“With four sets of tracks, it’s very possible this bike rider saw one train clear the intersection and believed it was safe to cross – only to be hit by a train they never saw.

“Another issue at this location is the frequency and duration of train crossings. These crossings often lead to bicycle riders becoming impatient and going around barriers, or in some cases, hopping over freight trains as they pass. The issue is so acute that local policymakers have sought federal grants to study it and find a solution. With so much attention on the crossing delays and related safety issues, this fatality is likely to spur even more conversations about how to rebuild these crossings to make them more compatible with urban traffic.”

It would be a fitting, albeit ironic, end to O’Callaghan’s life if his death led to the troublesome intersection finally getting fixed, given the biggest complaints about the crossing have come from drivers of motor vehicles sometimes stuck for up to an hour waiting for trains to move, according to Portland media reports.

Both cyclists and pedestrians impatient with waiting so long have been reported as seen crawling over trains stalled in the middle of the intersection. A Portland journalist in 2017 shot video of an entire group of cycle commuters portaging over one such stalled train.