I just found out about some sad news for any Alaskans or expatriates: well-known panhandler Floyd died April 7, 2004.
Anchorage drivers have one less reason to smile. Floyd is dead.
For more than two decades, Floyd Kaleak, a mentally impaired panhandler with a wide smile, danced and waved at passing cars from street corners all over town. Some considered him a nuisance. Others called him an ambassador of good vibes, an Anchorage icon.
Wednesday morning, one of his caregivers found Kaleak dead, still seated in front of his television in the tidy white house he rented off East Third Avenue and Eagle Street. Kaleak, 45, appeared to have died of natural causes, Anchorage police said.
The news touched many at police headquarters, said spokesman Ron McGee. Though they had responded to dozens of calls involving Kaleak over the years, “I think officers here at APD felt some affection for Floyd,” he said. “Someone here said he contributed to Anchorage in the only way he could. He made his mark.”
Anyone who lived in Anchorage for any length of time new of Floyd. You could see him all over town on any given day, standing on a street corner — I most often picture him in my mind at the corner of Northern Lights and Minnesota — bouncing up and down, waving at everyone who drove by, always with a bright, cheerful smile on his face. As long as I can remember living in Anchorage, he was as much a fixture of the city as anything else.
At one point, I heard a story about Floyd that may be something of an Anchorage urban legend, as it is somewhat (though not entirely) contradicted by some of the details of the news story, but it’s stuck with me for a long time as a shining example that no matter what, limitations are only limitations if we allow them to be.
Floyd was somewhat mentally retarded — not enough so that he needed to be confined or looked after in an institution, but enough that holding down a job wasn’t a realistic possibility for him. Because of this, he survived on the generosity of strangers, panhandling and collecting change from drivers and passersby as he danced and waved.
At one point, the police had to tell him that panhandling was illegal, and that he couldn’t do it anymore. Since this was how he lived, though, they told him that you could get a “panhandler’s license”: a legal necessity generally used by people who participate in Anchorage’s annual Renaissance Faire as beggars so that they can keep any tokens tossed to them by fairgoers. Floyd, doing what he could to stay out of trouble, saved enough of the money he collected that he was able to go to the city and get a panhandler’s license so that he could legally support himself in the only way he was able to.
As it turns out, the story itself may be only partially true. The news story mentions that Floyd “got a state business license for his panhandling activities. It was never valid, but it made Kaleak something of a folk hero among the city’s street people….” Either way, valid or not, it wasn’t just the street people that that license impressed.
Goodbye, Floyd. Keep on dancing.
iTunes: “Heavy Weather” by Caia from the album Isola D’Amore (2003, 5:06).
