This endowment was created to support and further the legacy of Jack and Sasha Calvin through education and other means. Funds may be used for research, workshops, activities, and to hire young students for work within the Sitka Science Center to help further their interests in marine science.
Jack and Sasha Calvin were extremely special and important to the wild places of Southeast Alaska and played an important role in the history of science. As a teenager in the early 1900s, he sailed from San Fransisco Bay to Bristol Bay and fell in love with the Alaskan landscape. Educated at University of Washington and a writing teacher at Stanford University, Jack had a real appreciation for the written word. Sasha Kashavaroff grew up in Southeast Alaska in a prominent Russian Orthodox family that valued education. Sasha was known as being curious, vivacious, and fun loving.
Jack and Sasha met through their friends Ed Ricketts who had a marine specimen collection business, John Steinbeck, the renowned author and Joseph Campbell, American mythologist. They met in Pacfic Grove in the 1930s. For their honeymoon, they canoed in a Willitz brothers canoe from Tacoma to Juneau, an adventure that Jack memorialized in a 1933 National Geographic article.
Sasha and Jack invited Joseph Campbell and Ed Ricketts up to Sitka soon after that to go on a specimen collecting trip that resulted in a book called Between Pacific Tides, Stanford University Press’ best selling book of all time, which is considered by many to be the first book of modern marine ecology.
Jack went on to form the Sitka Conservation Society, the first grass roots environmental organization in Alaska and he went on to become an instrumental player in the formation of West Chichacoff Wilderness Area, the first grassroots-based wilderness area created on federal lands in the nation.
Jack and Sasha’s grandchildren donated their honeymoon canoe to the Science Center where it sits on display in the Calvin classroom.
To Donate
Donate by credit card using the link below or make your checks payable to: Juneau Community Foundation, 350 North Franklin Street, Suite 4, Juneau, Alaska 99801. Please call us at 907-523-5450, or email info@juneaucf.org for information on donating stock, wiring funds, establishing a Fund, or naming the Juneau Community Foundation in your will as a designated beneficiary.
