Alaskan History
In 1933, Ray Mala hired Melbourne Spurr to create a new set of headshots for him. This is one of the images from that photo shoot. The Mala family selected this photograph to represent Ray Mala on Wikipedia. [Credit: "The Mala Collection" University of Alaska, Anchorage]
Ray Mala An Alaskan film star, who also filmed a historic mushing event for Pathe News The Alaskan Native who would become a Hollywood film star, cameraman and director, Ray Mala was born two days after Christmas in the small gold mining town of Candle, 200 miles north of Nome, on December 27th, 1906. Named Ray Agnaqsiaq Wise, his mother was an unusually tall and strikingly beautiful Inupiat Eskimo named Karenak Ellen “Casina” Armstrong, and his father, Bill Wise, was a successful and well-liked trader who did not meet his son until many years later, in California. Ray’s mother sent him to the Quaker school in Kotzebue where Ray learned to read and write and adopt the white man’s social graces. Meanwhile his maternal grandmother, Nancy Armstrong, also taught young Ray about the subsistence lifestyle, and he became an accomplished outdoorsman, skilled with the spear and bow and arrow. A natural athelete comfortably proficient in both worlds, young Ray Mala was destined for great things from a young age. In the spring of 1920, at only fourteen years of age and with fifteen dollars in his pocket, Ray made his way to the largest town in western Alaska, the seacoast city of Nome, and secured a job as a cook on the ship Silver Wave, bound for Seattle. He met an arctic explorer and filmmaker, Captain
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