Five cars and more than 1.5 million miles for Camano Island man

Allen Edenso chuckled when he read my column about how my one-owner Toyota Corolla had racked 200,000 miles on the odometer.

He let me know he’s driven five cars more than 300,000 miles commuting to work from his home on Camano Island.

I learned how miles accumulate when I lived

on the Island. It was seven miles from our house at Utsalady Point to Stanwood. With three children, our car quickly added miles going to school and sporting events, not to mention shopping.

Edenso commuted to jobs that were sometimes hours from home. He started his heavy equipment career in Alaska before moving south.

Edenso, a member of the Tlinget and Haida tribes, was born in Craig, Alaska.

“My grandfather was named George Washington Edenso,” he said. “I remember his big hands. He was really friendly and outspoken.”

His grandfather was into education, said Edenso, 68. The family settled in Ketchikan because there was a high school there. Craig only had a grade school.

“Wow, there were hotels and cars in Ketchikan,” Edenso said.

He went commercial fishing with his father, Victor, and worked at night cleaning float planes for Ellis Airlines, which later became Alaska Airlines.

“I was hired right out of high school in 1960,” Edenso said. “We took planes out of the water by crane.”

Those float planes were indispensable. They hauled supplies to logging towns and landed on old World War II landing strips.

While Edenso worked in the auto shop at a pulp mill, he learned all about equipment and motors. He married his wife, Louan, in 1962 in Alaska. Edenso custom ordered a 1966 Oldsmobile 442. They picked up the beauty in a Renton showroom, he said.

It had a white leather interior and cost $3,500, which he paid in cash.

“It was displayed on a showroom pedestal. Lots of people were gazing at the spectacular car. It had our Alaska plates on it.”

It was sold a year and a half later so Edenso could go to a trade school in Idaho.

The couple had two sons, Scott and Craig. He worked on the Trans Alaska Pipeline System at the Arctic Circle for several years.

“They were throwing money at us,” Edenso said. “But we worked around the clock.”

He unloaded airplanes carrying supplies for work camps and their thousands of residents. Sometimes there would be 20 airplanes circling the field waiting to land, he said. The temperature dipped to 67 degrees with wind blowing 100 miles per hour.

In that kind of weather, “metal turns brittle,” he said. “It breaks like glass.”

In 1977 the family moved to Camano Island and Edenso began long commutes to job sites.

“I sometimes drove 100 miles one way,” he said. “That was nothing.”

He worked at Seattle sports stadiums, at Pier 5 in Seattle and at the top of Snoqualmie Pass.

Edenso said he drove a 1972 wagon until it had 451,000 miles on the odometer; a 1974 Ford Maverick to 318,000 miles; a 1979 Dodge Omni past 335,000 miles; and a 1993 Dodge Shadow to more than 312,000 miles.

Not only did he know how to maintain and rebuild engines, Edenso said, he learned who to trust to do work on cars around the Camano and Stanwood areas.

One secret, he said, was using an oil additive called Slick 50. It’s controversial. The FTC chided Quaker State in 1996 for advertising claims.

But Slick 50 is still on the market.

“Customers who know about it come in looking for it,” said Ryan Knudson, manager of Stilly Auto Parts in Stanwood. “I sell it.”

Knudson doesn’t use the product anymore because he drives a diesel, he said.

One of Edenso’s cars, the 1972 station wagon, was given to his niece after Edenso drove it for 31 years. He is retired from Operating Engineers Local 302. Edenso hunts and walks as many as eight miles a day for good health.

When he used to leave his island home at 4 a.m. to get to construction sites, Edenso listened to tapes with tunes by George Jones and Waylon Jennings. Old-time country music entertained Edenso through thousands of work miles.

“If my commute was under an hour, what a bonus,” he said.

Kristi O’Harran: 425-339-3451; oharran@heraldnet.com.