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A Life Set In Stone
By Margaret Friedenauer
Published December 4, 2006, in the Local News section of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
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Alec Turner doesn’t sit still. He never has. He has to be busy, making something, creating something, talking about making or creating something. If he’s not gesturing as he talks, he running his hands over slabs of granite, showing off the details and intricacies of each kind. Or polishing it for a monument. Or cutting the grainy, igneous rock that will become the center piece of someone’s kitchen.
The 41-year-old Fairbanksan owns Alaskan Granite, a cozy workshop with four employees that specializes in anything granite. Turner said his bread of butter of the business is countertops, but his repertoire keeps expanding. It now includes monuments, tabletops, vanities and fireplaces.
It began about five years ago when Turner was working as a gutter and siding contractor as a partner in Exterior Works. He said he was hanging siding on a new house on Chena Ridge when he looked through a window and saw a crew installing a granite countertop. The approachable and affable Turner walked up to the crew and stated talking granite. It perked his interest enough that he kept researching it, discovering that granite work is a booming business in the Lower 48. A little more research and he found that not only was there a market in Fairbanks, but at that time no other fabricators outside Anchorage. So he started Alaskan Granite.
“This just kind of fell into my lap,” he said at his workshop, showroom and office off Davis Road.
Countertops aside, Turner also began earning a reputation for larger monuments and memorials around town. He created the 400 pound jade memorial at the Fairbanks Police Station, a World War II memorial for the only soldier killed on U.S. soil on Adak, and did granite work on the Alaska-Siberia Lend-Lease Memorial that was unveiled this summer at Griffin Park. He’s currently working with Army officials to plan a monument for Alaska soldiers that have died overseas, including the 26 from the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team.
Juneau artists R.T. Wallen worked with Turner on the Lend-Lease memorial this summer. He said Turner’s positive attitude helped smooth over the glitches that can occur on any large project.
“In any project like this, there’s not blue print for it,” Wallen said. “You’re working on an original design and an original piece of art and there are going to be problems. He just has a good attitude for that.”
Turner said he likes the creativity of doing large monuments and being a local craftsman people can go to for those things. He uses the phrase “why not?” as an answer for many inquiries, which has led him to his ever-increasing list of products.
“You bring a boulder in here, want me to polish it put your name on it, I’ll do it,” he said.
He’s thinking of working with more Alaska jade, going as far to envision creating some sort of jade bathtub.
“Why not?” he said, when met with a questioning look at that suggestion.
The determination, creativity and perhaps a little thrill-seeking via granite is what pushed Turner to learn the ropes of the granite trade. He calls it an “elusive” business, one in which craftspeople keep some of their talent and techniques a close secret. He struggled to find people to coach him in the beginning, but gradually built up the skill on his own.
“You couldn’t hold me down to read a book,” he said. “But hold a stencil to stone, I can try that.”
He’s built the skill over the years by attending training and trade shows across the country and slowing upgrading from hand tools to a mechanized saw, edge shaper and polisher which also allows him to complete more projects. He fills up to 10 orders for countertops a month he said. Next year, he’s planning on moving the business to a new 6,700 square-foot building with a more spacious workshop and showroom.
But he can’t envision himself slowing down. He admits to occasionally sleeping at the shop or heading into work in the middle of the night when he can’t sleep. His own countertop is a slab of plywood in his house on Murphy Dome that he built.
“At least I have a sink,” he said.
He does have a piece of Juparana Colombo granite picked out for his countertop that he’ll install someday, he said.
Likewise, his father, Don Turner will have to wait for his own granite countertop, although he does have a granite table top and fireplace hearth Alec made for him. But Don, a retired geologist, is not complaining at his son’s success.
“I’m so proud of him as his father,” Don said. “People tell me what a great kid I raised, but it’s kind of a joke because he was out on his own at such a young age. He works more than any human being I know.”
Don said his son always liked to work with his hands and stay busy. Don remembers when the family was building their house on property off Ballaine Road. Don designed the house to sit on stilts, digging holes five-feet deep. Before placing the poles, Turner said dirt and rocks filled in the bottom of the holes.
“(Alec) was the only one that could get down there with his little yellow plastic bucket and scoop dirt out of the hole,” he said. “He was very much a part of the building of the house at age 6,” Don said.
Growing up, Don said his son always liked to stay busy and active, probably part of the reason that at age 16, Alec opted to go to work rather than stay in school. He had a friend who was working on the site of the Sophie Station construction and convinced the hiring boss he was 18. They didn’t find out his true age until a year and half later when he was a foreman.
“It was either go down the road of work and be a good citizen or go down the other road a lot of kids take,” he said.
In his early 20s, Turner said the Fairbanks job market was in a dry spell, so he moved to southern California to work in construction. A few years later he returned to Alaska and started crab fishing, a career he loved and stuck with for nearly eight years. In 1998, a wave crashed over the side of a boat, and slammed him against a steel door, injuring his shoulder. He decided his time had come to leave the business.
Turner came back to Fairbanks and found there was a high demand for siding contractors. That eventually led to that day on Chena Ridge when he spotted his first granite countertop.
Turner said he misses rough and tough life of fishing, which worked well for a single guy. But the work ethic of fishing carried over to his craftsman career. Now that he’s thinking of having a family at some point, he said he might settle down, but not slow down.
“To finally get a career that might be the career …” he said. “Yeah, I could do this the rest of my life.”
Staff writer Margaret Friedenauer may be reached at 459-7545 or mfriedenauer@newsminer.com.
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2421 Hill Rd; Fairbanks, Alaska