Dave Richardson and his new book, Shamrocks on the Tanana: Richard Geoghegan's Alaska

Dave Richardson prefaces his new book, Shamrocks on the Tanana: Richard Geoghegan’s Alaska, saying, “When I was a small boy growing up in Friday Harbor, Washington, I loved to visit the little country newspaper shop with its clutter and clamor, and those delicious old-time smells of printer’s ink and hot lead.”

That printer’s shop was owned by Jack Geoghegan, from one of Orcas Island’s pioneer families, who regaled Richardson with tales of his older brother Richard’s adventures in Alaska – the adventures of languages, history and cryptology.

Richardson, who with his wife Myra Jo has lived on Orcas Island for the last 50 years, has always been intrigued by the same kind of adventures.

So it should come as no surprise that his latest endeavor is Shamrocks on the Tanana, the biography of Richard Geoghegan who served as court reporter and attorney-in-fact during Alaska’s territorial days in the early 1900s. In telling Geoghegan’s story, Richardson’s involvement included no small amount of cryptology, historical research and a strong interest in Esperanto, the international language spoken by both subject and author.

Richardson, who grew up in Friday Harbor before attending high school in Seattle during World War II, showed an early aptitude for codes and languages. He knew Morse code, was a ham radio operator, and studied several languages at that age. When Army recruiters came to his school to direct students toward the armed services, they advised him to study Russian before joining in the war effort.

He did so and then, as an Army infantryman, saw the final days of the war behind  German lines in intelligence and reconnaissance, interviewing Russian prisoners of war who’d escaped their German captors.

He returned to Seattle to finish his schooling, majoring in Russian at the University of Washington, and then joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its early days. He was sent back to Germany in 1949 as a civilian working for the U.S. Department of Defense, “but it was obvious what we were really doing,” says Richardson.

His job was interviewing individuals and groups that were fugitives from the Soviet Union who claimed to have contacts that would be helpful to U.S. intelligence. “It was all exciting and patriotic, but whether we accomplished anything, I have my doubts,” Richardson says.

During his years in the CIA he took courses in cryptology, “as a hobby, just because it was something I was interested in.” Despite a visit from a lady who came to see him, “recruiting for something very mysterious,” (which he now believes was the National Security Administration), he left the CIA in 1953 when he saw it changing, “going in another direction I wasn’t comfortable with.”

When he came back to Seattle, television was becoming a star on its own, overshadowing its beginnings in radio, and though Richardson “never thought TV would amount to anything,” he wound up working in television until a bout with polio sidetracked his career.

By then he and wife Myra Jo had two small children, and when the opportunity came to move back to Orcas Island and work at the radio tower on Mt. Constitution, they welcomed the return to the more peaceful life of the islands. That was 50 years ago, come November.

Meanwhile, the footsteps, or more accurately, the correspondence of Richard Geoghegan, kept dogging him.