R. T. Wallen

While still a student at Lincoln High School (Manitowoc, Wisconsin), he spent his summers in Petersburg, Alaska commercial fishing with his uncle.

[1] As a zoology major at the University of Wisconsin, he worked on archaeological digs in the Anangula Archeological District, in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, identifying bird and animal bones excavated in the 3,000-year-old site.

He spent six months in 1965 as an observer on Little Diomede Island, living in a semi-subterranean house and hunting with the local men in a traditional skin boat known as an umiak.

From there he sold charcoal sketches, watercolors and hand-pulled lithographs from limestone that were printed by the notable New York printers George C. Miller & Sons in editions of between 25 and 185.

[9] After creating a maquette, Wallen scaled up the whale to one-third life size (eight feet) and cast the intermediate bronze for the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau in 2013.

[10][11] In 2011, Wallen began work on maquettes for a monumental bronze sculpture for the Lake Michigan shoreline between his hometown of Manitowoc and Two Rivers, Wisconsin.

Entitled Spirit of the Rivers, the work consists of a Native American man portaging a birch bark canoe accompanied by a woman and an elder.

The foundation eventually partnered with the Carter Center, which asked for another edition of small sculptures to give to donors who contributed $1 million or more to the effort to eradicate the disease.

[19] With the World Bank and other organisations, they led the programs to distribute the drug Ivermectin (Mectizan) which had been developed and donated by Merck and Co.[20][21] The Wallens initiated and raised funds for a project to carve a traditional spruce canoe in Glacier Bay National Park under the direction of George Dalton, Sr. in 1987.