Vale Brent Whitmore

A photo of Brent from his memorial program

Last Saturday we joined the Whitmore family and many friends from the Seward community in a celebration of Brent Whitmore's life and amazing service to community and country.  The celebration was fittingly held in the Center in front of our Touch Tank where Brent has worked for the past seven years as one of our senior interpreters.  Brent passed away on April 24th after a brave fight to beat cancer. 
The following is an excerpt from my remarks at the service.  We share these so that people who could not join us for the service can gain a sense of the great regard that all staff and volunteers at the Center held for Brent and a sense of how we will continue to honor and preserve his extraordinary legacy.

It is very fitting that we gather here this evening in the very location that Brent made his professional home since April 2nd 2004 and where he bravely continued to work right up until he was admitted to hospital. It feels eerily quiet to walk past this touch tank and not see his ever present smile or hear him call out a greeting. Brent worked at the SeaLife Center for just over seven years, although he would be the first to correct me and say that this was not really a job… such was his passion for our institution and for our mission!

That passion was most evident when Brent had the opportunity to share his exceptional knowledge about the Center. On busy summer days, he had the opportunity to do that hundreds of times each day. But it didn’t matter of you were the first or the 100th visitor he spoke with that day – Brent always tailored his message to his audience. Young or old, Alaskan, or outsider, English native or foreign language speaker, Brent made them all feel as if they were the center of his world for the time he was with them. And we believe that to a person, everyone he met over the past seven years was richer for having known Brent.


That is especially true for his fellow workmates. I know that every one of us delighted in his enthusiasm and every one of us learned about how to better relate to the public because of Brent’s mentorship.
Nikki Nelson, his boss, sums that up very well… and I quote…
“He understood the wonder of this place to children of all ages – those who met him were guaranteed a better visit than those who didn’t”.

I really like that quote because Brent truly understood that the child in all of us needs to be nurtured when it comes to trying to understand the marine environment that we share here at the Center. Many visitors often feel “out of their depth” and naturally look for guidance. Brent was an amazing interpreter because of his ability to sum up each visitor and to very quickly work out how best to relate to them. The first principle of interpretation is to get the visitor’s attention and Brent was superb at doing that! He was even better at the second principle which is the more difficult task of holding their attention!
I believe that Brent’s innate interpretive ability stemmed from the combination of his amazing life experience and his desire to make the world a better place. He knew that people really can make a difference when they are inspired and so he set about inspiring them, one conversation at a time.


Brent was a very accomplished person with a fascinating life journey. Others will talk about his career achievements and contributions to the community, but I want to especially acknowledge his tremendous intellect. From Weber State to Oregon to UAF and finally at the University of Hawaii, Brent had an incredible appetite for learning. Those studies provided the perfect foil for his inquisitive nature and nurtured his talent for sharing knowledge with others. He was deservedly proud of those academic accomplishments and I think we all share a great debt of gratitude to his teachers… each and every day he paid back that debt by passing on what he knew to others.


I want to let you all know how much I appreciated him taking me under his wing early in my tenure here as CEO and helping me settle in to this complex organization. I could always rely on Brent to both give good feedback to me when I bounced ideas off him and to not be backward in telling me how and what we need to improve. There was one particular day, just after I started, when Brent bought in a pile of articles he had been reading from the Economist to improve my education about some aspects of climate change! I appreciated them so much that I invited Brent to share similar information – none of you will be surprised that I subsequently had trouble keeping up with the pile of homework that Brent would put on my desk each week! I guess he really did learn a lot from his Mother about being an effective educator!!


And that brings me to how best to honor his legacy of learning. From 2011, I am pleased to share with you all that the Alaska SeaLife Center will be providing our annual award to the Seward High School in his name. The Brent L. Whitmore SeaLife Center Scholarship will be made available annually to the student who has excelled in a field related to marine science. We believe that would be the kind of legacy that Brent would most appreciate and we hope that those future scholars will continue the great work that Brent has begun in inspiring us all to care more for our ocean planet.


I’d like to close, by offering Brent’s family and friends here tonight a quote from Helen Keller that I hope offers you all some solace. She said:
"What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us."


We at the Alaska SeaLife Center are eternally thankful for all that Brent provided to us – as Ms Keller’s observation promises, his interpretive legacy will forever endure in the programs of the Center, in all of us and in the lives of all whose lives he touched.
Thank you again Brent for all that you shared with us. Thank you for all that you did for the Alaska SeaLife Center and the community of Seward and thank you for being our friend.


May you Rest in Peace.