"An Unusual Send-off"

George Coe Dudley, 1950-51.

AN UNUSUAL SEND-OFF

November 2010

One of the highlights of Rusty Lancashire’s retelling of George Dudley’s 1967 muddy, drunken mess of a funeral involved the moment that one of the attendees fell into the open grave.

In fact, Lancashire, who lived in the Ridgeway area for more than 50 years, took such delight in the story that she told it repeatedly, and many long-time residents across the central Kenai Peninsula still remember hearing the tale.

One of those listeners was Peggy Arness, who still chuckles at the memory of Lancashire’s narration. “Rusty’s rendition of it was hysterical,” said Arness, who, along with her husband Jim, once employed Dudley as a longshoreman at their Nikiski dock.

Another person who heard Lancashire tell the story was Soldotna’s Al Hershberger, who first met Dudley in about 1950 and remembers much of Dudley’s early history. “Ah yes, George Dudley, an unforgettable character,” said Hershberger. “Dudley was an easy-going, laid-back sort of guy, always laughing and joking, as well as hard drinking.”

But one of the only people still living who actually witnessed the funeral is Hedley “Hank” Parsons, who was a laborer on the central peninsula for more than 30 years before moving back to his home state of New Hampshire in 1984.

“I was working for Morrison-Knudsen at the time on the White Alice project,” Parsons recalled. “We’d take a trip or two into Kenai about every day for something, and I guess the funeral was kind of news, and so I swung in and visited.”

Parsons’ remembrance of the scene on that May 5 afternoon matches in most respects the story told by Rusty Lancashire, and it also matches a recently discovered, unsigned letter that colorfully describes the funeral in great detail. The letter was found in a cardboard board box of unrelated materials recently donated to the Anthropology Lab at Kenai Peninsula College.

Addressed “Dear Hugh,” the letter begins with a lament for “the passing of Kenai from the scene as a community completely unique,” and then offers up the Dudley funeral story as proof that the “old special flavor of Kenai” has not altogether vanished.

Because the letter refers to Hugh having “dealings with George over right of way,” several long-time residents have concluded that the recipient of the letter must have been Hugh Malone, who was a surveyor at the time and went on to serve first on the Kenai City Council and later in the State Legislature.

The identity of the letter writer, however, remains murky, although almost certainly a man. At one point, the writer appears to identify his occupation: “I don’t like funerals. I think they are barbaric and years ago swore that the next funeral I attended would be my own, and if I could manage, I’d skip that one, too, but somehow, after a few drinks, and swapping lies with a couple of other divers at Larry’s (Club) it seemed the thing to do.”

Divers were being employed at the time during the construction and erection of oil-drilling platforms in Cook Inlet, and several long-time area residents were unable to recall a single female diver working at that time.

And despite the writer’s reluctance to attend funerals, he seemed delighted that he made the effort to go to Dudley’s: “I’m glad I went. It was a funeral to end all funerals, and it and the wake that followed could happen only in Kenai, believe me.”

*****

On the morning of the funeral—a Friday—a death notice appeared on page 13in The Cheechako News, featuring this headline: “North Kenai Man Found Dead In His Home.” The four-paragraph article identified 58-year-old George Coe Dudley as the deceased, and said that he had been found on Sunday by Robert Murray, a long-time friend who had been staying with Dudley for a number of years.

Dudley, said the article, was a commercial fisherman who had been born in California on Feb. 23, 1909, had worked for the Alaska Railroad, had once operated a hotel in Anchorage, and who had spent the last 33 years of his life in Alaska.

The article set the time of Dudley’s passing as 4 a.m. and attributed the death to “natural causes.”

However, neither this small collection of facts nor the simple wooden cross bearing a small brass name plate in the Kenai Cemetery adequately describes the man George Coe Dudley was or explains why his funeral became such a wild affair.

To understand these things, one must look further back in time:

A 25-year-old George Dudley made his way to Anchorage probably in 1934. For much of the next 14 years, he experienced great success—but also some toppling failures. For instance, Hershberger remembers Dudley telling him that at one time the beloved Alaska painter Sydney Laurence gave him one of his paintings—one of the many symbols of his financial good fortune that eventually disappeared.

“Dudley was a con artist when it came to getting a drink, as most alcoholics are, but he was not a person given to making up stories about things he had done,” Hershberger said.

Although the timeline of Dudley’s life events is not well known, he did at some point work for the Alaska Railroad. He also built and was an owner of the Lind-Dudley Hotel in the Spenard area, and he was married to the daughter of prominent Anchorage attorney and president of the Anchorage Bar Association, George Grigsby.

“How he ever met Grigsby—how he ever got in with that family—I really don’t know,” said Parsons. “He might’ve been from kind of halfway civilized family before he came to Alaska.”

After the marriage ended in divorce, according to Hershberger, “the ex-wife was blamed (by Dudley) for the demise of his fortunes. This may or may not have been the case.”

Single again and down on his luck, Dudley made his way to Portage and a road construction job. It was in Portage in 1948 that he met Parsons, who also was doing road work. Parsons liked Dudley personally but called him a “derelict,” recalling that Dudley spent most of his spare time in Portage’s two or three shack-like bars, which were powered by individual light plants and had sprung up to support and to leach the paychecks of road workers.

Murray, another of the road men there, befriended Dudley at this time. Murray, who would become one of the first homesteaders along the shores of Longmere Lake, brought Dudley with him to the peninsula in either 1949 or 1950 and allowed him to stay for some time at his place. In fact, Murray thought so much of his friend that he named an east-west road off Murray Lane in Murray Lake Subdivision No. 1 “Dudley Avenue.”

Dudley eventually settled on a homestead of his own in North Kenai. He also acquired a commercial fishing site just south of the Arness Supply Dock, where he worked as a longshoreman during the 1960s.

It was shortly after his move to North Kenai that Dudley became acquainted with Edith “Eadie” Henderson, the renowned proprietor of the Last Frontier Dine & Dance Club—the establishment that was located near the Wildwood Station to attract military clientele as well as Kenai’s large number of fishermen and oil workers, and that was more commonly referred to simply as “Eadie’s.”

“He was a habitué of Eadie’s just for, uh, ‘sociability,’” recalled Parsons. “He had nothing else to do. That was his second home, and probably in his own environment out there at his homestead he didn’t have much of anything. Probably Dudley went to Eadie’s all the time to either keep warm or to socialize and drink—‘cause he had nothing else in life.”

“Dudley was a good guy,” Parsons said. “He was harmless. He was his own worst enemy, really. And of course, Eadie, she plied him with the booze, and she let him flop out on the floor at night instead of finding his way out north to his homestead.

“He was always welcome there because Eadie was due the few bucks he had left, you know, and he probably was a handyman there, doing chores and stuff like that, to keep Eadie going and keep the lights on.”

*****

Peggy Arness remembers George Dudley as “one of the colorful characters down there” at the dock. Despite owning a fishing site, Arness said, “He didn’t do much fishing. There was more drinking than fishing going on, but he was down there.”

Dudley spent much of his spare time with his friend and drinking buddy, Mosey Molander, Arness said. Molander and his wife, Gladys, ran an early 1950s movie house out of a portion of the former territorial school building in Kenai after a new school was constructed.

“We had to have longshoremen loading and unloading all the time,” Arness said. “And George and Mosey both were there. Pretty faithful. They were as good as any of them. They did their work. They knew how to hook and unhook. That’s what they did. But they were always sober when they came down to work. They never came down to do a shift if they were drinking. Jim just didn’t allow that. When (Dudley) was on the job, he was sober.”

During his off-hours, Dudley, who had been single since the 1940s, had occasional girlfriends—some of them, according to both Arness and Parsons, being “Eadie’s gals,” an oblique reference to the night club’s exotic dancers and whispered reputation for prostitution.

When he died in late April, it was difficult to find anyone who was surprised. “I wouldn’t say he ever appeared to be in the best of health,” said Parsons. “And he probably just wore himself out drinking.”

The funeral was held the following Friday, and many of the details have faded over time—except for the letter to “Hugh.” The letter—which Parsons says is remarkably accurate, particularly in its details of the funeral—claims to depict “a firsthand account of his passing and the send-off his friends, enemies and casual drinking acquaintances gave him.” Furthermore, the letter writer avers that Dudley “boozed away everything he owned, drank up his homestead acre by acre, and died intestate with only his shack and few feet of property left.”

Parsons believes that, because of Dudley’s high bar tabs, “Eadie” Henderson ended up with Dudley’s homestead property after his death. And as a result of Dudley’s poverty and insobriety—and in spite of the fact that he, from all accounts, was affable and generally well liked—his estate could not fund a funeral. “So the locals did it their way,” Parsons said.

Hershberger said he heard a rumor that on the night before the funeral, Dudley’s drinking buddies “took the body around to all his hang-outs and propped him up in the corner and poured a few drinks in him.”

Parsons said he never witnessed that particular behavior but wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was true. “There was somebody else they did that with at Kenai Joe’s,” he recalled. He called such actions “common” among certain Kenai crowds of the mid-20^th century.

The funeral was scheduled for 2 p.m. on May 5, and spring break-up was in full bloom at the Kenai Cemetery, which at that time had no surrounding fence or wrought-iron gate, and received little maintenance.

“When it came time to plant George,” said the unsigned letter, “a few of his friends rounded up everybody they could from the bars along the North Road, and we all trooped to the cemetery. Everyone was dressed in their usual spring Kenai Attire—dungarees, oilskins, gum boots, etc., and it’s a good thing.... We all had to slog in from the highway … and by the time we reached the grave, everyone was mud to the knees.”

George, meanwhile, was encased in an unadorned boxlike casket and was transported to the burial site on the same backhoe used to dig the grave.

Among those in attendance was a former Dudley girlfriend named Carmen, whom Arness believes was one of the dancers from Eadie’s. The letter writer painted her and many of the others there with brushstrokes of colorful language:

“Carmen was there, wearing a dungaree jacket over a tight print dress that was split where it stretched the tightest. Her slip bunched out through the hole and waggled back and forth like the flag on a whitetail buck as she waddled through the mud in saddle shoes, no socks.

“The funeral music was furnished by a local lady lush with an accordion…. She couldn’t find the right keys on the instrument, and I think she dropped it in the mud at least twice. Since George wasn’t exactly well known in Christian circles, the eulogy was delivered by the mortician, between hiccups.”

Although Parsons was there, he said that he doesn’t remember every detail contained in the letter, but he recalls enough of them to believe that the letter writer must have been one of the 15-20 mourners on hand and has, with an exception or two, recorded the event quite faithfully.

Besides the characters named or described in the letter, Parsons remembers that Kenai’s Swede Foss was in attendance, and Foss at that time was married to a woman nicknamed Dottie, who was well known in the area as an accordion player for any occasion.

According to the letter, no one at the funeral lamented Dudley’s passing more loudly than did Carmen, who “mourned like a coyote,” despite supposedly hating Dudley for the previous several years because he had once “belted her off a bar stool with a fresh salmon for snitching his drink.”

When it came time to settle Dudley into the grave, Parsons said that the job was made more difficult by the inebriated state of the pall bearers, who used ropes to attempt a balanced lowering process.

“As they lowered away,” said the letter, “they became uncoordinated and George got away from them, did a slow roll and landed in the grave upside-down. George hit the lid with a hell of a thump, and one of the pall bearers fell in the grave on top of him, and lost his glasses down alongside the coffin. They fished him out looking like a nearsighted mud statue and retrieved his glasses with a shovel.”

Parsons remembers that last part a little differently: “I know one of them fell in with him, and I think it was a kid that the undertaker had to dig the grave and help out. And it just scared the shit right out of him. He scrambled up out of the grave—or they helped him on out—and he took off.”

With the living extracted, only the dead man remained in the grave —still in an upside-down casket and solidly wedged into the mud. No amount of inebriated efforts were able to right the situation, at which point a woman referred to in the letter as “Old Lady Paige” hollered out something obscene and suggested that Dudley was better off in the position he was in.

After that outburst, according to Parsons, the mourners returned to the bars because the mortician had dismissed them by asserting that he would use the backhoe to turn Dudley right-side up. “We followed his suggestion,” said the letter, “and nobody seems to know today whether George is right-side up or upside-down.”

The letter writer –who said that he awoke the next morning, nearly freezing and with a vicious hangover, inside of his camper parked with both front wheels in the ditch—says that Dudley’s funeral was an event that even Dudley himself would have enjoyed. And he concludes with this remark:

“I’m sure you will be pleased to know that although (old) Kenai may be dying, she hasn’t gasped her last yet. I don’t think it will be too long until she does, but just in case, I’m not signing my name. Mayhem and homicide are still regarded rather lightly around here, and I’m the cowardly type. Anyway, you know who this letter is from, and it is all gospel—so help me!”

To add insult to injury, according to Kenai Cemetery archives, the wooden cross placed initially over Dudley’s grave identified him as “George R. Dudley.” Nearly everything else may have gone wrong, but at least he is now correctly identified on a brass plaque centered on the peeling white-painted cross marking his final resting place.