"From Last Frontier to Final Frontier"

FROM LAST FRONTIER TO FINAL FRONTIER

APRIL 2009

In 1948, when teen-agers Anne and Charles Lewis began attending the Kenai Territorial School, travel between Kenai and their home in Kasilof was so difficult that they went to see their parents only twice during the entire school year.

Now, after a life and a career in which she has traveled millions of miles, when Dr. Anne Kahle looks up into the clear dark sky at night, she can acknowledge an additional triumph: that she is partly responsible for one of the objects up there orbiting the earth.

As a member of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Kahle (pronounced like the vegetable, kale) was the lead scientist in the joint Japanese-U.S. effort to put the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) into space. Launched in December 1999, ASTER is being used to obtain detailed maps of the earth’s geophysical system to discover how it is changing, to better predict change, and to understand the consequences for life on Earth.

But Kahle, who retired from JPL in 2003, was not always aimed skyward. It took her many years, she said, to discover what she wanted to do.

Kahle, who was born Anne Lewis in 1934 in Auburn, Washington, first moved to Alaska with her family in late 1939, when her father, Charlie Lewis, found a job as a maintenance worker at the power plant on the University of Alaska campus in Fairbanks.

Although the Lewises moved to Berkeley, California, during World War II, they soon desired to move north again, this time to homestead on the Kenai Peninsula. In 1948, with the family of Ray and Florence Burton—Florence was the sister of Anne’s mother, Freda—they formed a small caravan and camped along the way until they reached Anchorage, where they learned that the homesteading program had been discontinued.

Ray and Charlie got a plane ride down to the peninsula, where they arranged for the purchase of the Victor Holm homestead for a “ridiculously low price,” wrote Freda in Once Upon the Kenai. To reach the Kasilof River property, however, they had to hire a boat, which carried them across a stormy Cook Inlet, around the forelands, and into the river mouth.

Ironically, Ray and Charlie would soon become employed by the Alaska Road Commission, which was building some of the roads that would eventually connect remote families to the rest of the peninsula.

Meanwhile, Anne, 14, and Charles, 16, needed to attend high school. The Lewises arranged to rent a one-room cabin in Kenai from Allan Petersen, so Anne and Charles could live there while they went to classes. Including Anne and Charles, the Kenai high school had nine students and one teacher, O.C. Connelly.

“There were no roads at the time, so we couldn’t go home,” Kahle remembered. The two times they did manage to see their parents involved boat rides. “Then, the second year, they got the road in, and we were able to drive home. My brother got a car, and we drove home every other weekend.”

Despite the new roads, however, getting home was not simple. Near present-day Cohoe Road there was a desperately meandering seven-mile bulldozer path to their homestead.

“A guy had taken a tractor in there and sort of made a road from there (the new Sterling Highway) to the beach,” Kahle said. “It took an hour to drive those last seven miles down to our house. The road contained 75 corners.

“The road commission, when they decided to build a road, started with the idea of following that thing and counted 75 curves and decided, ‘No.’ One stretch on the road we called ‘the super-highway’ because we could actually get into second gear for about a hundred feet.”

Kahle finished high school early, taking correspondence courses in addition to her Kenai classes, to complete her credit requirements.

The Lewis and Burton families in the late 1940s. (Photo from

Once Upon the Kenai by the Kenai Historical Society)

Anne and Charles graduated together in 1950, the only two graduates from Kenai that year. And in another irony, since the Territory of Alaska awarded college scholarships to the top two graduates at each high school, both siblings received funding to attend UAF.

Charles had to wait two years to attend college, however, since he was almost immediately drafted into the Army.

Meanwhile, Charlie and Freda approved the move for their young daughter. “The main reason I went to college was because my parents decided there weren’t any eligible bachelors around the neighborhood,” Kahle said. Consequently, studying for her wasn’t initially as high a priority as simply having fun.

“I went to college because that was the thing to do. At the age of 16, who really knows what they want to do with their life?” she said. “My first couple years at the university, I majored in boys and beer, like a lot of 16-year-old girls would do.”

At her aunt’s suggestion, she began by majoring in agriculture. “They taught us that you can’t make a living farming in Alaska. And then they wondered why everyone dropped out after that first year.”

Next, she tried wildlife management, but that, also, barely energized her. Then, she said, university officials examined her test scores and offered her—“out of the clear blue sky”—a job at the school’s Geophysical Institute.

At the institute she worked with Sydney Chapman, a renowned British geophysicist who worked at UAF and studied auroras in the north for nearly 20 years. Chapman, a pioneer in geomagnetism who also performed early studies on what would come to be known as the Van Allen Belt, inspired Anne.

“I studied under him, and worked with him, and I got all excited about geophysics,” she said. “I liked making exciting measurements, doing exciting things, going exciting places.”

In 1957, the excitement included marrying Jim Kahle, a budding geologist. When Jim got a job on the Distant Early Warning system project out of Nome, the couple moved there with their growing family, and geophysics took a temporary backseat.

“We had four kids in five years. I was a housewife with four pre-schoolers. I call those my ‘barefoot and pregnant’ years,” she said. When they left Nome and returned to Fairbanks, she was anxious to go back to school. In the next year, she added a master’s degree to the bachelor’s degree in physics she had earned earlier.

When Jim decided to earn his own master’s degree, the Kahles moved to Berkeley so he could attend UCLA. Meanwhile, with the kids in school, Anne joined the global think tank known as the RAND Corporation, where she began working on climate modeling and geomagnetism with another Sydney Chapman colleague, Harry Vestine.

While at RAND, Kahle completed her doctorate in meteorology, and in 1974 she joined JPL. She was listed in Who’s Who of American Women, and in the 1970s was one of 25 American women scientists and mathematicians selected to join an all-women math-science China study tour that allowed them to travel extensively in a country that had been only recently opened to westerners.

Over the years, Kahle has traveled extensively, for her work and for her avocation of bird-watching. Currently, her list of birds observed contains more than 5,600 species, and she has taken dozens of trips around the world in search of them. The only places she said that she has not traveled to are eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq.

She recently returned from a birding trip that took her to Puerto Rico and the Lesser Antilles, and she has another long trip, starting in Fiji, planned for the fall.

Now living in retirement in rural Washington State, she said she is proud of her accomplishments, particularly the completion and launching of ASTER, but she is worried about the fate of a world she sees as too overpopulated for its resources.

Perhaps her satellite, still orbiting and functioning well beyond its anticipated five-year lifespan, can help provide the world with some answers and generate some positive change.