"Hit by the Bread Truck"

Don and Marjorie Madden, 1940s in California.

HIT BY THE BREAD TRUCK
JULY 2010

As strange as it may seem, Carroll Knutson of Kasilof would not exist today if not for the story behind an old family phrase: “In case I get hit by the bread truck….” The origins of this phrase can be traced back to the histories of two individuals—her parents.

In 1930, Marjorie McCulloch was 12 years old and living in the prairies of South Dakota when she announced to her family her intention to someday become a homesteader. She had listened to the North Dakota homesteading tales of her uncles, and she had been swept up in the romance of owning and developing her own piece of land.

“Well, then,” said her Uncle Louie, “you’re going to have to go all the way to Alaska because that’s the only place there’s still homesteads left.” And she replied, “Then that’s what I’ll do.”

After graduating from Barnard High School, McCulloch traveled 17 miles south down U.S. Highway 281 to Aberdeen, where she earned a nursing degree at St. Luke’s Hospital and then began to work her way west. In Portland, Oregon, in 1939, she joined the nursing staff at St. Joseph’s Hospital, and in 1942 she was temporarily assigned to a clinic in a lumber camp near White City.

What happened next for McCulloch, however, would not have occurred if it hadn’t been for the bread truck. And that’s where Don Madden came in.

During the Great Depression, Madden lost his job in a lumber camp near the tiny town of Forks on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. Like many unemployed young men at the time, he turned his attention northward, deciding to look for work in the sprawling countryside of the Territory of Alaska.

Madden boarded a steamship in Seattle and traveled as far as Ketchikan before he ran out of money, so he left the ship and worked in Ketchikan until he could afford to venture farther north. The second leg of his journey took him as far as Valdez, where he gained employment with a crew building the Richardson Highway.

He stopped next in Fairbanks in 1938, and he worked there on the railroad and in a mine until 1941, when he moved south to Anchorage. And it was there on Dec. 7 that he heard the news that the Empire of Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor and, the following day, that the U.S. Congress had declared war.

“Like a lot of single men at the time  that were up here working when they heard about Pearl Harbor, they quit doing whatever they were doing here and they went to Seward and took the steamship back to Seattle with the intention of enlisting in the Army,” said Knutson.

“So my father gets to Seattle, and he borrows a motorcycle from a friend to be the transportation to get him to the enlistment center. And on the way to the enlistment center he was hit by the bread truck, literally the bread truck, from Gai’s Bakery in Seattle.”

The accident resulted in the 31-year-old Madden receiving a compound fracture of the right leg, and after he recovered in the hospital, the U.S. military classified him as 4F (“not acceptable for military service”), so his desire to help in the effort against the Japanese was thwarted.

As a consequence, Madden remained in the Pacific Northwest, instead of returning to Alaska, and eventually he found himself back in the lumber business, working as a sawyer in a lumber camp near White City, Oregon—and that’s where, in 1942, he met a nurse named Marjorie McCulloch.

By the end of that year, they had moved together to Long Beach, California, and gotten married. “She (Marge) always said that she married my dad because he’d been to Alaska and said he was going back after the war,” said Knutson.

The Maddens remained in Long Beach until 1949—Don spent the rest of the war laboring in the shipyards while Marge worked in a hospital—and started their family before heading north to Alaska. They moved first to Anchorage, where Marge joined the nursing staff at Providence Hospital, and they began to eye potential homesteading property down on the Kenai Peninsula.

It would be nearly a decade, including some hardships—in July 1952, their five-year-old son Terry died from severe burns he received in an accident involving a firecracker and gasoline—before the Maddens could make the move.

In 1954, the Maddens filed on a homestead in Kasilof, but had to relinquish it when two of their other children, Carroll and Don Jr., contracted polio.

By 1958, they found a lakeside piece of Kasilof property they liked, and, while Don went to work temporarily in the Interior, Marge and the kids moved into an old 14-foot travel trailer, sans electricity and plumbing, but with an 8x10 lean-to built onto each side.

From the lake, Marge and the kids toted jerry jugs full of water—chopping through the ice during the winter months—and they used kerosene lanterns for their lighting.

Because Don had been hit by the bread truck, he never had a chance to become a veteran and receive easier proving-up terms on their homestead; consequently, according to Knutson, to earn a patent to the land, the Maddens “had to go the old-fashioned route” and spend more years and clear more land than veterans.

And because Don had been hit by the bread truck, the family never adopted the more traditional phrases used when entering a potentially dangerous situation. “In case of an accident” or “In case something happens” never really entered their vernacular.

For them, for better or worse, it was always “In case I get hit by the bread truck….”