"Let There Be Light"

Main generator for the first electrical-supply power plant in the City of Kenai, 1950s. (Photos courtesy of Rowley family)

LET THERE BE LIGHT

MARCH 2010

As miraculous was the coming of light and power to Kenai, it was even more miraculous that the bringer of this light and power, Frank Rowley, was even alive in 1951 to flip the switch.

In July 1946, the soft-spoken Rowley was involved in an incident that for several consecutive days made the front page of The Anchorage Daily Times, nearly cost Rowley his life, and ended with what was at the time reported to be the largest personal-injury lawsuit west of the Mississippi River.

In late July 1946, Rowley, a civilian electrician employed at Fort Richardson, was completing an electrical power plant in Anchorage that would become known as Mountain View Light & Power and would eventually supply about one-fourth of the city with electricity. In pursuit of a fuel tank that he needed for his plant, Rowley visited the business of Z. E. “Slim” Eagleston, who owned and operated Alaska Salvage, a junkyard just north of E. Fifth Avenue, near Merrill Field. There, the two men made a deal.

However, the agreement between Rowley and Eagleston, who reportedly had once shot and killed a man during a card game in Wyoming, apparently soured. At about 8:30 a.m. on July 30, Rowley drove to Eagleston’s personal residence at 209 Fifth Avenue to voice his displeasure.

James Foote, who witnessed the ensuing confrontation, testified in a preliminary hearing that he heard Eagleston say to Rowley, “You can’t come to my place and call me a liar.” Then, according to testimony, Eagleston asked Rowley to take his glasses off, whereupon the junk dealer hit the electrician, who fell into a wood pile.

Eagleston then seized a heavy No. 2 shovel that had been leaning against a shed, and Rowley grabbed Eagleston by the arm to prevent him from wielding it; however, he was unable to prevent the junkman from smashing the implement onto the crown of his head.

Another witness, Louis Strutz, testified that he saw Eagleston deliver two blows with the shovel after striking Rowley three times with his fists. Rowley crumpled to the ground, his skull fractured, his brain injured. Foote ran for a wet towel, which he applied to Rowley’s wound, and then rushed to call a doctor.

About three hours before FBI agents arrested Eagleston, Rowley was rushed to Providence Hospital, where his condition was assessed as critical and one of the doctors prepared to perform brain surgery.

And this is where good fortune stepped in.

The highly regarded, Stanford-trained Dr. Howard Romig, who was the Rowley family physician, learned of the incident and convinced Frank’s wife, Vena, to allow him to perform the operation. She consented, and Romig went to work—first placing a call to some pre-eminent doctors in New York for advice, then reading several medical journals on the subject of brain surgery before finally operating while conferring the whole time by radio-phone with the doctors in New York.

The surgery lasted about six hours, during which time Romig extracted a tiny piece of metal from Rowley’s brain and removed a portion of his damaged frontal lobe. After a lengthy convalescence, Rowley recovered, although his speech and memory were likely somewhat impaired by the assault and the medical procedure.

In the lawsuit that followed, Rowley sued Eagleston for $55,000 (about $600,000 in today’s money), and won just enough, according to his son Raymond, to cover medical and legal expenses and buy new dresses for his three daughters.

*****

In the years that followed, Rowley began to explore a move to the relatively untapped electrical market of the western Kenai Peninsula, where only the Homer Electric Association had any sort of foothold.

Finally, four years after the assault, according to an account written by Vena Rowley, Frank sold his power plant to the Rural Electrification Administration—it was eventually controlled by the Chugach Electric Association—and made the move to Kenai.

There, with a small group of linemen from Anchorage and a collection of equipment that nobody else wanted, Frank Rowley made one of the most important steps toward modernization in the history of Kenai: bringing the small fishing village into the age of electrification.

Frank Rowley performs piston maintenance.

In a community that had few private generators, in a place where only kerosene lamps flickered in the windows of homes after nightfall, Rowley brought electric light. To the throbbing diesel engine inside his Kenai Power plant in Old Town Kenai, he hooked up a series of electrical grids that would act as the template for the modern infrastructure that serves the city now.

Starting after his first visit to Kenai in 1949, he had acquired the property for his power plant and, with the help of the Anchorage linemen, used military-surplus equipment to auger holes for the treated poles that would hold the transmission lines they strung throughout the village.

The first lines were made from galvanized number-nine steel wire salvaged from old fish traps, and he began generating power through those lines to about 50 subscribers in 1951. Initially the power came from an array of three small generators—two 50-kilowatt International Harvesters and one 60-kilowatt General Motors 6-71 series—and later from a mammoth Fairbanks-Morse engine that he managed to resurrect from the junkpile.

The 1920s-vintage engine, according to his long-time employee, Hedley “Hank” Parsons, was a 32-E, a four-cylinder monstrosity that had been used in the construction of the Distant Early Warning system in northern Alaska and had become so battered that it was considered a complete loss.

According to Rowley’s son, Raymond, who still lives in Kenai, the journals on the crankshaft had been pounded so much that it was no longer round, and the engine had run out of oil. Still, Rowley saw potential in it, and he had it shipped in pieces from Nome to Kenai, where he hand-repaired the damage and then reassembled the entire machine.

He bolted it to a concrete slab about five feet below the surface of the ground, and then he built a metal building over it and a shop out in front of it. Out near the front of the shop he placed a 5,000-gallon barrel of diesel fuel to run the engine, and nearby he later added an auxiliary 2,000-gallon barrel.

Parsons, who now lives in New Hampshire, said that when Rowley began his electrification project in Kenai, many members of the community eyed him skeptically. Some of them, he said, “made fun of Frank because they didn’t know what the hell he was doing. And then he lit up the whole town and supplied power to the canneries in the summertime.”

Suddenly, no one was laughing any more.

Once Kenai residents got electricity, “the whole town depended on it,” said former borough mayor Stan Thompson. And that dependency came with a cost.

Rowley’s dedication to keeping his power plant running meant that he was on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Donnis Thompson remembered that Rowley became so accustomed to the loud, rhythmic pulsing of the generator that he frequently said, “I don’t hear noise. I hear silence.” And when he heard silence, he knew that something was wrong.

When a shutdown occurred, Rowley responded rapidly. “If he was driving a nail, he’d drop the hammer and go,” said Stan Thompson. “He would really tear off.”

In fact, Rowley was so dedicated to the maintenance of his plant that he lived next door to it with his wifeand their five children: Effa, Billie, Aileen, Frank Jr. and Raymond. Their home was an old Russian cabin, onto which they had added extra rooms.

Down the gravel street and abutting the Thompsons’ business, Kenai Korners, the Rowleys had a small office for Kenai Power, necessary because, in addition to supplying electricity, they also had to bill their subscribers for its use, which meant reading meters, sending out statements, and collecting on bills left unpaid.

Vena, with help from her daughters, did most of the work in the office, where they also sold electrical-related items. The Thompsons remember that Frank also had a large chest freezer in the office, and onto it he once dumped the hundreds of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle for customers and visitors to work on when they stopped by.

The Kenai Power main complex.

On an everyday basis, Rowley worked hard for the people of Kenai. Evelyn Akers wrote in Once Upon the Kenai: “It was always a challenge to get through the first part of the Sunday morning services before Frank Rowley started his weekly maintenance on the generator. Often there was no power; other times, if the voltage was low, the organ would sound like an ancient Victrola badly in need of being wound.”

 

*****

Frank and Vena had married in 1932, and neither of them could doubt the other one’s sense of toughness and determination. Vena, who died at age 93 in 2006, had been raised on a sheep ranch in Wyoming, where by age 10, according to her obituary, she spent her summers with her camp wagon, a shotgun in hand, and her sheepdog, Jackie, at her side. Her mother had died when Vena was just 13, and she had been on her own by age 16.

Frank, the tenth child in a brood of 13, was born in 1905 and was raised on a ranch in Colorado. According to his son Raymond, Frank’s birth name was Finis—French for “the end” and usually pronounced “fee-NEE”—and was actually pronounced “FY-niss.” The name, said Raymond, was meant to indicate that he would be the final child: “He was supposed to be the last. His mother was trying to put the brakes on, but it didn’t work.”

Rowley’s father had died when Frank was in second grade, and his mother had died only a year later, leaving him to live with an older sister until he reached the age of 16, when he decided to leave home, change his name, and hop aboard a freight train bound for Tulsa, where another sister lived.

Unfortunately for Rowley, “free rides” came with a price. He was arrested in Tulsa and put to work on a chain gang doing road work. After he had served his time, he got a job in a Tulsa hospital, sharpening scalpels for surgeons and cleaning up after them. The doctors took a liking to this teen-ager and sent him off to a trade school in Chicago, where he learned to operate a machine shop and the ins and outs of the electrical business—all while earning 50 cents a week for doing shop work.

A few years later, he joined one of his brothers in Wyoming to open an industrial machine shop. During the oil boom in that state, the Rowley shop became the biggest industrial-electric machine shop in all of Wyoming. Frank Rowley was only 28 years old.

Married then, and with a growing family, Frank and Vena decided in 1938 to head north to Alaska, where they saw in the young city of Anchorage the opportunity to produce and sell electricity.

Frank Rowley with son, Raymond, outside their Anchorage power plant, 1948-49.

*****

Despite the severe cranial injury he had received in the altercation with Slim Eagleston, Rowley thrived in Kenai. According to Raymond Rowley, Frank took off only three personal days in more than a decade of supplying Kenai with power. Raymond remembers once, when Frank was 55, he stayed up for three days straight (with only one two-hour nap) to keep the engines going and the power flowing.

Of his father, Raymond says, “He was the toughest man I ever met in my life, easily.”

Throughout his life, Frank Rowley demonstrated that it took a lot to keep him down. When Rowley had attended the Chicago trade school, a metal shard hit his unprotected right eye, and when the eye became infected he lost the use of it. At the time of the Eagleston incident, Rowley had had his right socket filled with a glass eye and had taken to wearing spectacles.

As he worked with electricity, he also built up a tolerance for being shocked. Parsons, his long-time employee, remembers: “I’d seen him going around testing circuits. Now this was low voltage, you know, house voltage, and he’d touch his fingers to his tongue and go around and check the voltage that way. I asked him one time, I said, ‘Jesus, Frank, how can you do that?’ He said, ‘Oh, you get used to it.’”

Raymond also recalled the time that some of Frank’s linemen were placing a thirty-foot power pole, complete with glass insulators, into the ground. “The line (hoisting the pole) came loose, and the pole started to fall. Everybody ran for their life. My dad ran over underneath it, and caught it just enough to break the fall so that it didn’t break the glass insulators.”

*****

In the end, however, Rowley’s indomitable spirit was not enough to save Kenai Power. After moving his power plant to Sport Lake near Soldotna to take advantage of a nearby natural-gas wellhead and then signing a contract to supply power to the military base at Wildwood, he was expanding and improving his system of power lines when he ran into union problems.

Rowley’s children still harbor some resentment toward the agencies and individuals responsible for those problems, but they prefer to remain publicly quiet about the details. By 1963, the ensuing lawsuits and the financial strain on Rowley forced him to sell his company to the City of Kenai, and HEA acquired the utility some years later.



Frank Rowley.

While many people who were in the central peninsula in the 1950s remember Rowley now only for the electricity he provided, his family hopes that he will also be remembered for the service he gave to Kenai during the months leading up to its incorporation as a first-class city in 1960.

Rowley, who was an original signer of the city charter and later served on the city council, pushed hard for the incorporation of as much land as possible, with the idea of creating a large tax base from which to extract money for needed services.

Meanwhile, bereft of his power company, he continued to serve the area in any capacity he could, including running a freight barge to wherever his contracts required. Then, at age 65, while riding on a return trip from Anchorage with a friend in October 1970, he suffered a cardiac arrest and died.

Despite his passing, he left an indelible mark upon the central peninsula. Frost Jones, who was a retail clerk in Kenai throughout the 1950s, once wrote about the first night that she and her husband, Casey, spent in an apartment near the Kenai bluff: “We went to sleep that night to the throb of the Kenai Power diesel plant that Frank Rowley built and managed in the middle of town. The power was off and on some, but Frank really tried hard to keep it going.”

It was tough to keep that good man down.