"Nothing Quite Like It"

David Thornton, proprietor of the Brown Bear Gun Shop & Museum, 2009.

NOTHING QUITE LIKE IT

JUNE 2009

The Brown Bear Gun Shop & Museum is an unusual place, but it might have turned out even more unusual if the daughter of owner David Thornton hadn’t told her father about her alarming dream.

Thornton’s own dream for his sturdy gun shop—tucked among the other buildings facing Tinker Lane across from the soccer fields at Kenai Middle School—included a sod roof, which he had seen and admired in several old buildings in Alaska.

In order to realize this sod-roof vision, Thornton built the walls and rafters and ridgepole to support six inches of earth and a foot of ice. “I calculated 166,000 pounds of weight would be on this roof,” he said. “I thought it was neat, and I made the roof flat enough to where hopefully the water would run off some.”

But then the telephone rang. It was a call from his youngest daughter: “She said, ‘Dad, I had a horrible dream about you last night.’ And I said, ‘Well, honey, what’d you dream about?’ She said, ‘Well, I want to ask you if you put that sod roof on the roof of your building yet?’ And I said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘Well, I heard you talk about you’re gonna put grass up there, and you was gonna put some strawberry plants up there on the roof, and I knew the next thing you’d be doing, you’d be taking your crane and set your riding lawn mower up there, and mow the grass, and I dreamed you drove your mower over the side of the building, and it fell on you and killed you. I don’t want you to put a sod roof on that building because I know what you’ll do.’

“And I said, ‘Well, sugar, I planned to put a sod roof on it, and that’s what I told the building permit people.’ But (later) I got to thinking about it: ‘Well, David, you got all the yard that you can keep mowed now. You don’t need to worry about mowing the roof,’ and so I just went ahead and put a metal roof on the thing. And that’s why it’s built so gosh-awful strong, with a semi-flat roof on it.”

Thornton, who was born and raised in west Texas and speaks with a soft Southern drawl, grew accustomed to building big and strong during his long tenure in the construction and oil business. In New Mexico in the late 1950s, after serving out a four-year carpentry apprenticeship, he learned how to operate cranes and how to lower big compressor blocks precisely onto bolts set in permanent foundations.

In Alaska, only days after the Good Friday Earthquake of March 27, 1964, he was hired by “Red” McCollum to work on the Swanson River oilfield as a carpentry foreman. And on Feb. 21, 1967, he began a 21-year career as a roustabout and production foreman for the Amoco Production Company on Platform Anna in the Granite Point field in northern Cook Inlet.

So when it came time, in 1985, for him to build his shop at 104 N. Tinker Lane, immediately north of the home he and his wife, Mary, had shared since the summer of 1964, he was well qualified to do the work. And he wanted to build it his way.

“Initially, when I went before the Kenai city fathers for permission to build this thing, I knew that I was going to have to sell them on something a little bit unusual, rather than just a gun shop. And that’s when the idea hit me to build a gun shop and museum—because at that time they were gung-ho about getting something in for people to look at. And as a result of that, believe it or not, they went for it hook-line-and-sinker, and I had their blessings to build this.”

From the street, the single-story shop appears squat—partly because Thornton has pushed soil about two feet up the sides of the north and south walls, and also because each short concrete side-wall supports a column of only three logs. Sturdy eaves drop away from each side-wall, and a large heavy gable thrusts over the mostly glassed-in front wall. At the peak of the roof, where the ridgepole pokes its nose toward the street, hangs a set of moose antlers. On the ground below the antlers stands a large chainsaw-carved brown bear signed by the artist, McVay, in 1984, the year it was given to Thornton by his family as a gift.

The completed outer shell during construction.

The logs have been stained dark, and the front wall has been painted brown, but the front door, the numbers in the street address, and the trim around the windows have been painted bright orange.

What an observer may not glean from this first impression, however, is the massive size of some of the pieces holding this building together, and the intricate nature of the mechanics keeping it all in place. And no one would be likely to guess where all the pieces of this puzzle originated.

In 1986, after clearing the land for his store the year before, Thornton, 79, paid the Seldovia Native Association $3,600 for the nine spruce logs he used for his side walls, gable rafters, and ridgepole. The logs, estimated to be about 175 years old, were harvested in Jakolof Bay, and he paid Jakolof resident Vern Savage $700 to tow the logs across Kachemak Bay to where Thornton was waiting with a crane near the end of the Homer Spit.

For expenses incurred.

Savage piloted his own 20-foot wooden dory, with its 50-horsepower Evinrude, to tow all nine logs at once. By traveling with the incoming tide, he managed a speed of perhaps two knots, and arrived without incident, but it took a logging truck two trips to haul the logs to Kenai. Thornton said that the driver guessed the gross weight of each log—the biggest more than three feet in diameter—to be approximately 8,000 pounds.

On location in Kenai, Thornton built his foundation, tapering his side-walls to offset the natural taper of three large logs per wall. Into the concrete of each wall, he secured a row of seven-eighths-inch rebar, one steel rod every four feet, the first set off-center left, the next off-center right, and so forth. He then cut flat the top and bottom of each log and drilled one-inch holes to match the rebar.

Using his own orange-painted 20-ton Koehring crane (lovingly dubbed “Lulu Belle”), he then hoisted each 48-foot log and, with the help of assistant John Hammelman, neatly lowered it onto the rods of steel.

But that isn’t the end of the shop’s unique construction.  The most westward ridgepole support is a length of 20-inch steel surface pipe that Thornton bought surplus from Amoco. The center support is a massive spruce burl that he rescued from the construction of the Exit Glacier Road right-of-way near Seward. The last interior support is another, smaller burl that he personally cut and hauled south from the village of Eagle along the Yukon River. And the bulk of the rafters, 3-by-12-inch boards of West Coast Douglas fir, he purchased as surplus on the North Slope when Amoco shut down its drilling production there.



Thornton uses "Lulu Belle" to lay an immense log.

Because Thornton was still working for Amoco until 1988, the building project did not happen quickly. In fact, it wasn’t until 1990 that he actually opened for business.

Customers to the Brown Bear Gun Shop & Museum move either to the right for guns and ammo or to the left for the museum displays. To the right, also, is Thornton’s prominent sales counter, the glassed-in part of which came from the gun shop of renowned Cooper Landing gunsmith, Harold “Bill” Fuller, who died in 1988 and whom Thornton much admired. Other links to past firearms and gunsmiths can also be found around the store. For instance, the reloading tools of Kenai Marshal Allan Petersen line a small cabinet near the back, where Thornton himself does his gun work.

These days, Thornton does only repairs in addition to his retail sales. Several years ago, he sold his lathe and gave up smithing.

In the museum, the assortment of items (mostly Alaskan) is broad. Among the artifacts are a pair mukluks, antlers from a moose shot by Dr. Paul Isaak, many glass floats, a large grindstone from the Cunningham family of Kenai, an immense Oneida Newhouse bear trap #6, a forge welder, three stuffed bears (two grizzlies, one brownie), numerous mining tools, a pith helmet, two outboard engines, and Kenai’s first mechanical lawnmower.

With great patience, Thornton will answer customer inquiries about the museum, guns, ammunition, and life in general. Many of those who frequent the store appear to be repeat visitors, chummy with a man they have grown to love and respect, a man who has lived out a boyhood dream of one day coming to Alaska.

“My mother, bless her heart, would sit around an old kerosene lamp in Texas and read me stories—I was the baby of seven kids—and she would read me stories about the north country, the Jack London stories,” Thornton said. “I just had a big imagination, thinking, ‘Someday I want to see that world and maybe live in it, be a part of it.’”