"True Love at Last ... and Too Brief"

Harold and Roxy Pomeroy, 1982.

TRUE LOVE AT LAST … AND TOO BRIEF

March & April 2013

A 1982 color photograph of Harold and Roxy Pomeroy, smiling widely at the camera as they share a shoulder-to-shoulder embrace, reveals two people who appear to be very much in love with each other. Even their eyes are smiling past the crow’s feet at the corners, and the joy in their expressions is impossible to miss.

At the time of the photo, Harold was about 80—he would die in his sleep the following year—and Roxy was approaching 60. They had been married since 1955, and, by any measure, they had led full and vital lives that included California politics, the anti-Nazi underground , the fledgling government of the Kenai Peninsula Borough, and the Anchorage psychiatric establishment.

They had met nearly four decades earlier and half a world away from the smiles in this photograph.

Harold Pomeroy, a dashing—and married—lieutenant colonel in the U. S. Army, had been in post-World War II Vienna, acting as secretary to the American High Commissioner during the three-power occupation of Austria, when he was introduced to his new interpreter, a Ukrainian exile named Roxolana Eurydice Skobelska.

Roxy, as he came to know her, could speak five languages—English, German, French, Russian and Ukrainian—and she could adeptly translate for nearly anyone occupying the seats of power at the table during the negotiations to decide the fate of “displaced persons” living in Austria. Roxy herself was a displaced person, as was her mother.

On the back of this photograph, Roxy wrote "Remember me,
please" and handed it to Harold before she departed Vienna.

In addition to working with Harold, Roxy also assisted his wife, Floretta, a Washington, D.C., lawyer in Vienna to aid Harold in his work. Both Pomeroys became close with Roxy, and it was Floretta who arranged for Roxy and her mother to travel to Bremen, Germany, and from there to board a ship filled with Jewish refugees bound for Boston.

Before she departed from Vienna, however, 24-year-old Roxy gave a black-and-white head-and-shoulders photograph of herself to 46-year-old Harold. Written on the back were these words: “Remember me, please.”

Harold would spend nearly the rest of his life in her company, but in 1948 he had to say goodbye.

According to John Havelock, a former Alaska attorney general and a good friend of the Pomeroys, Roxy was the only refugee aboard the Boston-bound vessel who could speak English. “On arrival Roxy found herself an indispensable linguist in the processing of new Americans,” Havelock wrote in a 2008 remembrance published in the Anchorage Daily News.

But after her arrival in Boston in November 1948, Roxy remained on the East Coast less than one month. As she told a local newspaper reporter, she was bound for Alaska, where she planned to “homestead with friends.”

As part of his negotiations for some of the Europeans whose homes had been taken or destroyed by the Nazis, Harold Pomeroy had sought and arranged for them to become homesteaders in the Territory of Alaska. He had flown over the Kenai Peninsula and had initially liked property he had spotted inside a broad meander of the Kenai River, but he soon learned that the property in question—now part of Soldotna—had already been claimed by Jack and Dolly Farnsworth.

So he kept looking, and from an airplane window high above the peninsula he examined a Kachemak Bay site recommended to him for its beauty and available land. Bear Cove, he decided, was perfect for his plan, and he and three partners in this endeavor arranged for the land purchases, the transfer of refugee belongings, and all the other paperwork and legwork required to create a new home.

In fact, Pomeroy liked Bear Cove so well that he decided to move there himself. And so did his son, Rodney, one of two children from Harold’s first wife, Ruby.

In 1949, Harold settled on 37 acres near an unnamed lake. Rodney and his wife claimed a 24-acre parcel nearby. Roxy garnered about 65 mostly swampy acres adjacent to these properties. And Pomeroy’s partners claimed sites of their own.

But the move was not without problems.

First, of all the displaced persons scheduled to homestead in Bear Cove, only Roxy Skobelska showed up. According to Dolly Farnsworth, most of the others—including Roxy’s own mother—stayed out East, perhaps because they found relatives or encountered persons there who spoke their language.

Second, Pomeroy’s wife, Floretta, chose not to join Harold in Alaska. When he drove up the Alaska Highway to start his new life, she chose to remain in Washington, D.C., and continue her law practice. Eventually, she met an Italian count she was convinced she would marry, so she filed for divorce from Harold—only to learn later that the count had no interest in wedlock.

Third, Pomeroy’s partners did not stick around long. Even Rodney eventually moved. Within a few years, all of them had either sold out or given up their lands. Harold (and Roxy, after their marriage) soon had claim to nearly 150 acres.

Before Roxy joined Harold and the others at Bear Cove, however, she sojourned for a while in Anchorage at the home of her sponsors, the family of realtor Ben Culver, a friend of Harold’s who had purchased the site of an old Bear Cove fox farm and planned to build a lodge there. The Culvers employed Roxy as a nanny for their gaggle of small children, once even traveling for six weeks in the Lower 48 while Roxy tended to the kids.

Harold works on one of Roxy's greenhouses in Bear Cove, 1950.

But by sometime in 1949, Roxy had made her way to Bear Cove, where Harold was living in a small cabin on his property. Roxy assisted Harold in establishing a sawmill on his place, and he in turn used some of his rough-cut lumber to help Roxy construct two large greenhouses, in which she grew a variety of vegetables (especially cucumbers and tomatoes) that she sold to customers around the bay.

Over the next few years, Roxy and Harold ran the sawmill, and Harold helped with the gardening. Roxy lived inside one of her heated greenhouses, eating meals with Rodney and his wife. Harold continued to live in his small cabin and began traveling to Juneau to work as director of Alaska Territorial Civil Defense.

By 1955, the presence of the Italian count had subtracted Floretta from the equation of their intertwining lives, and Roxy and Harold were free to marry. From that point on, despite the myriad activities in which they were involved across Alaska, they kept their Bear Cove home and traveled there again and again like two lovebirds returning to their nest.

Refugees and the Underground

When courier Roxy Skobelska and the rest of the anti-Nazi underground in Vienna learned that the Nazis were planning to clear out the home and office of the renowned psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, they mobilized swiftly.

According to John Havelock, Skobelska and a group of others from the underground removed Freud’s belongings in advance and hid them beneath coal sacks in a horse-drawn coal wagon driven by Skobelska herself. “Think of that,” Havelock wrote, “if you ever see the restored office at the Vienna Freud Museum.”

A handful of years later, Skobelska was living in Bear Cove, growing and selling veggies out of her greenhouse-home, and intensifying a relationship with Pomeroy, a man 22 years her senior and the love of her life.

The eldest child of Edward and Adele Pomeroy, Harold Edward Pomeroy was born in Burbank, California, on Oct. 9, 1902. According to long-time friend Dolly Farnsworth, Pomeroy was raised on a farm and was in his late teens when his mother died of cancer. While their father worked, Harold and his siblings had to mostly fend for themselves, and as a result Harold developed a strong sense of self-sufficiency.



This 1930s photo may show Harold during
his tenure as city mayor for South Gate.

In 1932, he was elected city mayor of South Gate in his home state, and four years later he began a three-year stint as administrator for the California State Relief Administration.

During the 1930s and early ‘40s, he was also active in the League of California Municipalities, the City Housing Authority of Sacramento, the National Homes Registration Division (an advisory commission to the Council of National Defense), and the American Red Cross.

After the United States entered World War II, he joined the U.S. Army in 1943 and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel while serving in North Africa, Italy, England and Austria.

When Pomeroy met the slender, dark-haired refugee, he was in post-war Vienna, having received a presidential appointment as an executive officer of the Austrian Planning Unit during the Allied occupation of Austria. Negotiations, in myriad languages, were often difficult.

But Skobelska’s journey to Vienna had been far more arduous.

Born, according to Havelock, “in the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains” on Aug. 17, 1924, Skobelska was the

daughter and granddaughter of prominent pastors in the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Eastern Rite.

When she was born, said Havelock, her father (Lev Skobelsky) was a chaplain to a cavalry regiment, and Roxy “grew up loving and riding horses, an affection that stood her in good stead later in life.” As a courier for the underground, she was often the only one familiar enough with horses to drive the wagons while transporting goods away from the enemy.

But in the Ukraine, the Russian Revolution soon uprooted her family and whirled her away from her homeland and her family’s large fruit-and-dairy farm. On forged passports, they fled across the border into Austria, the birthplace of Roxy’s mother and the home of relatives who would take them in.

In the Ukraine, they had loaded a wagon with crates of their most precious belongings, and Roxy’s mother had driven the wagon while Roxy and her father walked to the border crossing. According to his passport, Lev Skobelsky was a millworker, but his soft priest’s hands raised suspicion with the border guard when he examined their papers, said Farnsworth.

Roxy's mother.

Roxy.

Roxy’s mother was allowed to pass, and she traveled on to Vienna, but Roxy and her father were held up temporarily and then forced to stay near the border because of her father’s failing health. He was suffering from a heart condition and had to be hospitalized. Although he eventually recovered enough to continue on to Vienna, he later died in his daughter’s arms while his wife was out trying to get food.

In Vienna, despite her family’s strife, young Roxy was able to complete her schooling—a process that had been tumultuous even in the Ukraine. Roxy’s father, who had attended secondary school in England and learned English there, had taught the language to his daughter in addition to their native Ukrainian. But he had hoped for a better education for his daughter than what Farnsworth called the “terrible” schools available in their country at the time. So Roxy’s parents sent her to Germany for her education.

“They put a tag on her and put her on a train—she was six years old at the time—to go to this German Catholic school,” Farnsworth said. “And she arrived there, not speaking one word of German, and was enrolled in that school. She would cause problems, and they would kick her out. And they’d put her in another school.”

But in Austria, at an all-girls school in the Monastery of St. Zion, she completed her secondary education at the age of 15 and was enrolled in the University of Vienna.

Harold and Roxy (and a very big dog) in Vienna, Nov. 1948.

The Nazi annexation of Austria occurred in March 1938, but Roxy continued her studies, even while joining the resistance movement. She completed a degree in mining law, a skill set that would prove valuable in Alaska nearly two decades later.

Then the war ended, and the post-war negotiations began. For Roxy and her widowed mother, post-war Europe meant refugee status. For Pomeroy, post-war Europe provided him an opportunity to continue helping others.

In this crucible, Harold and Roxy met and mingled.

They would rarely be out of each other’s lives for the next 35 years.

Busy, Busy, Busy

In a padded crate in the garage of her Soldotna home, Dolly Farnsworth has a white marble headstone. Crate and marker together weigh nearly 200 pounds, and soon the headstone will stand on a small wooded hill near Bear Cove as a tribute to one of Farnsworth’s great friends, Roxy Pomeroy, who died on St. Patrick’s Day in 2008.

Farnsworth, along with her friend, John Havelock, will transport the crate by boat this summer and deposit it on the beach at Bear Cove. There, they will employ one of their four-wheelers to pull a small trailer to the beach and haul the headstone up Pomeroy Road and onto the hill, where they will place it next to a similar white marble headstone that marks the remains of Roxy’s beloved Harold.

Harold died of a heart condition while napping on Oct. 1, 1983, just eight days shy of his 81^st birthday. Roxy, who had been married to Harold since 1955, was just 59. She had lived with him for 28 years; she would live without him for 24 more.

Roxy and Harold in Bear Cove, 1955.

By the time of Harold’s death, Bear Cove was more of a vacation destination than the home it had been in the 1950s, but Roxy continued her summer sojourns there as often as her health allowed. Each time Roxy came to Bear Cove, Farnsworth said, she made the quarter-mile walk up to visit Harold’s grave at least two or three times.

In the years just after his passing, she had visited even more frequently. She had planted flowers by the grave, and she often rose by 5 a.m. to carry water up the hill to keep them and Harold’s memory alive.

Despite the difference in their ages, Farnsworth said, the relationship between Roxy and Harold was “a perfect match.” Roxy’s only regret in loving Harold, Farnsworth said, was in losing him so soon.

“I think that’s why she died,” Farnsworth said. “I’m surprised she lived as long as she did because she was so much in love with him—and not to have him there. Oh, God, she missed him. That was love, I’ll tell you.”

Together, according to Harold’s 1949 homesteading diary, they tried to carve a home out of the brambly backcountry at Bear Cove. They cut roadways and cleared land, stacked firewood and planted gardens. They started a sawmill operation to produce rough-cut lumber, which they used to build work sheds and homes and greenhouses—even a bridge and a water tower. Surrounded by ocean, mountains and glaciers, they dug clams and shot wild game and worked cooperatively, regardless of weather and insects and other privations.

Harold’s diary is spartan in its details. Written in list form, it mostly delineates tasks and accomplishments, but occasionally a personal sensibility shines through. When Roxy’s large dog, Ruslan, arrived at the cove in mid-September, Harold noted, “Roxy so delighted she cried.” When he was ill for a couple of days, he wrote, “Roxy takes darned good care of me.” And about working with her, he said, “Roxy darned strong + swell.”

By the mid-1950s, their Bear Cove operation was flourishing. At about the same time, Harold and then Roxy began

Harold as director of Alaska Territorial Civil Defense agency, 1950s.

ambitious careers of public service that would cause them to move their home base first to Soldotna and later to Anchorage, always returning to Bear Cove each summer whenever possible.

From 1954 until 1958, Harold began making frequent trips to Juneau as the director of the Alaska Territorial Civil Defense agency. From 1962 until 1969, Roxy began making frequent trips to Anchorage as a land law examiner for the Alaska Division of Lands.

Because Roxy believed that Harold was traveling too much and working too hard to have time to read the news, she pored over each day’s paper and clipped the items she thought he should read. She placed the clippings in a folder, which sat waiting for him whenever he returned home. (After Harold’s death, Roxy’s clipping habit continued, but she began mailing the articles to Farnsworth, instead.)

In 1963 Harold was elected to be the first chairman (now mayor) of the Kenai Peninsula Borough, and the Pomeroys had a home built near the Kenai River in Soldotna. Farnsworth, who served on the early Borough Assembly, recalled that Pomeroy used his extensive political expertise to draft most of the initial resolutions that established the borough’s governmental methodology.

Harold ran for reelection in 1966 but lost to Kenai’s George Navarre by 87 votes.

He finished out the 1960s as the chief administrator for the City of Soldotna, and in 1967 he and Roxy assisted the Tolstoy Foundation in purchasing the land that became the Old Believer community of Nikolaevsk.

By the 1970s, the Pomeroys had moved to Anchorage, eschewing a rented apartment for a home of their own as they continued to diversify their work portfolios.

Roxy as land law examiner for Alaska Division of Lands, 1960s.

Roxy spent six years as a senior administrator for the McLaughlin Youth Center, and in 1985 retired after a decade as the chief administrator for the Alaska Psychiatric Institute. She also worked on the gubernatorial campaigns of Arliss Sturgulewski, and after her retirement became a phone-answering volunteer at Providence Hospital.

Harold served as consultant for British Petroleum, and as a member of the Alaska Growth Policy Council, the state’s Agriculture Task Force, the Resource Development Council, and numerous other committees, task forces, and advisory boards.

After Harold’s death, Roxy continued to live in Anchorage and visit their home in Bear Cove. But changes were inevitable.

When Roxy desired to set up a research fund in Harold’s name, Farnsworth offered to buy the Pomeroy property, with the stipulation that for Roxy a small cabin be constructed there in which she could live as long as she wished. A year after the 1984 sale, Roxy established the Harold E. Pomeroy Public Policy Research Endowment with the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research.

In 2012, Havelock and Farnsworth, as the executrix of Roxy Pomeroy’s estate, placed an additional $288,000 into the endowment.

Farnsworth continues to own, and her family continues to enjoy, the old Pomeroy homestead, in addition to property she had bought there in the early 1960s. Havelock, too, vacations there, and both of them are looking forward to bringing closure to the saga of Harold and Roxy.

In 2008, after Roxy’s death, Havelock and Farnsworth scattered Roxy’s ashes over Harold’s grave. This summer, the stationing of Roxy’s white marble headstone will leave the twin markers standing sentinel above the place that united them and the home they loved.

Addendum: Forgotten Riches

The treasures were astonishing, especially in such a rustic setting.

In 1949, when Roxy first came to Bear Cove, waiting for her were crates of her family’s belongings—some of them unopened since they had fled the Ukraine ahead of the Communist advance in the late 1930s. In the early labor-intensive homesteading years at Bear Cove, the necessary work afforded little time to unpack these crates, and so some of them stood unopened in a storage building for nearly half a century.

When Dolly Farnsworth finally helped her pry open the containers, they discovered a number of high-quality 19^th century oil paintings—mostly painted by one of Roxy’s relatives, they later learned.

The paintings also turned out to be quite valuable.

Roxy’s mother, they discovered, was kin to two famous Ukrainian artists. She was the granddaughter of writer/poet Mykola Ustyianowycz, and the niece of the painter Kornylo Ustyianowycz. Several of the paintings in the crate had been made by Kornylo.

Although the artwork was undamaged by its long travels and the passage of time, Roxy had the paintings sent to San Francisco to be professionally cleaned and restored.

Afterward, she had hoped to send some of the priest-related paintings back to the Greek Orthodox Catholic church in which her father had served as pastor, but the ravages of the Communists and Nazis made those attempts fruitless, so she searched for other options.

Family friend John Havelock finally discovered the Ukrainian National Museum in Chicago, the officials of which were thrilled to take the artwork (via the Pomeroy Portrait Trust) and make them part of an exhibit entitled the “The Heirloom Treasures of Roxolana Skobelska Pomeroy.”