"Good Fortune and a Midas Touch"

Heinie Berger's freight-toting ship, the Kasilof. (Photo courtesy of the Pollard Collection)

GOOD FORTUNE AND A MIDAS TOUCH

SEPTEMBER 2012

On Monday, Dec. 5, 1932, after many hours of battling the elements in Cook Inlet, the 31-ton diesel-screw schooner, Discoverer, had had enough. When the members of the ship’s four-man crew realized their craft was doomed, they hurriedly began preparing the lifeboat.

“It was the greatest good fortune that we got out of that bad mess alive,” Capt. Heinie Berger later told a reporter for the Anchorage Daily Times.

It was about 1:30 a.m., and, according to Berger, “the night was inky black.” It was bitterly cold, much of the storm-riddled inlet was filled with ice, and they were a long ways from safe—six miles north of Ninilchik, eight miles off shore.

About 15 years before a highway system was built on the Kenai Peninsula, they had departed Anchorage earlier in the evening, heading out of the inlet and bound for Seward. The 53-foot Discoverer had been plowing through frozen seas between Kenai and Kasilof, “bucking a sheet of solid ice an inch or two thick,” according to Berger, who had begun operating his transportation business out of Seward, Seldovia and ports in the lower inlet in 1926.

What Berger and his crew initially failed to realize was that the ice had cut deeply into the ship’s hull, neatly incising a rim around the wooden craft and virtually slicing the boat in two. When they emerged suddenly into an ice-free zone, the boat, laden with several tons of coal, became a sieve.

Soon, several feet of seawater had accumulated in the hold. Eventually the water reached the 100-horsepower engines and quelled them. As the Discoverer—built in 1914 in a shipyard in Seabeck, Wash.—foundered and began to sink, the crew clambered into the lifeboat and shoved off.

“We were careful to take along a compass, and but for that fact we never would have been able to make shore,” Berger stated. “It was so dark we could see nothing ashore, but as the sea had broken the float ice, we could handle the oars to advantage and after three and a half hours made land.”

In addition to the compass, crew members (including engineer Jack Wilkinson, cook/deckhand Oscar Wick, and deckhand Fred Bergman) had also packed onto the lifeboat a can of coal oil and some blankets, an axe and some food, and matches in a small, tightly corked bottle.



Heinie Berger

Aboard the open lifeboat, the “continuous spray from the sea” blew over the men and “formed a coating of icy mail.” Thus, “we were in a shell of ice when we struck shore,” Berger said, “and too cold to even light a match for some time. To set up our circulation, we ran up and down the beach like wild men for a time and finally were able to cut a little dry wood and strike a match and get the blaze going.”

In addition to the cold created by the “shell of ice,” the roughening seas had caused havoc during the landing by tossing the boat about. Their food was lost in the dark tumult, the lifeboat was swamped, and the crew struggled through waist-deep waters to reach the shore.

“The coal oil and axe were our salvation,” Berger said. “We never could have made a fire without the oil and the axe, and we even saturated the blankets and threw them in for fuel.”

In 1932, no road system connected the few settlements dotting the eastern shore of lower Cook Inlet. To the south were Ninilchik and Homer. To north were Kasilof and Kenai. There was no telephone system. In fact, there was no electricity. Although the men were ashore, they were far from secure.

They warmed themselves with the fire on the beach, and at daybreak they set out for Kasilof, nearly 25 miles away, where Berger’s wife, Alice, awaited at their Kasilof Fox Ranch.

“I was mighty glad I had insisted on Mrs. Berger remaining at our home that day,” Berger said. “She wanted to go along, but there is where the skipper was right for once anyway—and mother escaped a chilly ride we won’t forget.”

“Jack Wilkinson of our crew,” Berger continued, “was particularly glad to be safely back, as this is his third experience of the kind. One time he was in an open boat in the ice of Cook Inlet escaping from a similar plight, and one of his mates went insane by the time he was gotten ashore. Jack says never again for him—and I don’t blame him. He’s a lucky boy to be here today, and so are we all.”

Berger said he was sorry to lose a ship that had served him so well for so long, but he added that he intended to replace the Discoverer with a newer, larger craft. The ship had been covered only partly by insurance, but Berger was not without good fortune where his finances were concerned. According John P. Bagoy in Anchorage Legends & Legacies, Berger had won part of the Nenana Ice Pool in 1929 and still had nearly $15,000 remaining of his winnings. After sojourning in Anchorage briefly, he and Alice almost immediately departed for Seattle to seek a replacement boat.

He purchased one under construction at the Berg Shipyard and gave it the same name as his old craft. At 76 feet, the new Discoverer was about one and a half times the length of the old one. It also featured a 200-horsepower Washington diesel engine, a 14-passenger capacity on the deck, and a 50-ton cargo capacity in the hold.

By springtime of 1933 Heinie Berger was back in business, and once again business was booming.

But this was just a beginning for the man whom Bagoy called one of Alaska’s “true entrepreneurial types [who] not only benefited themselves but benefited the Territory and the people in it.” Before he was through, Berger would grow his transportation business, make a big splash on the Anchorage entertainment scene, and challenge the railroads.

His battle with the railroad was particularly intense.

Col. Otto F. Ohlson was an autocrat who disliked interference, particularly where the railroad was concerned. Although whether he respected Berger was debatable, he certainly found him an expensive nuisance.

In 1928, Pres. Calvin Coolidge had appointed Ohlson general manager of the Alaska Railroad. According to Bagoy, the promotion came with considerable clout: “The job as general manager of the Alaska Railroad was, during the early years, the most prestigious, the most powerful, and the highest paid position in Alaska. The man who ran the Alaska Railroad was next to God in Anchorage.”

From this semi-divine position, Ohlson could be bull-headed and iron-fisted when he chose to be. And as such, he did

The power scow Seldovia in the mid-1940s.

not appreciate—and went to great lengths to hinder—the efforts of Heinie Berger, who was attempting to horn in on railroad profits.

According to Bagoy, the federally owned railroad had not been built for profit-making, but Ohlson aimed to “operate in the black,” nevertheless. Therefore, he kept his freight rates high, infuriating merchants from Seward to Fairbanks, and opening the door for a cut-rate operator like Berger.

Berger, who in 1926 had begun a marine transportation service in Resurrection Bay and lower Cook Inlet, charged far less to haul freight than either the railroad or the Alaska Steamship Company. When Berger’s capacity was a mere 50 tons, however, Ohlson barely noticed. But the game changed in 1938, when Berger purchased a motorized scow capable of hauling 200 tons. Suddenly Berger was carrying automobiles, huge loads of lumber, merchant orders of groceries, and plenty of miscellaneous freight. Ohlson set out to stop him.

Ohlson was powerful, but Berger was wily. And Berger had spent a lifetime finding ways to get things done effectively, regardless of the obstacles.

Although some details of Berger’s life are sketchy or even contradictory—for instance, he appears to have been counted three times in the 1940 federal census—a general sense of his background is fairly clear.

He was born in either Hamburg or Hanover, Germany, on June 24, 1888. He earned the equivalent of an eighth-grade education, and he immigrated to the United States in 1903 at the age of 15, or in 1908 at the age of 20. He may have been naturalized as a U.S. citizen on July 8, 1915, when he was 27, although there is some evidence to indicate that his naturalization came a few years later.

About the rest of his early life, little is known—he apparently was briefly married, probably worked as a miner at some point, and was drafted into World War I—but many of the facts become more clear after his arrival on a steamship in Seward in 1914.

Bagoy says that Berger and a partner “supposedly” set up a tailor shop in Seward. He also says that by 1923, Berger had the papers to prove that he was a master seaman. In about 1922, he had bought a 53-foot motorized boat called the Discovery (later renamed the Discoverer) and had begun his shipping service a few years later.

But according to his WWI draft card (via Ancestry.com), he was not still living in Seward in 1917. He was in Fairbanks, where he was listed as a married, an unemployed miner and a foreigner. He is also described as short, with a medium build, grey eyes and brown hair.

During his days of serving the lower Cook Inlet, Berger developed a friendship with Allen Hardy and his wife, Alice, who lived and worked on a fox farm on the Kasilof River.

Alice (Hardy) Berger

In 1930, according to Alaska’s No. 1 Guide by Catherine Cassidy and Gary Titus, Hardy and his friend Ed Zettle were motoring upriver with a load of supplies for a hunting party when they struck a partly submerged tree and flipped their skiff. Zettle was able to reach shore, but Al Hardy was not. Two days later, Hardy’s body was found, and Berger transported it to Anchorage on the Discoverer. A year later, according to Bagoy—or only a few months later, according to a wedding license viewable on Ancestry.com—Berger and Alice Hardy were married by a justice of the peace in Kitsap County, Wash.

Berger transformed the fox farm into the headquarters of his transportation service, and in 1931, according to a news brief in the Seward Gateway, he also erected a dock on the river big enough to accommodate his ship.

In the mid-1930s, after purchasing the second Discoverer, he authorized the construction of a new ship, named the Kasilof, and his passenger-and-freight service continued to blossom.

Berger would haul almost anything. In Alaska’s No. 1 Guide, Cassidy and Titus recount that in 1929 Berger hauled live minks to a Tustumena Lake fur farm, and in 1932 he moved 20 horses from Kasilof to a hunting camp in Beluga. He also regularly hauled local residents, the mail, and rifle-toting trophy hunters—all on his medium-sized ships.

But he got Col. Ohlson’s dander up when he put his big scow into operation. And Ohlson, never one to shy away from trouble, went on the offensive.

“Heinie was offloading at the old City dock (in Anchorage), which was on Railroad property but was leased to the City,” wrote Bagoy. “To reach the dock on the second bend of Ship Creek, you had to cross the main line of the Railroad. Ohlson placed a string of railcars across the road, blocking the entrance to the dock.”

Ohlson’s actions prompted a lawsuit from Berger. After he lost the case, Berger appealed to a higher court, but the final verdict was suspended when World War II began, and Berger was forced to pay the railroad $1.25 per ton for wharfage.

According to several other sources, however, Berger often found ways to outmaneuver or outfox Ohlson. In one popular story, when he once again found railcars and railroad men blocking his path, he forced them to move by demonstrating that he was carrying the U.S. mail, the blocking of which was a federal offense.

Seward merchants, in particular, were delighted to see Berger get the upper hand because his success guaranteed them lower rates they could pass on to consumers.

Jim Arness of Kenai, a skipper on Berger’s cargo ships after World War II, said of his boss, “I can truthfully say that I never worked for better people than Heinie.”

Arness hauled passengers and freight mostly in lower Cook Inlet, but also made many trips to Kodiak and Prince William Sound. On at least one occasion, he made a freight run all the way to Seattle. Generally speaking, the bigger the load (especially if it was freight), the happier Berger would be.

“One time we hauled 85,000 board feet of timber on the Seldovia from Juneau to Kenai, plus a barge loaded with

Jim and Peggy Arness aboard one of Berger's freight-hauling ships, bound for Seattle.

timbers,” Arness said in a 1999 recording, transcribed by his wife, Peggy. “We also picked up 13 surplus army jeeps for delivery to Anchorage. Twelve jeeps on top of the timbers on the Seldovia and the 13^th jeep over the timbers on the barge! We were deep in the water when we arrived at Emards’ dock in Ship Creek. After off-loading the jeeps we took the timbers back to Kenai. Needless to say, that load made me a good guy for quite a while.”

Conversely, Berger, who by this time was also running an entertainment business in Anchorage, hated even a few pennies of waste. He once berated Arness for failing to collect from one of their best customers a 50-cent minimum hauling charge, but he was even angrier on another occasion when too much of his precious stock was used to “smooth over” an inspection.

“Before we left Seattle, the Kasilof had to be inspected by the Coast Guard,” Arness recalled. “The two inspectors came to the shipyard, put on coveralls and did their walk-through. They left the boat, and a couple of hours later Heinie came aboard, the maddest I had ever seen him. He had a step-son, I guess to be 14 to 16 years old. He had been told to give those inspectors a fifth of good whiskey before they left. The kid had given them a whole case while (they were) up in the yard taking off their coveralls.”

Both the Seldovia and the Kasilof were licensed to carry passengers, but Berger advised his crews to avoid them whenever possible because passenger transportation was not economical. “We could only charge $3 fare from Anchorage to Kenai,” Arness said. “No matter how we scheduled, they would eat at least one meal (supplied by the ship at no additional cost), which meant they rode for nearly nothing.”

Instead, the emphasis remained on freight, and sometimes the loads and the circumstances were unusual.

“One trip, Anchorage to Homer, we had a whole bargeload of homestead vehicles,” said Arness. “We had to lay behind Yukon Island for three days waiting for the wind to stop blowing down Kachemak Bay. One of the vehicles had a number of chicken pens facing out with freight in the center of the truck bed. We pulled the barge up close twice a day so two of the homesteaders who traveled with us could feed and water the birds.”

Berger and his bookkeeper, Sally Gorsuch, watched the transportation and entertainment books carefully, but at least once Arness and his crew found a way to pull the wool over the eyes of the boss. When he was piloting in lower Cook Inlet, he would often stop in Seldovia to order food for the ship’s stores. Frequently, the order would include a $3.50 case of peas, which coincidentally cost the same amount as a case of beer. Beer would come aboard for the crew, while “peas” were listed on the ship’s inventory, and Berger was never the wiser.

Still, the overall relationship between Berger and Arness was solidly built on trust. And Berger liked it that way. In his entertainment dealings, he also employed a man he trusted, Chris Terry, Berger’s manager for a dining-and-dancing club in Anchorage and his marketing agent for Berger Distributing.

The Ambassador Club, probably in 1937, in Anchorage.

Berger had decided in 1937 to expand his financial scope beyond transportation and into entertainment. According to Bagoy, Berger purchased a partially completed building on the corner of 6^th Avenue and C Street and named it the Ambassador Club. Bagoy called it “the finest club in town in those days, with a huge dance floor, three sides of booths and tables, a bandstand, and a private entrance.”

In a separate move the following year, Berger brought in three Wurlitzer jukeboxes and installed them in three different Anchorage venues, two of which catered strongly to the teen-age crowd.

All of his enterprises flourished.

In the early 1950s, however, Berger fell ill, and he died in Seattle in 1954.

His ships Discoverer and Kasilof far outlasted their master. According to Arness, the Navy chartered the Discoverer during World War II to use as a submarine net tender at Adak, “opening and closing that net to let the good guys in and keeping the bad guys out.” Eventually, he said, the Navy sold the Discoverer as surplus property, and it was used as a mail boat in Southeast Alaska until it wrecked in the early 1970s.

The Kasilof, on the other hand, maintained a freight run between Seattle and Anchorage, with Cook Inlet stops, throughout World War II. According to rumor, the Kasilof burned to the waterline in the 1980s somewhere in Southeast Alaska.