"Kaknu Days"

Some of the very first high school cheerleaders in Kenai.

KAKNU DAYS

JULY 2011

Going ‘Old School’

The history of schooling, public or otherwise, in Kenai stretches back more than a hundred years. In that time, there have been odd and sometimes unfortunate occurrences, periods of staggering growth, and the laying down of high school traditions that are carried on in the present time.

Once a Kenai High School was established as part of the Kenai School, for instance, students wove into the fabric of their educational experience the “Kardinal” as mascot, red and white as school colors, and Kaknu as the official name of the yearbook. Following traditions established across the United States, they also began the first sports and cheerleading programs, set up the first pep club, performed the first stage plays, and put on the first prom.

But the deeper origins of the Kenai school system delve deeper—to  Russian occupation. The first school on the Kenai Peninsula was the Russian Church School in Kenai, and it remained operational—with classes taught primarily in Russian, and with Native languages forbidden—until the school closed in 1921. After that, it was used mainly for parish

The old Russian school building as it appeared in 1930 when Paul Wilson delivered the
mail by dog team.

functions before being torn down in the late 1950s, according to Once Upon the Kenai by the Kenai Historical Society.

By the time of the Russian school’s closure, a $5,500 U.S. government-run public school was already in business, having been built in 1907. This one-and-a-half-story building was 55 feet long and 22 feet wide, and its first teacher was a Missourian named Arch R. Law. Two years after it opened its doors, the U.S. school had 58 students.

In 1911, two Midwestern sisters took over teaching duties and later wrote about their three-year stint in the school and the village. The sisters, Willietta and Alice Dolan, penned The Clenched Fist (published in 1948 under their married names, Alice M. Brooks and Willietta E. Kuppler), a revealing but controversial book. Valuable historically, the book illustrates the sisters’ missionary-like zeal for “enlightening” the uncivilized of Kenai, and their sometimes pejorative views regarding the local Natives.

The first territorial school in Kenai, seen here in 1928.

In 1917, the U.S. Congress granted the Territory of Alaska the right to control its own schools, so the Kenai site became an official territorial school and was allocated funds to keep it running. By the time it burned down in 1930, however, it had already been replaced by the newer Kenai Territorial School, which was constructed in 1926.

Kenai Territorial School featured four classrooms on the ground floor and two teacher apartments on the second floor, and in 1941 it was the educational home to Kenai’s first-ever high school student. Two years later, long-time Kasilof educator, Enid McLane, became the school’s principal.

By the late 1940s, the school was “in poor shape,” according to the historical society, so a lobbyist was sent to Juneau to petition the territorial legislature for a new school. The successful lobbying effort resulted in the Kenai School (currently the home of the Boys & Girls Club and the Aurora Borealis Charter School).

The second Kenai Territorial School, 1949.

The Kenai School opened its doors in the fall of 1951 and rapidly began to fill. Propelled by population spikes from a new highway system and homesteading opportunities, the installation of the Wildwood Army Station, oil and natural gas discoveries, and statehood, enrollment numbers skyrocketed.

Starting with 86 students in 1951-52, the enrollment more than doubled to 178 the following year, shot up to 285 in 1954-55, to 415 in 1957-58, and to 543 in 1959-60. The burgeoning enrollment figures prompted new staff hirings, occasional overcrowding, new classroom construction, and, in 1957, a whole new addition, including a new gymnasium, that gave the entire structure an L-shape and became known separately as Kenai High School.

Despite all the growth and modernization, however, there were constant reminders of Kenai’s more rustic village days.

Carol (Covich) Anderson, a former student of the Kenai School, recalled the day that she and a friend were accosted by a belligerent moose while they were walking to school, according to a brief account in Once upon the Kenai. The moose was so aggressive that the two elementary-age girls were forced to climb a tree to escape, and they stayed there until the school’s first principal, O.C. Connelly, came to their rescue with gun in hand and chased the moose away.

The Kenai School, before the addition of the high school and gym, 1953.

Several students and former teachers also remember the days when George J. Fabricius, who came from Wrangell to become Kenai’s principal in 1952, would open a window in one of the teacher apartments above the school, cradle a BB rifle, and draw a bead on one of the many dogs that regularly invaded the playground and carried off sack lunches. “Sometimes it wasn’t a BB gun,” added Mary France, who began teaching at the Kenai School in 1954.

There were many encounters with animals in those days, France said. In the coldest part of the winters, the moose enjoyed entering the playground and lying next to the building for warmth. “We went outside to play,” France said. “You played outside until it was 20 below, and everybody went out. Mr. Fabricius or one of the teachers would have to go check to see if there were moose out there. If there were, you couldn’t go out for recess.”

Reunited

On the spine of the 2011 Kenai Central High School yearbook—and nowhere else in or on the publication—is the word “Kaknu,” a variant of a Dena’ina name (Kahtnu) for the Kenai River; it is also the lone remnant of the name given 50 years ago to the first-ever high school yearbook in Kenai.

The first Kenai High School yearbook.

In 1961, “Kaknu” linked the language of a once-dominant culture to an educational tradition of the present time. Simultaneously, it united two eras via a symbol of the central Kenai Peninsula’s lifeblood—the river itself—and implied with that symbolism the flow or passage of time.

How fitting it was, then, that in early July the woman who concocted the name for the first yearbook jetted across country from her home in western New York to join other members of the Kenai High School Class of 1961 for a 50-year reunion.

At a Friday dinner at Paradisos Restaurant in Kenai and a Saturday picnic on the old Cotton Moore homestead in Sterling, class members, now mostly in their late 60s, united to celebrate old times and catch up on more recent ones.

Among the graduates was Kathy “Dolly” (Wilson) Lecceardone, who had submitted the name Kaknu for the yearbook after brainstorming with her former gradeschool teacher, Jettie Petersen. Wilson, who was born in 1943 in a house on Mission Avenue in Kenai, and whose family continues to have a long history in the area, was well aware of the important ties between the fishing village that Kenai had been before statehood and the river that lured the salmon home each summer.

She was also aware that the area was beginning a period of rapid growth, and the Kenai School was bursting at the seams because of it.

She said she remembered leaving behind the old Kenai Territorial School, where she was once allowed to toll the large bell on the roof, for the new one in the early 1950s. She remembered all of the students placing their chairs upon their heads one day at the old school and marching down the street to the new one.

Quickly that new school also filled with students, and in 1957—when the members of the Class of ’61 were freshmen—the addition was constructed on the end nearest the Methodist Church. It was the precursor to the current Kenai Central High School, which was constructed east of Kenai along the Spur Highway, and which opened its doors in the fall of 1964.

The first Kaknu pictured 35 members of the graduating senior class. Of those 35, five—Don Lewis, Gary and Grant Wilson, Stanley Brower, and William “Bill” Robinson—have died. Of the 30 remaining, 21 (or 70 percent) still live in Alaska—mostly on the Kenai Peninsula.

Of the 30 graduates still living, 20 attended the reunion festivities, many of them with spouses or significant others. The dinner drew about 70 individuals, while the picnic drew about 80. Also in attendance were a smattering of former teachers, a bus driver, a school board member, and other students who also attended either Kenai High School or the Kenai Territorial School through the spring of 1964.

Not everyone who had been a part of the KHS Class of ’61, however, was able to graduate with the 35 students pictured in the yearbook. Carroll (Madden) Knutson, for instance, got married during her senior year and left school; she did finish her schooling but missed the graduation ceremony. And Nancy Savage and Virginia Murto were sent to high school in Homer for their senior year, apparently because the school boundaries south of Kenai were changed as enrollments climbed.

The reunion effort was spearheaded by class president Patricia (McCollum) Falkenberg, without whom, according to several attendees, the get-together never would have taken place. Falkenberg put together a six-person committee more than a year in advance of the event, and the number of volunteers grew as the reunion dates neared. Besides event planning, committee members also gathered information about their classmates. One of the many lists they kept showed how many students’ families had been tied into businesses in the local economy.

The parents of Doug Jones owned Kenai Commercial. Eric Thompson’s folks owned the Kenai Korners lumber yard. Mike Seaman’s parents owned Seaman’s Furniture. Martha (Lancashire) Merry’s parents owned Larry’s Club. Other businesses tied to students included: Bing’s Landing, Dianne (Moran) Cooper; “Ribs by Cotton,” Myla (Moore) McFarland; Gibbs’ Apparel, Jimmy Gibbs; Reger’s Garage, Doug Reger; Northern Oil Operations, Falkenberg.

Students from the Class of ’61 included Native kids, homestead kids, fishing-family kids, military kids, oilfield kids, and Alaska Road Commission kids, among others. They came to school from as far south as Anchor Point and as far north as Nikiski. They were a reflection of the times.

Just getting to school each day back then could be a time-consuming trial for some students. McFarland was a Sterling girl back in the late 1950s and early ’60s, and she lived on the Cotton Moore homestead down two miles of bad road from the graveled Sterling Highway. The road crossed two swamps, but in the early days the road itself was uncrossable except when frozen; consequently, McFarland had to walk to the highway, at times balancing precariously upon poles that had been laid in the marsh for safe foot travel. “If you fell off, you were ruined for the day,” she said.

At the highway, she and her buddy, Cooper, caught a regularly scheduled ride into town to the Sky Bowl, where a school bus driven by Dan France picked them up and drove them into Kenai. During their junior and senior years, the bus route expanded to include Sterling, but the journey was just as long.

McFarland said that she occasionally rowed a boat down the lazy waters of the Moose River to the bridge to catch a ride, and on cold winter days she sometimes skated down the meandering ribbon of river ice to the main road. “It was a long day by the time you got 26 miles into Kenai,” Cooper said. “And then you’d get back, and heaven forbid if you wanted to do something in the evening.”

“My dad, all he had (in those days) was a ’49 Jeep,” said McFarland, “and so if I was coming home late, I can remember coming down the Sterling Highway looking for—you know how Jeep headlights are close together—I remember looking to make sure if he was coming after me.”

In the Class of ’61, the class officers besides Falkenberg were Jimmy Gibbs, vice president; Karin (Mainwaring) Newcomb, secretary; Barbara (O’Rourke) Minich, treasurer. The class valedictorian was Merry, and the salutatorian was Newcomb.

Class colors were blue and white, the class flower was the lupine, and the class motto was “First in Work, First in Fun, Senior Class of ’61.” And the class song was “Memories Are Made of This,” a tune written in 1955 by Terry Gilkyson, Richard Dehr and Frank Miller, and popularized by Dean Martin, whose version spent six weeks as Number One on the Billboard Top 40 charts in 1956.

At the reunion dinner, one of the featured speakers was former KHS (and KCHS) chemistry teacher, Shirley (Denison) Henley, who entertained the crowd with funny stories and a few playful jabs at administrators of the time.

Former KHS chemistry teacher, Shirley Denison, circa 1960.

Henley had transferred from Tustumena Elementary School, where she was helping to run a small pilot high school program, to KHS during the 1959-60 school year after being asked to teach some typing classes. “The only course I ever dropped in high school was typing,” she said. “I just am totally uncoordinated.”

At the dinner, she apologized to the students who had taken her first-ever chemistry offering: “I told them about the asbestos plates that were used under the Bunsen burners,” she said. “Now I see these advertisements for mesothelioma, and I think, ‘Oh my God, what have I done!’”

Fortunately for everyone concerned, the members of the Class of ’61 seem to have done just fine. Many of them married within a year or two of graduation. Myla and Lee McFarland, for instance, recently celebrated their 50^th wedding anniversary, and several others aren’t far behind in celebrating their own.

The graduates have also produced plenty of offspring, traveled far and wide, hve created businesses and had careers, made a substantive difference in their communities, and shared the bond of once belonging to a small collective called the Class of ’61.

Many of them were friends in high school and have remained so, regardless of distances and the long passage of time.

Sports & Other Traditions

The first KHS prom occurred in the spring of 1959. The theme was “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.” Music for the evening came from long-running vinyl records played over the loud speakers from the main office.



At the recent 50-year reunion for the KHS Class of '61, there was some disagreement over the genesis of the current KCHS mascot, but one former member of that class, Shane Griffin, who moved to Missouri to complete his final year of school--offered this email explanation concerning the origin: "I can assure you, with no equivocation whatsoever, that it was the valedictorian of the Class of '59, then student council president, Kim Griffin, that submitted, campaigned and secured the Kenai Kardinal as our mascot." Shane was a KHS sophomore when his older sister, Kim, succeeded in her mascot-naming efforts.

"Just as the Bald Eagle is not spread over all America, I (not anyone I know) have never seen a cardinal in the Kenai area," Griffin wrote. "But Kim's mother was from Missouri, and we had been there a lot visiting our grandparents, etc. So, for the same reasons the baseball team of St. Louis, Missouri, chose the Cardinal as their namesake and mascot, Kim was enamored of the red (C)Kardinal, and got enough support to get it voted in."

Most of the other mascot choices have been lost to memories fading over more than five decades, but one of the possibilities not selected in the school vote was the “Kenai Koyotes.”

There is also some disagreement about who drew the first Kardinal once the mascot was decided upon. Some insist that first image came from Cary Bear, but Myla (Moore) McFarland was the creator of the first-ever Kenai Kardinals banner.

“I designed the Kardinal banner and won the contest for the design,” said McFarland. “It (the banner) was at Kenai High for a long time until someone stole it, and they made a new one with a similar design.”



With a mascot and colors selected, and a new gymnasium in place, it was natural that basketball became an official school sport, starting in 1958-59. Coached by Paul Smith and playing against mainly JV squads from other schools, the fledgling Kards hit the hardwood to the boisterous approval of local fans.

Mary France remembers the first game in the old gym (which later became a sort of multi-purpose room): “It was packed. I mean there was standing room only in there. It was the first time anybody in town had ever even seen a (local) basketball game. I can’t tell you who the team was that came there to play, but I took tickets at the first game. Everybody in town was there.”

Basketball gave area residents an excuse to venture out into the cold and also gave them a unified rooting interest. “All of the teachers there, we went with the basketball team to Seldovia to watch them play,” France said. “We went over by boat and stayed the night. The boys played ball, and we came back the next day.”

In addition to the ballplayers there were newly minted cheerleaders and a pep club to boost team spirits and stir up the crowd.

In the second year, under new coach Jim Evenson, the Kardinals began playing varsity ball. Among the best players in those early seasons, according to Evenson, were Ross and Chris Cooper, Bill Robinson, Eric Thompson, Vic Tyler, Doug Jones and Gary Davis. Evenson said that his teams fared well against the other squads in the Southcentral League—Kodiak, Homer and Seward—and even won occasionally against teams from the much bigger Anchorage schools.




Before hoops became a hit, however, other high school sports got their starts. A 1956-57 copy of the student gazette, The Moosepaper, makes reference to school teams in track, softball, volleyball and soccer. Track meets in Homer were held out on the spit until the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake altered the geography and forced the athletes to compete farther inland.

One of the sports that may go back the furthest in time is ice hockey, which France recalls being played as far back as 1954 on a rink between the Kenai School (pre-expansion) and the Methodist Church.

“When I taught Home Ec one year, I ended up driving part of the team to Ninilchik,” France said. “Wayne Tachick was playing, and he got hit in the mouth with a hockey stick, and he skated over to me and handed me half of his two front teeth.”

After 104 years of public school in Kenai, some of the rules have changed: Most Kenai students are now actually from Kenai itself; hockey players have better protection for their mouths; and neither principals nor anyone else is allowed to bring guns onto campus, even to confront surly moose or mooching dogs.

But much of the rest has remained the same: Students still start in the fall, still battle the snows of winter and Kenai’s persistent wind, and still graduate in the spring when most of the frost has left the soil. And in KCHS, students are still urged not to step on the part of the commons floor containing the Kardinal logo—thereby demonstrating a sign of respect for a traditional symbol concocted more than a half-century before many of those students enrolled as freshmen.