"Mortician Elementary School"

Soldotna Elementary School undergoes one of its many expansions during the 1960s.

MORTICIAN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

APRIL 2011

Nineteenth-century American essayist Charles Dudley Warner once wrote, “Politics makes strange bedfellows.” In the mid-20th century in Soldotna, however, the strangeness emanated from burgeoning school enrollment—pairing one elementary school class with a public library, and three others with a mortician.

To understand the rationale behind these pairings, one must first understand the times in which they occurred.

Soldotna Elementary School opened for business in 1960, the same year Soldotna became a fourth-class city, only one year after Alaska became a state, and only three years after the discovery of commercial quantities of oil at Swanson River. There was money to be made and opportunities to be had, and new residents thronged the central Kenai Peninsula in order to get a piece of the action.

The original Soldotna Elementary School structure, which even today sits at the core of the facility, consisted of only four classrooms. In those classrooms were 104 students, under the guidance of superintendent/teacher Charley Griffin, a Georgia transplant who was the autocrat of his own district since the Kenai Peninsula Borough had yet to be formed.

The backside of the 1962 expansion.

In its second year, the enrollment leaped to 248 students, and the expansions began. Classrooms were added in 1961-62, again in 1962-63, and again in 1963-64. Although the school finally managed to get ahead of the enrollment increases, the borough, created in 1964, found it necessary to expand Soldotna Elementary again in 1968 and then open Soldotna Junior High School in early 1970.

Even then, after grades 6-8 were moved to the junior high, the borough expanded Soldotna Elementary again in 1975 and once more in 1987.

But it was the earliest of these expansions that created the odd educational symbiosis in Soldotna.

While new rooms were being added in 1961-62, Soldotna went looking for a place to house two classes of students until construction was complete. Fortunately, within easy walking distance of the school was a newly built structure containing two empty offices. Rent was paid to the building’s owners, entrepreneur Madison L. “Red” Grange and his wife Beulah, who recognized a good opportunity.

The following year, with enrollment spiking again, the Granges expanded their office building, adding new units to accommodate new classes.

In 1961-62, Superintendent Griffin had moved his two oldest classes. The following year, however, he moved his four youngest. Into the hastily constructed Grange units went the first-grade classes of Jean Bardelli (now Brockel) and Dorothy Knight, and the second-grade class of a very pregnant Rose Ann English. Into a portion of the fledgling Soldotna Public Library went a combination class of second- and third-graders.

Versions vary—and tend to be hazy—as to how this blended arrangement worked. Three of the early board members and helpers at the library—Katherine Parker, Dolly Farnsworth and Betty Smith—remember the time with slight variations.



One of the first Soldotna librarians, Joyce Carver eyes the collection in 1965.

All of them agree—more or less—on the following: The library had its grand opening only a few weeks before the first day of school, during the July celebration of Soldotna Progress Days. During the festivities, Gov. Bill Egan had come to visit the small facility tucked into the lower left side of the downstairs of the Central Kenai Peninsula Medical Clinic. Next door, downstairs, was the dental office of Dr. Calvin Fair, D.D.S., who had moved in a year earlier.

Probably, in the space later occupied by the library, a certified public account named Ted Gaines had his office. And probably, once he departed and the library books were shelved there in his place, a temporary space was made for a small group of students.

Meanwhile, over in the Grange building, situated perpendicular to and just across a gravel parking lot from the clinic, a small fence separated the closest three units, all containing classrooms, from the last two units, containing the office and lab of John R. Bacak, director of the Copper Delta Mortuary.

Bacak, who had come from Ohio to Alaska in April, had in late June established his “peninsula-wide service,” a branch of a Cordova mortuary, owned and operated by 30-year Cordova resident and then Cordova postmaster, Hollis Hendricks.

First-grade teacher Brockel, whose room abutted Bacak’s office, remembers that generally her students paid more attention to their neighbor than she did: “They would see a car there, parked outside, and they would come in and say, ‘Well, there must be a body next door because the car is there.’”

At the other end of the building, in Rose Ann English’s classroom, then-second-grader Penny McClain said she remembered the mortician and thought his presence there was “spooky.” Despite her youth, she was aware of Bacak’s occupation, partly because of an experience by her older sister, an eighth-grader named Patricia.

Patricia used to babysit for Soldotna Elementary’s eighth-grade teacher, Frank Dunlap, who happened to be a friend of the mortician. One day, Patricia got a ride either to or from the Dunlap residence in Bacak’s vehicle at a time that a body was in the back. She was told that they had “extra company” on the trip.

The worst thing about being away from the main school, however, was not the cramped conditions in the library or the idea of dead bodies next door. The worst thing, according to Brockel and to Mary France, who filled in for English during her maternity leave, was the quality of the rooms themselves in the Grange building.

Since the wood-framed building sat on pilings, a crude set of steps led up to the single door leading into each classroom. Since each door led directly to the outside, each time the door was opened in winter, a blast of cold air was sent inside.

Indoors, a small heater sat under the single large window in front, with a second heater against the back wall. In winter, the heaters and the weak insulation offered poor warmth, so some of the children wore their winter garments indoors all day long.

Each classroom held one teacher’s desk, one teacher’s chair, and an array of student desks. Partitioned off in the back of the room was a small bathroom containing a single toilet and a single sink, with only cold running water.

No classroom contained a blackboard; instead, teachers unrolled long sheets of blank newsprint and affixed them to the walls with strips of masking tape. When the papers were filled, the teachers took them down and put up fresh ones. All custodial duties in these classrooms were the responsibility of the teachers.

On one particular Sunday that winter, Brockel came to her classroom to catch up on some work, and discovered that the flimsy latch on her door had not held during that weekend’s snowstorm. “It had blown open,” she said. “And the plumbing had frozen, and somehow or another a pipe had just burst, and there was water all over the floor, like an inch and a  half or two inches of water—just from wall to wall. You’d just go in and slosh-slosh-slosh. Oh God, what a mess! But that was the only time that year that that floor got washed.”

The playground was the driveway/parking lot in front of the Grange building, and Brockel said that the lack of equipment there was almost compensated for by the freedom of the teachers to have recess whenever they chose.

“If everybody was climbing walls and going crazy, you could say, ‘Okay, put on your coats. Get on your hats. And get out of here,’” said Brockel.

During especially cold winter recesses, recalled McClain, students would sometimes huddle around the exhaust vents from the indoor heaters to stay warm.

The best news about these arrangements was their temporary nature. On Feb. 6, 1963, according to the Cheechako News, 117 students were brought back into the fold—joining the rest of the school for the remainder of the year.

Meanwhile, Bacak lasted only a few months longer in Soldotna, the Grange building stood only a few more years, and the public library eventually moved out of its confined space in the clinic basement and into a home of its own.