"Not What She Expected--But Better"

Katherine Parker poses outside her Soldotna homestead cabin in the 1960s.

NOT WHAT SHE EXPECTED--BUT BETTER

MAY 2011

After the small black bear stood and smeared filthy paw prints on the front window of her homestead cabin, Katherine Parker liked them as a conversation piece, so she refused to clean them off. She also enjoyed the lynx they once followed up their driveway, the moose that her husband Charlie usually harvested annually to feed the family, and the home that they shared at the top of hill leading into Soldotna.

This was the life she came to love—but it was a far cry from the life she had envisioned as a young adult.

Back in her early 20s—as a first-year high school teacher, single and idealistic, fresh from the halls of Northern State Teachers College in Aberdeen, S.D.—Parker never imagined the life she would come to know: as a pioneering small-town newspaper reporter and a resident of Alaska for more than half a century.

Born Katherine Kranick in tiny Elgin, N.D., in 1924, she was the sister of a teacher brother, and the daughter of a teacher mother and an auto dealer/mechanic father who preferred to spend his time gambling.

Before she reached public-school age, Parker and her family moved to Mobridge, S.D., less than two miles from the east bank of the muddy Missouri River. There, while her mother taught grade school to Sioux children on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, and her father slipped off to card rooms to make real money, Parker excelled in English, history and business classes and graduated from high school in 1942.

In her youth, Parker also took violin and piano lessons —funded, like her college education, by the winnings from her father’s gambling. “I was pretty good, but I think I just wasn’t a natural musician,” she said. “When I went to college, I played in the orchestra. It wasn’t first violin, but it was second, though. It was kind of thrilling.”

From high school, it seemed only natural to Parker to follow her mother and sibling into the teaching profession, and by 1945 she had landed a job teaching English and business (shorthand, typing and bookkeeping) to high school students in Faith, S.D. She went on to brief stints in Coulee Dam, Wash., and Deadwood, S.D., before her passion for teaching flamed out and she began to seek other options.

“I think there was a period when I wished that I had gone into writing,” Parker said. “It was one of those things I really enjoyed and felt I was pretty good at, but I wondered if I could make money at writing.” Such doubts would delay her writing career for another decade, but her adventurous spirit and a sense of romance impelled her northward.

Parker with a friend and two king crabs in Homer, probably in the 1960s.

In the fall of 1954, 30-year-old Parker decided to move to Alaska. “I thought, ‘I’ll be back in two years,’” she said. “But maybe I was thinking of getting married, too.” She liked the territory’s lopsided ratio of men to women, and she liked the idea of the type of men she might meet on the Last Frontier. “’The odds are good, but the goods are odd,’ they were saying, way back then,” Parker said.

Before she could make the acquaintance of any potential suitors, however, she received word that her mother had suffered a heart attack. Parker returned to South Dakota to help her mother, who had been divorced from her gambler husband for many years, was living alone, and was still teaching. After her recovery, she returned to the classroom and lived to be 93 years old.

Parker returned to Alaska, arriving in Palmer in the heart of the winter. She began working as a school secretary for Palmer superintendent William T. Zahradnicek, one of the founders of the Alaska School Activities Association and later the State Commissioner of Education under Gov. Bill Egan. She enjoyed working for “Mr. Z,” but she quickly met another individual who changed the course of her life.

Until this point, she said, Parker had never set foot inside a bar, but in 1955 she found herself in a Palmer establishment where she encountered Gertrude Felzien, the aunt of a young man she appeared to be shopping around. “She said, ‘You must meet my nephew.’ I think she was kind of looking for a woman for him.”

Felzien invited Katherine to a party, where she met the nephew, an Anchorage civil engineer and surveyor named Charles Lincoln Parker, whom she married the following year. She said right from the start she thought Charlie was a good-looking man, and it appears the feelings were mutual.

“They said that he’d had so many dates arranged for him and he always came back saying, ‘She wasn’t my type.’ And then they said, when he came back from our date, they asked him, and he said, ‘Yeah, she’s my type.’ So I don’t know what that says, but it was good.”

Katherine and Charlie Parker in 1956, the year they married.

Shortly after their marriage, Katherine moved to Anchorage, and the Parkers borrowed about $7,000 from Charlie’s parents to buy themselves a home on F Street.

Charlie, who was born in Juneau in 1922 and was working as an airport construction engineer, had, in 1952, surveyed the Soldotna subdivision of Jack and Dolly Farnsworth, and had fallen in love with the area. He had secured some property through the surveying job, and he set to work to also purchase some homestead land—specifically a piece of land atop a hill because he wanted a view.

When he got the 40 acres he wanted, he and Katherine moved to Soldotna in 1961 and built their homestead cabin.

“Charlie built the cabin on the highest point of the hilltop we homesteaded,” Katherine wrote in the early 1980s. “When the leaves left the trees, the lights of town were revealed. There were just a few and I knew whose they were. Twenty years later, we have moved into a new home built on the same spot as the cabin. But now a myriad of lights cover the flats below.”

The Parkers work to frame their homestead cabin.

In 1963, the Parkers welcomed their first child, Nancy, who died in a drowning accident in 1965. In 1966, a second daughter, Pattey, was born.

Meanwhile, two pioneering women journalists were paving the way for Parker’s new career as a reporter. The first of these women was Mable Smith, who had become the key writer for The Cheechako News in the early 1960s. The second woman was Seward’s Beverly Dunham, who in 1966 started The Seward Phoenix-Log and hired Parker to be her correspondent for all meetings of the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly and the school board.

Employing her skills in the Gregg style of shorthand, Parker sat up front at these meetings and in her narrow notebook scribbled furiously the information needed to write thorough stories for Dunham, while simultaneously submitting similar versions to The Anchorage Times. It was an arrangement that suited all parties.

“It sure was handy for us because it would have been really difficult to do it (cover the meetings), otherwise,” said Dunham, who added that she appreciated the fairness and impartiality in Parker’s writing. And by 1972, with Pattey enrolled in public school and Mable Smith having retired from the Cheechako, Parker was hired by publisher Loren Steward to fill the vacancy. She worked for the paper until it folded under new ownership in 1986.

“I was really glad I could go into newspaper work,” said Parker, who quickly became the Cheechako’s main writer and was its city editor in its final years. “You got to go to work on Monday morning and just look forward to what had happened. I was interested in the news and I was interested in writing. It gave me something to do, and for myself to be proud of. I always tried to be balanced and not let my politics interfere or get to be obvious in anything I was writing.”

The same, however, could not be said for her husband.

The Parkers and the Johnsons show off the results of their clamming efforts.

As visitors to his map shop could attest, the cigar-smoking, cantankerous Charlie loved politics and argumentation, and under the moniker “The Muckraker” he wrote regular and often inflammatory columns about the goings-on of the Kenai Peninsula. When Katherine joined the newspaper, Stewart began handing her Charlie’s columns to edit.

“He (Stewart) knew I would be up to getting anything that might put us in jail—libel or slander,” said Katherine. “I was Charlie’s proofreader. He knew it, too. And Charlie, once in a while, he would say, ‘God, you took the guts out of it.’ But I was just kind of a necessary block there because he went across the line every once in a while because whatever he thought always just came out of his mouth. He didn’t hold anything back.”

They made a good journalistic pair—Katherine reporting the news, and Charlie commenting on it.

They also made a good pair of what Charlie liked to call “urban homesteaders”—living close enough to civilization to reap its benefits, despite visits from curious black bears—and they remained married until Charlie’s death in 2001.

Katherine, now 86, still tends to Charlie’s map shop and keeps a critical eye bent toward the news of the day.