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| Donnis Thompson in the 1950s. |
UNLUCKY
IN LOVE
MARCH 2012
Donnis Thompson had a bad feeling about the marriage—not her
own, of course, which was just fine, but the one she was about to officiate.
Still, she had a job to do.
In her early 20s in 1953, Donnis had come to Kenai to marry
Stan Thompson, with whom she had worked in Fairbanks for the Army Corps of
Engineers. Shortly after the couple settled in Kenai, Stan, who was in the
process of creating a building-supply business named Kenai Korners, was appointed
as U.S. Commissioner (a magistrate, essentially, in pre-statehood days), and
Donnis became his assistant commissioner. Therefore, when Stan was away, Donnis
had a part to play—of commissioner.
And thus it was that she was called upon to marry a middle-aged
Kenai couple—a pair she does not wish to identify, except to say that they were
known in the area as “heavy drinkers.”
In those days, Kenai had a population of about 300 people,
was still seven years away from voting to become a city instead of a village,
and offered few commercially profitable opportunities. The groom, as an
example, was a professional net-mender, and he repaired commercial fishing nets
year round. “All the time, really good, very fast,” Donnis said.
The bride had never cut her hair and typically braided it
into two thick pigtails that hung down her back to well below her waist. She
was proud of her long hair, and those braids would play a part in the lives of
the Thompsons again at a later time.
With Stan out of town, Donnis was approached about doing the
ceremony, and she didn’t like the stress. “I was scared silly,” she said. “I’d
never performed a marriage ceremony before, and I thought, ‘What if I don’t do
it right? What are the repercussions? Would the kids be illegitimate? What’s
going to happen?’”
Donnis decided that her best course was to strictly follow
the rules of such ceremonies and do everything precisely according to the book.
The book, in this case, was the U.S. Commissioner’s little
black book of rules, regulations and guidelines. In this book was a wedding
ceremony. “I read word for word from the little black book,” Donnis said. “And
I got every word in.”
The ceremony was performed in the commissioner’s Kenai office,
which Donnis described as being “about as big as a grandmother’s pantry,” with
a wall-to-wall counter behind which she stood to officiate. Dressed in town
clothes—nothing formal or fancy--the bride and groom, along with their handful
of witnesses, stood on the opposite side of the counter, crammed into the tiny
space.
Although she performed the ceremony flawlessly, she said, she
disliked the experience, and she hated the way the marriage turned out.
A short time after the ceremony, the couple moved out of
state. “They seemed fine at the time,” Donnis said. Within a few months,
however, alarming gossip began to filter back into the Kenai area: First, the
husband had had a heart attack (but survived). Second, the wife had tried to
commit suicide (but survived). Third, they had gotten a divorce.
Both of them eventually returned to the Kenai area, and the
Thompsons crossed paths, albeit briefly, with the ex-wife once again.
A few years later—still before statehood, when Stan’s
commission expired—the woman was sleeping on a couch at Eadie’s Frontier Club.
She had announced that she was tired because of some medication a doctor had
prescribed to her, and so she slept soundly. One of her long pigtails was
tucked underneath her, while the other one lay draped over an arm of the couch.
The sight of this dangling pigtail apparently posed too great
a temptation for a young taxi driver who ambled into Eadie’s to pick up a fare.
With no provocation, the cabbie pulled out his knife and proceeded to saw off
the pigtail before leaving the premises.
When she awoke and was informed of what had happened to her hair
and who had done the deed, the barbering victim went to the U.S. Commissioner
and filed charges against the taxi driver, who hadn’t exactly been hiding his
crime. In fact, he had been parading around other bars in town and bragging
about what he had done.
At the trial, Donnis said, the woman came into the courtroom
with her single braid wrapped around her head and tied up inside a bandana. She
won her case and received some sort of financial settlement from the young
cabbie. Afterward, she went into a beauty salon, had the lone pigtail lopped
off, got herself a perm, and came out “looking 20 years younger.”
Until statehood in 1959, Donnis continued in her capacity as assistant
commissioner, but she never again performed a marriage ceremony. “I figured it
wasn’t my thing,” she said. “I should not marry people. I couldn’t give
blessings, obviously.”
She decided not to officiate again, even if asked to do so.
“I said I’m not going to do any more. I told my husband, ‘Don’t go away if
there’s a wedding coming up.’ And he made sure that never happened again.”
Fortunately for the Thompsons, their own marriage has
withstood the test of time, despite some initial struggles. They arranged the
wedding by telephone between Fairbanks and Kenai; Donnis flew into Anchorage to
be married in a wine-colored dress that Stan called “purple,” a color he
disliked; Stan, who was hungry from an all-night, no-food working spree on the
plumbing at their home in Kenai, ate five plates of food at the all-you-can-eat
buffet at the Silver Dollar Club after the ceremony; the Kenai “cabin” that
Donnis had romanticized about was actually a two-room building with gray
sheathing on the outside and was “cleverly” placed between a muddy alley and the
back of a garage.
Despite such things, the Thompsons will celebrate 59 years
together in 2012.
