CAST OF CHARACTERS
FEBRUARY 2013
Author’s
note: When histories are written, some individuals are inevitably
remembered more readily than others; however, it is important to never lose
sight of the many accomplishments of those who may be less widely known. Here
is a selection of brief bios concerning people who once lived on the central
Kenai Peninsula.
NINA ROBINSON
For
several decades, it was almost impossible to vote in the Sterling Precinct
without running into election volunteer Nina Robinson. She was a fixture at the
sign-in table, and she could be seen opening the registration booklet to each
individual’s name before he or she even fished out a voter’s card.
 |
| Nina Robinson, 1980. |
Robinson
seemed to know everyone in the community. And why not, since she was one of the
first to actually live in the Sterling area. Additionally, she didn’t exactly
keep to herself while her husband, Jesse, was out building roads. Nina was a
founding member of the Sterling Homemakers Club, a part-time Sterling
postmaster, the record keeper for the family dairy farm business, and a strong
promoter of the foundation of the Sterling Community Club.
She
also helped to raise five children and was active in area schools.
Gwin
went on to establish an eponymous Cooper Landing restaurant, but the following
year the Robinsons checked out land in the area known initially as Naptowne,
and in 1948 they made a permanent move.
By
1949, they had their own hand-dug well and a windmill pump to extract the
water. Nine years later, they had electricity in their home.
Jesse
worked for the Alaska Road Commission early on and then later on the building
of the Wildwood Army Station and Swanson River Road. Meanwhile, Nina kept the
home fires burning and tended to their growing family.
When she died at the age of 80 in June 2005, Nina was considered a Sterling-area pioneer noted for her frugality and her civic-mindedness.
BILLY McCANN
Billy
McCann could throw a punch as well as he could mix a drink, run a wire, or lend
a hand. During several decades in Alaska, he exhibited all three skills during
a lifetime of athletics, bartending, electrical work, and public service,
mostly centered in Kenai.
 |
| Billy McCann. |
In
1938, while in his early 20s, McCann came to Alaska to take a break from his
professional boxing career in Washington. Instead, he boxed in Juneau while
also working construction. The following year, he began tending bar, and in
1940 he traveled to Sitka and won the Alaska welterweight title. He won the
Southeastern middleweight crown in 1941, but he also made an important career
move when boxing referee Mac McGuern, a leader in the local electricians’
union, got McCann into the union as an apprentice.
McCann
was in and out of Alaska for a while, but when he came to Ketchikan in 1944, he
was a journeyman electrician and became the coach of the Coast Guard boxing
team. When he returned to Alaska again in 1949, he came to stay.
He moved
to Kenai in 1953 to work on the Wildwood Station project for Langlois Electric.
Until he retired as an electrician in 1981, he also worked for the Kenai Native
Association, for ARCO on the North Slope, and for City Electric on the
Collier’s expansion.
Over
the nearly five decades he spent on the peninsula, he bought stock in Food and
Spirits, Inc., and managed its property—the Rainbow Bar; became the controlling
owner of the Rig Bar and worked for Rob Mika at the Lamplight Bar; served on
the Kenai City Council and the Borough Assembly; was a long-time member of the
Lion’s Club, and became the first president of the Nikishka Chamber of
Commerce.
After
his death in 2001, the Borough Assembly honored McCann posthumously for his many
civic accomplishments.
ED HOLLIER
Ralph
Soberg, Ed Hollier’s predecessor as general foreman for the highway department,
once called Hollier “one of the best dozer operators” he’d ever worked with.
More than that, said Soberg, Hollier “was one hell of a good man.”
Many
people on the central Kenai Peninsula agreed. Hollier served on the original
Kenai school board and remained there after the Kenai Peninsula Borough was
formed in 1964. He continued to serve on the school board until 1975.
 |
| Joanna and Ed Hollier. |
“He
was very vocal about keeping extra-curricular activities in the schools,” wrote
his wife of 41 years, Joanna, in Hollier’s 1989 obituary. “In ’69 we had the
same kind of economic crunch as we have now and there was the same talk of
cutting out activity programs. He was concerned about keeping the activities in
the schools.”
Hollier
also promoted youth activities outside of the schools. He supported the Boy
Scouts and Little League baseball programs and helped establish the Babe Ruth
League in the Kenai area. He also aided in the construction of the first
football field for Kenai Central High School, and the field was later named in
his honor.
Hollier
was born on July 5, 1917, in Borden, Saskatchewan, Canada, and became a
naturalized U.S. citizen in 1932. Before moving from Washington to Alaska in
1938 to work on road-building projects, he served for three years in the
Civilian Conservation Corps.
Once
he moved to Alaska, he left only to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps for four
years in the Pacific Theater during World War II. After his discharge as a
sergeant, he returned to the state, where he met and married Joanna. They
homesteaded off Beaver Loop Road and had three children.
In
addition to his school board affiliation, Hollier was active in the Methodist
Church in Kenai and spent more than 30 years building roads in Alaska. Named
“Highway Man of the Year” in 1977, he retired from the Department of
Transportation in 1984.
WILMA THOMPSON
Since
former U.S. commissioner and borough mayor Stan Thompson had been a lawman and
a lawmaker, he had to grow a thick skin and become accustomed to having people
dislike him or disagree with his politics.
But
no one had an unkind word to say about his mother.
When
she died at age 92 in 1988, the beloved Wilma Thompson, who taught elementary
school until she was 65, who was active for decades in her church, and who was
renowned for all the cookies she dispersed to youngsters in Thompson Park, was
known by kinfolk and non-kin alike as “Granny” or “Grandma.”
Born
Wilma Freeland on Nov. 16, 1895, in Columbus Junction, Iowa, she married
attorney Jasper “J.W.” Thompson on Thanksgiving Day in 1919. At the time, only
Wilma had an Alaska connection—her grandfather had been in Nome during the
gold-mining era—but after 25 more years in Iowa, both Thompsons were ready for
a change and a shift northward.
In
1944, they packed their bags and moved to Nenana, where J.W. became the school
superintendent and Wilma a teacher. A year later, they traveled by boat from
Nenana to Unalakleet and then flew on to Nome, where they worked in the school
for a year before moving again, this time to Seldovia. After three years there,
J.W. was ready to return to the practice of law, so the Thompsons moved north
to Fairbanks. Then in 1954, they made their final move—to Kenai.
They
homesteaded in the area now known as Thompson Park near Beaver Creek, and Wilma
returned to teaching—first as a substitute at the Kenai School, then as a
regular teacher. When forced into retirement in 1961, she created a private
kindergarten, which she operated for several years.
Meanwhile,
as their four children grew up, graduated from college and started families and
businesses of their own, Wilma and J.W. were subdividing and selling off chunks
of their homestead and marveling at the changes being wrought around them by
the discovery of oil near Swanson River.
J.W.’s
heart problems led to his death in 1977, but Wilma continued to live in her
Thompson Park home for many more years before moving to the Anchorage Pioneer
Home, living near her long-time friend and former teaching colleague, Jetret
“Jettie” Petersen.
VICTOR ANTONE JR.
It’s
not all that unusual these days to find someone who was born in Kenai. A few
decades back, that was more of a rarity. Victor Antone was born in Kenai in
August 1922, and his mother was born in Kenai, too.
An
Athabascan Native, Antone was born in a log cabin, and at a very young age he
was venturing out with his father to work the traplines and learn the trapper’s
trade. In interviews he gave in the 1970s and ’80s, he recalled catching fish
in the Nikiski-area lakes to feed to his father’s dog team, and salmon from the
ocean to help feed his family. He said they liked eating porcupine and grouse
when they could get them, along with ducks and geese, beluga and bear and
moose.
When
Antone was a teenager—after three or four years of schooling in Kenai—he was
sent away to Sheldon Jackson boarding school in Sitka, but he hated the
strictness of the regimen there and so he ran away by hopping on the back of a
garbage truck and slowly working his way back to Kenai.
He
worked the cannery circuit for a while, and then during World War II he worked
on the railroad until he went out to the Aleutians as a civilian employee of
the military. He remembered the mud and the rain and the bombing raids out on
Attu.
After
the war, he returned to cannery work and continued to trap in the winters.
In
an interview published in 1983, he explained his fondness for the outdoors: “I
still like the wood a lot. I could live out there now. I’m still trapping.
That’s what keeps me going. I set snares for wolves and mink and muskrats. If I
lay around too much, my legs get stiff and I get restless. Sometime I walk
around, cross the lake, or hunt for rabbits just to get out, for the fun of it.
No matter how old I get, I’ll be doing the same thing, trapping and hunting. That’s
the way my dad taught me, and I can’t change it. I tried to, but I can’t.”
Antone
died at age 74 in September 1996.
RUTH POLLARD
It
has been said that behind every successful man there stands a great woman, and
that certainly seems to have been the case for George Pollard, a long-time and
highly regarded Kasilof hunting guide who was married to his wife, Ruth, for 48
years.
Born
in Germania, Pennsylvania, in 1923, she became a teacher in the mid-1940s and
taught physical education at a private parochial school in her home state.
Known as a strong disciplinarian and respected by students and staff, she moved
to Alaska in 1957 and taught P.E. in Anchorage, the city in which George had
been born.
Bound
by a love of the outdoors and each other, Ruth and George married in 1959, and
not long afterward they moved onto their new 160-acre homestead in Kasilof.
Together they built a rustic 16x20 cabin and shared numerous outdoor
adventures. With Ruth as his assistant, George began a guiding and outfitting service
centered on the area surrounding Tustumena Lake.
Environmentalists
at heart, the Pollards became members of the Kenai Peninsula Conservation
Society, occasionally hosting functions at their home and leading group hikes
into the local countryside.
When
she died in November 2006 after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s, her obituary
noted her membership in the Kasilof Community Church, the recent death of her
sister, Mary Hawkins of Ninilchik, and her enjoyment of bird watching and
outdoor recreation.
 |
| Laura Tyson wrote for this statewide publication. |
LAURA TYSON
Born and raised in Minnesota, Laura Tyson moved to Alaska in
1945 with her first husband, Walt Keller, and a few years later became the
second postmaster of the community of Naptowne, now known as Sterling. She
remained as postmaster until 1958, when she resigned and recommended her
successor, Gloria McNutt, for the job.
While married to her second husband, Walt Pedersen, she
started a small grocery store and tackle shop, which she operated at first out
of her home. She also acted as a barber and had clients come all the way from
Kenai to get their hair cut.
For a while, she authored a column called “The Homesteader’s
Wife” in The Alaskan Agriculturist,
and she ran the Moose River Resort for many years.
LUCY CASEY
In the fall of 1964, Lucy Casey became interested in art and
enrolled in classes at the fledgling Kenai (Peninsula) Community College. She
said she struggled with her paintings for about three years but was continually
encouraged by her instructors. Eventually, she won awards for her paintings and
in 1970 had her work displayed in the Grant Hall gallery on the campus of
Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage.
“People say you have talent, but you really have to study,”
she said in Narratives on the
Kenai-Soldotna Community. She said that she studied long hours every day
and tried to paint a picture a week for constructive criticism.
Born as Chinitka “Lucy” Kawaglek in Akiak (near Bethel), she
attended school in Eklutna and lived in Palmer before moving to Anchorage,
where she married Alden Casey. She moved to Kenai in 1959 and homesteaded in
the Nikiski area.
“Hardest part was packing supplies on my back and building
my cabin,” she wrote in Once Upon the
Kenai. “The windows were Visqueen and the shelves were Blazo boxes—lights
were Coleman lantern. I trapped in the winter and fished commercially in
summer.”
PAUL NESTOR
One of many individuals to purchase a chunk of Howard
Binkley’s homestead land in Soldotna, Paul Nestor started Soldotna’s first
sawmill and planing mill. In 1948, he created Nestor Concrete Products in
Soldotna, operating at first out of a Quonset hut and supplying concrete blocks
to Wildwood Station and many other buildings in the area until 1967.
The Soldotna Store, the community’s first grocery (owned and
operated by Don and Verona Wilson), was erected by mason Jim Porter from blocks
supplied by Nestor’s business.
A native New Yorker, Nestor moved to Alaska in 1940 and
began working for the Alaska Road Commission in 1945. He was involved in some
of the early work on the Sterling Highway before moving on to businesses of his
own.
Nestor also owned Soldotna Sand & Gravel and the
Soldotna Texaco station before he moved to Missouri in the late 1960s.
 |
| Paul Nestor and family in Soldotna, 1968. |
ARTHUR “SWEDE” FOSS
Despite his nickname of “Swede,” Arthur Foss was not
Swedish. Foss was actually one of 10 children of Norwegian immigrant parents,
Peter and Anna Foss, who raised their large brood on a farm in rural North
Dakota.
By the 1940s, after serving in the Army at Fort Richardson
near Anchorage, the colorful Swede Foss was a commercial fisherman in the
Kasilof area and may have been the owner and operator of the Porcupine fish
trap. He sold his fishing site to Herman Hermansen and spent the remainder of
his life involved in various jobs in the Kenai-Soldotna area.
He ferried passengers in his skiff around Cook Inlet and was
known for not always picking them up when he had promised, sometimes forcing
them to wait for hours or even days, or perhaps find other means altogether to
get home.
Foss also owned a single-engine aircraft for a while, and
his record for prompt pick-ups remained intact.
Acknowledged as a skilled builder with logs, he aided in
numerous construction and restoration projects. He was praised by some for his
ingenuity, and he once reportedly crafted a gasket from birch bark when he had
trouble with his outboard engine while motoring up a remote stream.
Foss was also involved in at least two area bars, serving as
both part-owner and bartender for each. And in Kenai in 1967 he and his
accordion-playing wife, Dottie, took part in the notoriously drunken funeral
for George Dudley.
PAUL WILSON
Born in Kenai in the early 1870s, Paul Wilson was an early
mail carrier. On occasion, Wilson was accompanied by his son, Alex, who later
became a carrier on his own peninsula route.
On Aug. 11, 1961, under the headline “Mail by Dog Team,” the
Cheechako News published an article
about Wilson’s work on the mail route. Here are a few excerpts:
“Every morning except Sunday Alexander W. ‘Alex’ Wilson
picks up mail sacks at the Kenai Post Office for Soldatna, Sterling, Kasilof,
Cohoe and Clam Gulch. Four hours and 20 minutes and 134 miles later he is back
in Kenai. Alex uses an automobile and a big part of his route is over asphalt
pavement.
“Thirty-eight years ago Paul Wilson Sr. Picked up mail at
the Kenai Post Office for Cooper Landing and the railroad depot at Moose Pass.
Two week and 196 miles later he was back in Kenai with the monthly mail.
“Transportation was by dog team during the period from
December to April, and the trail was often unbroken snow. Many times Paul had
to break trail both ways.
“Frequently in these first years the monthly mail for Kenai
would weigh as much as 1,200 pounds and required double-tripping, since 600
pounds was about maximum load over the long and rough trail. When
double-tripping was necessary, Paul needed all of the 14 days allowed, to relay
up part of the load, unloaded it and go back and relay up the rest.
“The route followed reads like the history of the Kenai
Peninsula. From Kenai the trail went to Philips Cabin, Moose River, Millers
Cabin and then to Middle Cabin, from there to Jean Lake and then to Cooper
Landing and Lawing. Last stop and turnaround point was the railroad depot.”
Paul Wilson was known for getting the mail where it was
supposed to be and on time. He delivered the mail on this route for nine years,
making his final trip in 1934.
 |
| Paul Wilson and his mail sled in front of the old Russian school in Kenai, 1930. |
K. LEWIS FIELDS
K.
Lewis “Lew” Fields was an ambitious man who wasn’t afraid to work hard. He was
a construction worker, a homesteader, a farmer, and a strong contributor to
civic affairs. He and his wife, Gladys, raised six children on their property
in the Sterling area.
Lew Fields
moved from Salt Lake City to Alaska in 1939 to work on the construction of the
Whittier train tunnel. He became adept at operating heavy equipment and worked
on the building of the Sterling Highway. During that time, he got a good look
at the Sterling area that he would soon call home.
In 1955, with a family of only three kids at the time, Lew and Gladys homesteaded a patch of the 1947 Kenai Burn that Fields described this way in Once Upon the Kenai: "Nothing but burned trees. No birds, no grass and no nothing except burned trees and a little shack.... In 1955, were going to cut out a farm on the Kenai Peninsula. The craziest idea we have had yet, but it was fun and a good place to raise our family."
The
Fieldses cleared 200 acres of land. They raised barley, which grew well but
lacked a substantial market to make it commercially profitable.
They also tried raising hogs. The January 1959 issue of The Alaska Sportsman featured a photograph of a smiling Fields standing at a butchering station. His right hand was placed on a bled-out, seven-month-old hog suspended from a meat hook. According to the paragraph accompanying the photo, "There's a profit in pork on the Kenai Peninsula."
Fields raised 60 hogs in 1958 on his
homestead, feeding them only a cooked potato-barley mix in addition to the
roots, grass and alfalfa that the hogs foraged for themselves. The pictured
hog, Fields said, dressed out at 145 pounds. At the selling price of 45 cents a
pound, Fields earned enough money to make plans to raise hogs again in 1959,
but eventually he abandoned farming altogether and stuck mainly to construction
work on a contract basis.
By 1972, Fields was also becoming active in
local politics and ran successfully for the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly,
where he served until defeated by Merrill Sikorski in a run-off election in
1979.
In his Once
Upon the Kenai remembrance (published in 1984), Fields recounted struggling
against the weather, battling a fire on his roof and plenty of pesky and
sometimes unpredictable wildlife, and the joys of working as part of a family.
He ended with this comment: “Homesteading is a hard life, and I am not sure I
would want to go that route again…. This is home to our family of six children,
and it was cut from a wilderness of old burned snags. It is all green now with
new growth and quite pretty. Lots of birds and wildlife. We have comfortable
living, and we do like it. It is home.”
AMANDA “MANDY” WALKER
Amanda
“Mandy” Kellar was a registered nurse and hospital administrator in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
when she met the man she was going to marry—Delta Calvin “Pappy” Walker. She
just wasn’t aware of it at the time.
In an account written in 2006 by Mary Ford of the Kenai
Historical Society, Mandy said that Pappy, whom she referred to as “an old
fossil,” had “made eyes” at her and called her “honey” and “pet” for years, but
she wasn’t interested in his flirtations. Besides, he was nine years older than
she was, and he was already married.
Then, in 1942, he left his first wife and the state of
Oklahoma and ventured to Alaska to help build an Army base at Nome. He grew
fond of the Last Frontier and decided to stay, settling in Kenai but never forgetting
about Mandy, despite marrying a second wife, Jessebelle.
When he became single again in 1949, he wrote to Mandy and
attempted to entice her northward. “He told me he still loved me and all that
blarney,” she wrote many years later.
In other words, she recognized a line when she heard it, so
she once again ignored his advances.
But a year later, she received a new written message from
Pappy that changed everything: “It’s a year since I wrote you,” he penned. “It
seems to me you could write and tell me to go to hell or something—Walker.”
Something about his directness appealed to her. She wrote back.
 |
| Pappy Walker (center) wooed Mandy Kellar north to Alaska. |
He sent her a dozen roses.
And the romance on. Eventually, she succumbed and agreed in
1950 to move to Kenai to become Pappy’s third wife.
Pappy encouraged Mandy to ride the Alaska Steamship north,
but she ignored his advice and insisted on driving. When she arrived in
Anchorage, she learned that the Seward Highway was not yet complete, so she
hurried to get her car and herself on the next train to Moose Pass, where she
navigated the mostly finished Sterling Highway to Kenai.
She was dismayed at the sight of his small filthy cabin
(littered with poker chips, cards, beer bottles and mud), irritated by his
insistence that they get hitched right away because he needed to leave soon for
four days of fish camp, and incensed by his shaggy appearance. She sent him on
to fish camp without the nuptials and cleaned his place in his absence.
When he returned, she directed his renewal of personal
hygiene and got him dressed in the suit she had cleaned.
Ford wrote this of the wedding itself: “The ceremony was to
be conducted by U.S. Commissioner Paul Wise in his home. A woman in a bathrobe
met them at the door and told them that her husband was at Kenai Joe’s (bar).
Pappy went after him and also recruited Bob Castleberry, Kenai’s attorney, to
be best man. Pauline Wise, in her bathrobe, was bridesmaid.”
The marriage, which was as full of character as the
participants, lasted 11 years, ending with Pappy’s death in 1961. (The Totem
Tracers’ book, Cemetery Inscriptions and
Area Memorials in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula Borough, says only that Pappy
died in 1961. No month is listed, and no birth date is mentioned. However, when
Pappy and Jessebelle had a bear encounter in August 1948, the Anchorage Daily Times listed Pappy’s age
then as 55. So he was likely about age 68 at his death.)
In her own version of her marriage, Mandy Walker ended with
these words: “He was quite a character. God threw the mold away after he made
Pappy.”
Mandy outlived Pappy by many years and remained in Kenai for
the rest of her life. She claimed that her life in Alaska taught her, among
other things, how to operate a bulldozer, pick fish, milk cows, start a
gas-powered washing machine, clean clams, can moose meat on a stove, pilot a
45-foot fishing boat, and bake proper biscuits.
In her later years, she also volunteered at the Kenai public
library.
Mandy Walker died in 1999 at the age of 96.
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