"Four Tales of Christmas"

Vern Gehrke, who played Santa locally for more than 20 years, reviews a youngster’s Christmas list during a 1983 stop at D&A Grocery..

Santa Vern 

DECEMBER 2010

Santa Claus has an image to protect.

Vern Gehrke, who portrayed Santa Claus for decades, understood the need to protect that image, which is why he purchased a top-notch Santa suit, why he played the part for so many years, and why he simply had to say no during the incident with the dogs.

Arriving in Alaska in the late 1960s—with an off-and-on history as a seasonal Santa dating back nearly a decade in Washington state—Gehrke became the most widely requested local Saint Nick until he hung up the red cap in about 1990, when he was in his late 70s. He died in 1995 at the age of 83.

During the incident with the dogs, Gehrke, who also was once transported into Soldotna on a shiny red fire engine, was on this occasion being hauled into town via dog team. The team had been patched together with “borrowed dogs from who knows who,” according to Gehrke’s widow, Allouise, and they were trotting irritably along the Spur Highway toward the center of town.

“The driver was having a little bit of a problem with them,” said Allouise. “They had stopped and were having a little squabble, so he had a broom that he was carrying with him, and he handed the broom to Vern and said, ‘Go break up that dog fight.’ And Vern handed the broom back to him and said, ‘I don’t think it would look very good for Santa to be beating on the dogs.’”

Gehrke began his portrayal of Santa—Allouise referred to it as a “career”—in the late 1950s during the time he was playing his guitar on a radio program in Bellingham, Wash. “Something happened there, where some organization had wanted a Santa Claus, and he ended up doing it,” Allouise said. “And how consistently he did it, I don’t know. That was kind of before my time.” Vern and Allouise were married in 1959.

“It must have been about a year after we were married, maybe two years, he started doing Santa (regularly), and as far as I know, he never quit,” she said.

Most of Gehrke’s Santa gigs in Washington involved appearances at private parties or at private homes with families that wanted seasonal portraits with Santa. And most of the time, Gehrke worked gratis.

The Gehrkes moved to Alaska in 1967 when Westinghouse hired Vern, who was an industrial electrician, to perform electrical maintenance on their big engines. The job didn’t turn out as advertised, however, said Allouise, so the Gehrkes moved to Soldotna, and Vern took on an electrician job working on various oil platforms just as Cook Inlet oil production was expanding rapidly.

Back in Washington, Gehrke had left behind his big red Santa suit and had no real intention to become Santa again, but when he saw a local need for a Santa with experience, he purchased a new costume and began anew.

Choosing a quality suit is important if appearances matter to the individual behind the beard, and Vern soon realized that he was in for the long haul.

“The first (suit) we got was just sort of so-so, but then we invested in a really good suit and the hairpiece and the beard,” said Allouise. “We figured if he was going to do it, we might as well do it right. So we did.”

Rising costs since 1960s have sent the price for high-end Santa suits soaring. This month, one online seller offered its top-of-the-line, “burgundy pile plush” and satin-lined Majestic Santa Suit for $579, excluding the wig and beard, the glasses, and the boot-like sleeves that cover the faux Santa’s regular footwear. The most expensive wig-and-beard combo offered by the same company, Costumes for Santa, is made of yak hair and sells for $400.

There are, of course, much more economical versions available of the suits, wigs and beards, and all other Santa accessories. A complete cut-rate Santa set-up can be had for as little as $200.

Allouise said that she couldn’t remember exactly what they spent when Vern decided to invest in a better suit, but she figured that it was at least $100. A hundred bucks in about 1970 translates to approximately $550 today, so the investment was sizable, but they never questioned whether it was worthwhile.

Typically, Gehrke had a small mustache of his own, which helped hold in place the Santa beard that was held to his face with an elastic band that encircled his head. The generous fur on the Santa hat hid the elastic, and the glasses (specially crafted by a local ophthalmologist, Dr. Peter Cannava) helped make the disguise almost impenetrable. And although Gehrke had a fairly generous natural belly, he usually augmented his paunch with a small pillow tucked just above the beltline in order to enhance his jolly appearance.

Gehrke began his local Santa stint by working wherever he was called. Early on, he worked at North Road Automotive in North Kenai, and, since his appearance had not been widely advertised, he resorted to occasionally standing out in the parking lot and waving to passing cars in order to draw in customers.

Later, however, he became a regular at the Blazy Mall in Soldotna, and then eventually at the Central Peninsula Mall. Whenever possible, he worked his Santa appearances around his employment schedule and family responsibilities, beginning most years on the day after Thanksgiving and playing the part every day of the week until Christmas Eve.

Beyond his electrician duties, Gehrke was a busy man: He served from 1978 to 1982 on the Soldotna City Council and as vice mayor from 1982 to 1984, and he was also heavily involved in the city’s Little League Baseball program. Because of all his work in maintaining the baseball fields and because he secured the state funding for the construction of the newest field, that playing surface, Gehrke Field, was named in his honor.

During his stints at the mall, he employed Santa helpers—usually Allouise or one of their three daughters, often dressed in Santa hats and simple green or red vests—who snapped and sold Polaroid photos of children on Santa’s lap. They also sold cotton candy and manned a donation jar, the proceeds from which went to the Soldotna Little League.

His eldest daughter, Darlene (Gehrke) Conright, who said she enjoyed watching her father play Santa, occasionally had to assist him with transportation. “There were a few times that I went along to help him if he made any special calls (outside of the mall), mostly to drive him because the facial hair would get in his way, and he hated anyone to see him only half-dressed, so to say,” said Conright.

Allouise said that Vern was adept at dealing with children, a few of whom were deathly afraid of this imposing-looking man in the big red suit. “Mostly, I think, he would just talk to them,” she said, “and if it got to the point it was obvious they were going to have a really hard time, most of the time the moms just decided not to push them any further.”

Gehrke found his role as Santa gratifying, according to Allouise, but “at times he would kind of doubt himself. I can remember him saying one time, ‘Gehrke, what are you doing playing Santa?’ This is him talking to himself. ‘Here you are, so-many years old, and you’re still playing games.’ And then he got to thinking about the smiles on the kids’ faces and how pleased they were that they had seen Santa, and he decided that it was pretty much all well worth it.”

He also enjoyed keeping the Santa myth alive. “Oftentimes he would tell kids that the belief in Santa does not necessarily mean that you have to believe in a person,” said Allouise. “It’s a belief in a feeling, in a spirit of the season.”

(Yes, Vern, there is a Santa Claus.)

Joe Megargel memorial painting showing his homestead cabin.

 

Holiday Generosity

DECEMBER 2009

Joe and Ruby Megargel celebrated Christmas Eve 1959 with their friend, Carl Spetz, at the home of John and Inga Berg. When the Megargels returned home that night, they had no idea that their small Cohoe cabin would not survive until 1960.

On New Year’s Eve, the Megargels, who had homesteaded off Cohoe Loop only one year earlier, traveled north to ring in the new year at the home of “Whitey” Yurman at Boulder Point in Nikiski. In the meantime, back in Cohoe, one of the Megargels’ neighbors spotted trouble.

Jess Nicholas, who had homesteaded nearby in 1956 and had just been named state deputy magistrate at Kenai, discovered at about 7 p.m. that the Megargel home was on fire.

Details from that evening are sketchy, as most of the people living in the immediate area at the time have either moved or passed away, and the front-page Cheechako News story on January 15, 1960, was only a few lines long and not especially informative.

But the bad news was evident enough to the Megargels when they returned to their property: Their vertical-log cabin had burned to the ground, and they were about to begin the coldest month of the year.

Fortunately, good news came with the bad, as the Cohoe community rallied around their stricken neighbors: Wayne and Trudy Webb took the Megargels into their home until, a week or two later, when Vern and Verna St. Louis loaned the couple a house trailer. Wayne Webb also chipped in some leftover house logs, and a small local crew gathered to help build the Megargels a new home.

Stephen Webb, who was nine years old at the time, remembers when the Megargels came to stay. He was particularly impressed by their appearance: “He looked like a mountain man. He looked like Jedediah Smith. He almost always had this big bushy beard. And his wife was about as big as he was. I barely remember her, but she seemed like she was close to six feet tall.”

Stephen’s mother, Trudy Webb, verified her son’s impressions. She described Ruby as “tall and well built … all muscle, but a nice-looking lady.” And Joe did, in fact, have a full, dark beard, in addition to dark bushy eyebrows and a shaggy mane of dark hair. His personification as a mountain man also relates to his career choices—commercial fishing in the summers and trapping along upper Tustumena Lake in the winters.

Joe was born in Dickson City, Pennsylvania, in 1920, while Ruby was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, two years later. According to his sister, Jessie Winter of Cohoe, Joe served in the military in World War II, and then he and a buddy, John Springer, traveled to Alaska in 1948. He worked mainly at Elmendorf Air Force Base until moving onto his homestead in 1958, the same year he married Ruby in a ceremony in Homer.

Ruby Megargel.

Ruby, according to her obituary in July 2008, had also worked with the military prior to hooking up with Joe. She was a member of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, worked in occupied Germany after the war, and took great pride in the fact that she had once been allowed to ride the horse of Gen. George S. Patton.

Shortly after the fire, construction began on the new Megargel cabin, using the same design as the original and making it about the same size, roughly 20 by 30 feet.

“All the neighborhood came in, and they cut down trees and built him a cabin the middle of the winter,” said Winter. “They had a cabin built in no time.”

Among the Megargels’ friends and neighbors at that time were the Webbs, the Nicholases, Ann and Archie Ramsell, John Swanson, Ray and Florence Burton, Charlie and Freda Lewis, Eugene and Mary Smith, George and Lois Calvin, Chuck and Helen Raymond, and Pete Jensen.

On Jan. 16, as construction continued, a benefit for the Megargels was held at the Clam Gulch Community Hall. The St. Louises showed their Alaska movies, and afterward those gathered shared refreshments and did some dancing. A small society notice in the Cheechako did not mention the amount of money raised at the benefit.

By mid-February, work on the cabin was evidently complete, for on Feb. 12 in the “Letters to the Editor” section of the Cheechako ran a small note entitled “A Card of Thanks.” It said: “We wish to thank everyone for their generosity and kindness in the time of our need. Unfortunately we do not know every person who helped us, but we would like to thank them personally. Come see us. Good luck and good health to all.” It was signed “Ruby and Joe Megargel, Box C, Cohoe, Alaska.”

Joe’s sister, who still lives on a portion of the original homestead, said that while the cabin may have been constructed quickly, it was made stout. Although it has undergone some remodeling in more recent years, it is still standing and continues to be occupied.

Unfortunately for the Megargels, their marriage was not so enduring. Joe and Ruby divorced in 1963, and she moved to Anchorage, where she became an ardent supporter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and worked until 1994 as a room aide and a crossing guard for the Anchorage School District.

Joe stayed on in the small cabin, working various jobs in addition to his fishing and trapping, until he died in November 1995.

On a painting of Joe made for his memorial by Colorado artist Carole Bourdo (the mother-in-law of Joe’s sister’s son), his cabin, with its fading moose rack over the front door, is featured prominently just off his left shoulder.

Joe and his cabin remained together until the end, thanks in part to a group of neighbors who made sure that Joe had many happier holidays to come.

Billy and Barbara Jean Stock in Soldotna, 1950s.

 The Gift that Kept on Giving

DECEMBER 2011

A series of events that culminated with the playing of “Pomp and Circumstance” began simply enough with a roasted holiday turkey and some after-dinner music. It was a case of “paying it forward,” decades before that phrase was in vogue.

It all started in December 1954 when Barbara Jean and Billy, the children of Bill and Dee Stock, decided to invite three of their new Kenai School teachers to Christmas dinner in their Soldotna home. Putting in their RSVP notices that December were first-year teachers David and Beth Duddles and Rachel “Ricky” Weinberg (who married the following year and became Ricky Thomas).

The Duddleses, fresh from the University of Minnesota, had dreams of teaching overseas one day. “We came to Kenai to get some teaching experience before leaving the U.S.A.,” David said. Two years later, they would travel to Africa to teach in the Belgian Congo, where David would also direct a band at the Institut Chretienne Congolais near the equatorial city of Mbandaka (formerly Coquilhatville).

At the Kenai School, Beth taught sixth grade, while David taught high school math, science and physical education. Weinberg, on the other hand, taught high school home economics and some P.E.

All three had been hired by Kenai principal and superintendent, George J. Fabricius, for the 1954-55 school year. Enrollment at the school had boomed, leaping from 86 pupils in 1951-52 to 178 in 1952-53, 197 in 1953-54, and 285 in 1954-55.

The Stocks, meanwhile, had moved to the area from Richland, Washington, in the spring of 1951 so that Bill could take a job with the Alaska Road Commission, as his friend, Chell Bear, had done a short time before—and as their friends, Jake Dubendorf and Paul Tachick, would do a short time later.

From homesteader Howard Binkley they purchased a small piece of Soldotna property near the Ace of Clubs (now the Maverick Bar). When the Dubendorfs came to town, the Stocks sold them half of their property and became their neighbors.

For living space, the Stocks purchased a World War II-era military KD hut that had been sitting over by Crooked Creek. They had the small, uninsulated three-room structure hauled into town.

After Bill’s 10-hour shifts at the ARC, he and Dee labored to get their home ready for the rigors of winter. They insulated the building, installed a woodstove (which doubled as a cookstove), and hand-dug a water well. When the cold weather came, they covered their doors and windows with blankets for extra insulation and kept a fire burning.

In those days, Soldotna was in its infancy, and nearly everything was hard to come by. Lacking electricity, many residents were hauling water or digging wells, chopping firewood, and using heated flatirons to press their clothes, and kerosene lanterns to illuminate the dark interiors of their homes in wintertime. “Our living conditions were very primitive, to say the least,” Dee said.

So when it came time to celebrate the holidays, the Stocks knew two things: Plenty of new folks in the area could use a warm, friendly place to go, and they would need to put in an order early if they wanted any special foods for dinner.

Dee, now 94 and living just north of Salt Lake City, said that they received their Christmas meal by air. To place their order, they drove to Kenai and sent word to one of Bill’s ARC bosses (and friends) in Anchorage; he purchased the food for them and put it on a plane headed back to Kenai. Among the goodies that year was a turkey, some cranberries, and canned yams.

For the holidays, the Kenai Peninsula was in the midst of a 13-day stretch of sub-zero temperatures. According to records from the Kenai Airport, the temperature dipped to minus-24 degrees on Christmas day and fell all the way to minus-35 three days later.

So the blankets were on the windows and the doors that day when their bundled-up guests trundled in from the Stocks’ frigid porch. David Duddles may have had Beth on one arm, but in his other hand he gripped the handle of an instrument case, inside of which was his trumpet.

In the days before television and computers, David, who had been a member of his high school band and a brass quartet, was going to provide some of the entertainment for the evening.

By Christmas of 1954, Barbara Jean was 15 and Billy was nine. Billy was particularly enamored of David Duddles’ trumpet playing. Dee remembers him attempting to play the instrument, and acting silly, once placing something like a lampshade over his head.

As the fall of 1955 approached, the Duddleses were preparing to move into Allan and Jettie Petersen’s house on the bluff in Kenai, but they needed temporary digs before the space became available. Because the Stocks were out of state for a few weeks, David and Beth were able to stay at Bill and Dee’s place for a short time.

“When the Stocks returned,” David said, “I started giving Billy Stock trumpet lessons. Billy was a fast learner and made good progress.”

“Billy was really interested in it,” Dee added. “So we just kind of got together and thought, ‘Well, if he (David) would let me cook him a meal—for him and his wife—then we could get Billy lessons. And that’s how we did it.” Each week for the next year, Billy received trumpet lessons, and in return the Duddleses received a good home-cooked dinner.

Even after David and Beth moved to Africa, Billy continued to play. By the time the end of his senior year at Kenai High School, he was able to help play the processional march for his 1963 class during graduation ceremonies.

David and Beth Duddles retired from teaching in the early 1990s, and they now live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Ricky Thomas taught at the Kenai School through the 1956-57 school year and now lives near Phoenix. Dee—who went on to work at the Ace of Clubs, the Sky Bowl, and the Riverside House, among many other businesses—continues to remain friends with all three of them.

Over the years, the Stocks added a kitchen, two bedrooms and a washroom to their home, and the structure is still in use commercially in Soldotna.

Billy no longer plays the trumpet regularly, said Dee, but he did teach his son, William, to play. William also went on to become a member of his high school band in Anchorage.

“All that from that one dinner,” said Dee. Music was the Christmas gift that kept on giving.

Joanna (Bahnub) Hollier during her
miserable 1945 Christmas.

A Very Unmerry Christmas

DECEMBER 2008

Since arriving in October 1945, 20-year-old Joanna Bahnub had been in Talkeetna for more than two months. Now Christmas was only a few days away, and she was feeling terribly homesick and forgotten.

Bahnub knew that her parents and her six siblings back in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, had her address, and yet she had received no Christmas cards and no presents. She wanted to call and find out why, but the nearest telephone was in Anchorage—seven hours away by train—and she was working eight hours a day, seven days a week.

Unhappy despite the kindness of her co-workers at the Civil Aeronautics Administration station, Bahnub tried to cheer herself up. She tromped into the nearby woods and cut a three-foot spruce, which she stood in her quarters as a Christmas tree. Then she made her way into town to Nagley’s “all-in-one store” where she bought for herself a nice box of stationery, which she wrapped and placed under her tree.

“I tried to tell people I got a present,” said Bahnub—now Joanna Hollier, 83, of Kenai. But telling people that didn’t really make her feel any better, and neither did the potluck and dance put on by station personnel.

Christmas then came and went. She received no cards and no gifts.

When New Year’s Day rolled around, she became determined to contact her family.

Hollier, who had grown up on a dairy farm, had desired a different kind of life than the one she had known in childhood. “I was the oldest of seven kids, and we really had to work. We had to go out and milk seven, eight, ten cows before we’d go to school in the morning, run in and wash the cow manure off and run to catch the bus, if we caught the bus, if there was any bus. And then home every night, immediately after school and back in the barn till nine or ten that night. We were literally hired men. This was during the (second world) war, and times were tough.”

So Hollier consciously sought a job that would get her as far away as possible from milking cows.

Her plans took her away from the farm right out of high school and upset her father, who “didn’t believe in educating girls.” Hollier wanted to attend a Minneapolis radio-television electronics institute, which would provide the training she needed for the training she really wanted: six months with the Royal Canadian Air Force at Boeing Field in Seattle.

The Seattle training would allow her to become something rare—a female aircraft communicator (today called an air-traffic controller).

But first she had to earn her way to Minneapolis. Tuition at the institute cost $200, and she had to work for all of it—two jobs, at a restaurant from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m., then at a dime store from 1:30 p.m. to at least 6 p.m., at about a dollar an hour. Earning the $200 took her a year and a half.

After she completed her training at the Minneapolis institute, she headed in the spring of 1945 to Seattle.  She passed her Civil Service tests, and learned to send and receive Morse code at a rate of 30 words per minute. She also learned the basics of air-to-ground radio communication and meteorology, and how to use a teletype.

By the fall she was a certified aircraft communicator. “This is the end of World War II,” Hollier said. “The men are all in the Service. I was in the right place at the right time, or I never would have got in. And there were very few women in that profession.”

After her training at Boeing Field, Hollier had a choice to make: To which of 17 CAA stations in Alaska—that was her only choice of state—would she like to be assigned? To help her decide, the CAA sent her a handbook describing the Alaska stations. Almost immediately, she preferred the Talkeetna station because it was small and had potlucks on Saturday nights, and dances in the station washroom.

“I figured I could handle that better than Anchorage or Juneau or Fairbanks,” she said. “And I knew a country girl like me better stay in the country. I could understand potlucks and little dances on Saturday nights.”

On Oct. 9, 1945, she arrived in Anchorage on a CAA DC-3 (“with bucket seats and a sack lunch”), and the very next day she climbed on an Alaska Railroad car at 9 a.m., bound for the station near the mining town of Talkeetna. She arrived there at 4 p.m., and saw the landing field and the cluster of white-painted station buildings that would become her home.

And, despite the homesickness that would strike her hard later on that year, she encountered many benefits to her new job. To begin with, she earned the same pay for her job as the other two male aircraft communicators. In addition, when her first paycheck arrived she was shocked at the amount. “I didn’t know there was that much money in the world,” she said.

With at least two full days of guaranteed overtime per week, each paycheck was several hundred dollars. Flush with cash, she began perusing catalogs to see what she liked. Her first purchase was a waffle iron (which she still owns), and later came a pair of skis.

But Hollier did miss her family and Wisconsin.

And that miserable Christmas of 1945 was the last straw. Even though she knew she would have to pay her colleagues to work longer shifts in her absence, she made plans to travel to Anchorage to place a phone call home.

“While I’m down there on a Sunday, I had set up with the phone company at the time in the Federal Building on Fourth Avenue, right across from Woolworths. You had to make an appointment to make a telephone call Outside. So I made this call—and it cost me a lot of money, too. Anyhow, I made this (15-minute) appointment for 10 o’clock Sunday morning, and when my mother picked up the phone and said hello, I started crying, and I never said nothing for my 15 minutes’ allotted time. My mother talked. I tried to sniff and answer her, but that’s how homesick I was.”

Hollier traveled back to Talkeetna without really knowing why she had received no cards or presents, but truth soon materialized.

In those days, sending a card or a letter by regular mail required a three-cent stamp, which was fine except where the Territory of Alaska was concerned, especially in 1945. Mail tagged for ground delivery got as far as Seattle, where it sat until it was loaded on a ship for the long waterway trek to Alaska. Once in the territory, it traveled by rail or other overland means to its destination.

Had the members of Hollier’s family back in Wisconsin used eight-cent stamps for their holiday cards, the airmail rate would have ensured that she received her Christmas booty on time. Airmail rates also applied to packages, but the Bahnubs hadn’t known that paying the extra money was necessary, so they’d sent everything the slow way.

Sometime in January, Hollier received a large pile of presents and cards. A merry Christmas at last, better late than never.