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| Chell Bear (left) and Lawrence "Mac" McGuire pose with trout caught through the ice below Bob Mackey's cabin. |
GOOD FORTUNE OR BAD
VARIOUS
DATES: 2009-2011
Sometimes
timing is everything
When Harold Daubenspeck, owner of the Kenai Packers cannery
near the mouth of the Kenai River, walked into the Seattle-Tacoma airport on
Oct. 6, 1959, he expected nothing out of the ordinary. He was there, as he had
been so many times before, to pay for a ticket so he could make a routine
flight to Anchorage on Pacific Northern Airlines.
But this transaction was not as simple as the rest had been.
According to a December 1959 Alaska
Sportsman account of the incident, Daubenspeck, who operated his Kenai
cannery for more than 30 years, was greeted by PNA president Arthur Woodley,
who presented the fisheries mogul with 10 shares of PNA stock and told him that
his ticket that day was free of charge.
He also received a kiss from the stewardess.
It turns out that Daubenspeck had just become the airlines’
millionth passenger in 27 years of flying in and around, and to and from,
Alaska.
The magazine quoted Daubenspeck, who died in 2008 at the age
of 95: “I’ve made the trip so often I guess it’s the law of averages working.
Back in 1937 I used to fly with Art Woodley and Dave Kellogg in Travel Airs. I
never dreamed their little bush line would grow up and carry a million
passengers!”
Good
Luck, Bad Luck
August 1961 was a good hunting month for Bob Schmidt. He
crept into the woods early on the opening day of moose season, located and shot
a bull almost right away, and had his kill cleaned and hauled home well before
the day was done.
Nine days later, on Aug. 10, Schmidt, a Kalifornsky Beach
homesteader and commercial fisherman, was flown by guide Harold R. “Andy”
Anderson into the Tustumena glacier flats for a Dall sheep hunt. Anderson,
Schmidt, and the Rev. Paul Weimer, a Baptist minister from Soldotna, then hiked
the difficult route into the mountains to establish a camp and search for full-curl
rams.
Their search was successful. All three men made a kill, each
at an elevation of approximately 4,000 feet, and they all returned safely.
A photograph in the Aug. 25, 1961, edition of The Cheechako News shows Anderson
kneeling in front of three sets of ram horns displayed on a table. According to
the information in the accompanying article, these were the horns from the Aug.
10 hunt, and the largest horns, flaring a prominent 1¼ curl, had come from
Schmidt’s ram.
Anderson estimated that Schmidt’s ram had been nine years
old, although Schmidt himself said recently he believed it had been 10. A rough
estimate of the horn size—a computation involving numerous measurements of horn
thickness and length, plus distance between the horns—provided a score of 170,
which made the horns a contender for inclusion in the Boone & Crockett
record book.
No specific details of the measurements were provided in the
article, but ironically the still-standing world record for Dall sheep was also
killed in 1961. Harry L. Swank shot his ram in the Wrangell Mountains, and its
horns—the right more than 48 inches long, the left more than 47—scored a 189¾ with
Boone & Crockett.
Unfortunately for Schmidt, he would never learn the official
score for his set of horns. A fire in his home the following year destroyed his
trophy, and a second fire sometime later destroyed his only photographs of the
horns.
Nightmare
problems haunt dream school
The page-one headline in the Tuesday, Jan. 13, 1970, edition
of The Cheechako News exclaimed:
“Seward’s Beautiful New Elementary School Dedicated.” The accompanying article
went on to tout the $2.1 million facility’s “beautiful, modern” appearance, its
exposed beams, plank interior siding, modernistic arches and light-colored
plaster.
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| A modern view of Seward Elementary School--from the school's website. |
At the ceremony, which included the Alaska commissioner of
education, Kenai Peninsula Borough Chairman George Navarre termed the opening
of the new school “the fulfillment of a dream.”
Less than two weeks later, however, the dream may have felt
more akin to a nightmare.
The Cheechako, in
its Thursday, Jan. 22, edition, announced: “Seward Elementary—Problems in
Paradise.”
Two main problems were cited: First, the heating system was
out of whack. One teacher claimed that the system was “creating an unbearable
teaching situation”—with the heat in the classrooms climbing from 75 in the
morning to as high as 90 in the afternoon.
Second, and much more critical, the roof was leaking in more
than a hundred places. At a Borough Assembly meeting in Seward two days before
this article appeared, Area Director Jim Martin said that there had been no
leaking at all during the heavy rains in Seward in recent weeks, but that the
leaks had appeared after the previous week’s deep freeze.
Fortunately for the borough and for the school’s staff and
faculty, the building (which today continues to hold classes in the foothills) was
still under guarantee from the contractor, whom Martin said would be contacted
about making repairs.
Navarre, who had spoken of the “dream” only a few days
earlier, expressed a sour note at the assembly meeting: “I hate to say I told
you so, but I was against this roof design from the first.”
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| Betty Karsten chats with Ed Back (left) and Bill Gross as they make the Karsten family the state's first recipients of commercial natural gas. |
Sometimes location is everything. At least such was the case
in 1961, when Emmett and Betty Karsten of Ridgeway became the first civilian
consumers of natural gas in the State of Alaska.
A large natural gas field had been discovered west of
Soldotna by Unocal and Marathon Oil Company in 1959, only two years after the
discovery of oil in the Swanson River field. Soon, construction on a gas
pipeline began, and the residents of Ridgeway and Soldotna were the earliest
beneficiaries.
On Aug. 9, 1961, Ed Back of Ed’s Appliance Service in
Soldotna and Bill Gross of the Anchorage Natural Gas Company completed the
installation and hook-up at the Karsten home.
The Kalifornsky Beach gas field turned out to be the largest
field ever discovered in the Cook Inlet area, and it was soon supplying
customers all across the central Kenai Peninsula.
Wobbly
reminiscence
Editor’s note: Many of
the details and all of the quotes in this story come from an anonymous
nostalgic remembrance printed in the Cheechako News in early January 1980. Although the account is uncredited, it appeared
near some other history-flavored articles written by publisher Loren Stewart
about early homesteading life on the Kenai Peninsula. Stewart, who came to live
in Ridgeway in 1948 and founded the Cheechako in 1959, almost certainly penned the piece, which was entitled “Irish
Whiskey & Fishing Trip.”
When the tracks in the fresh snow left the graveled Sterling
Highway that late afternoon in mid-winter 1949, they formed a fresh clear path
down the crude three-mile road Bob Mackey had cut to his home on the Mackey
Lakes. So the late arrivals to Mackey’s social gathering—an ice-fishing party—followed
those footprints, followed them easily … at first.
Soon, however, the tracks began to wander, and the two
travelers later discovered a disturbance in the snow that indicated that the person
ahead of them had fallen. Sometime afterward, they discovered evidence of
another fall, and lying alongside that small snowy crater they spied an empty
Irish whiskey bottle, which told them all they needed to know.
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| Lawrence McGuire poses outside his Soldotna homestead cabin. |
They were trailing Lawrence “Mac” McGuire, a transplanted
Irishman (from County Donegal) who became one of Soldotna’s first homesteaders
in 1948. McGuire was a man who loved his cabin across the Kenai River bridge
from Soldotna, loved to welcome company to his door, and loved a bottle of good
Irish whiskey.
The two travelers continued their journey, and additional
evidence began to present itself: More blemishes in the snow indicating more
falls. A single glove. A wool hat. Another glove. And then McGuire himself.
They found the wiry Irishman “lying peacefully in the snow,
with an opened, half-empty bottle of Irish whiskey in his bare, blue hand—and
what is more, he hadn’t spilled a drop.”
Although McGuire may not have realized it, he needed to be
rescued. The two travelers “half-carried, half-dragged” him to Mackey’s cabin,
where they “poured some hot coffee in him and stuffed him into a sleeping bag.”
Then they left him alone in the cabin so they could join the
ice-fishing festivities out on the lake, hoping in the meantime that McGuire
survived the night and avoided pneumonia and the loss of any frostbitten
fingers or toes.
The party on the lake went late into the night, and
eventually everyone returned to the cabin to find the “indestructible” McGuire
sleeping soundly and apparently comfortable. The other partiers crawled into
sleeping bags arrayed on the cabin floor and sacked out, intending to snooze
until about noon the next day.
However, the well-rested McGuire was up and energized before
daybreak, shaking awake his friends to offer them the coffee he had brewed and
the bacon he had fried.
Something
else about the marshal
Many people with an eye for Kenai history know the name of former
U.S. Deputy Marshal Allan Petersen, but there’s one thing—from nearly a century
ago, when Anchorage was barely out of its Ship Creek swaddling clothes—that
most folks probably don’t know at all: In his late 20s, Petersen was a championship
wrestler.
His daughter, Peggy Arness, still has the coin-sized medal
to prove it.
According to Once Upon
the Kenai, Petersen, who was born in 1890, left a teaching job in
California in 1914 to join his father in Alaska and look for a better job. After working initially on an Alaska Railroad
survey crew, he used his newfound railroading skills for the U.S. Army in
France during World War I.
Upon his return to Alaska, he went briefly back into
teaching, this time in Seldovia, where he met and married another teacher, Jetret
“Jettie” Stryker, the sister of Enid (Stryker) McLane, for whom the first Kenai
Peninsula Community College building was later named.
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| Allen Petersen outwrestles an opponent named Hegstrom in a 1918 match held in Anchorage. (Photo from the Anchorage Weekly Democrats--Feb. 16, 1918) |
Petersen retired from his post in 1953 and then was elected
in 1959 to be a member of the first State Legislature. He died in May 1969 and
was buried in Spruce Grove Memorial Park in Kasilof.
In his younger days, said Arness, her father enjoying using
his “very large strong arms” in displays of strength. In the 1930s and ‘40s,
she said, “(he) would often arm wrestle with guys in bars, just for fun, as he
made his rounds as marshal. Alec Wik (Sr.) was bound and determined to crash
him but never did.”
Prior to these arm-wrestling days, however, Petersen was an
adept wrestler. In fact, a photo of him in action, and an article mentioning
his prowess on the mat, graced the pages of the Anchorage Weekly Democrat newspaper on Feb. 16, 1918.
According to the brief article, Petersen had earlier been
victorious in a wrestling competition at a smoker—a popular men’s-only social
gathering common in the early to mid-1900s, typically held on the grounds of a
private charitable club, and usually in a haze of tobacco smoke. At the smoker,
Petersen had defeated an opponent named Hegstrom, and the paper said it also expected
him to fare well against his next foe, a “Mr. Kincaid”:
“While Kincaid (is) giving away some weight, the match
promises to be fast, as Petersen has demonstrated to the fans of Anchorage that
he is there with the good, and the easy manner in which he handled Hegstrom,
considered a good man and a hard one to beat, proves conclusively that he
understands the game from all angles.”
The Petersen-Kincaid match was held during the second
anniversary celebration of the organization of the Alaska Labor Union in
Anchorage. The union, run in part by Socialist activist Lena Morrow Lewis and made
up mainly of railroad workers, hosted the smoker on Feb. 25, and once again
Petersen emerged victorious.
Arness still keeps her father’s small engraved medal on the
end of a thin chain and wears it sometimes as a necklace. She also keeps an
original copy of the newspaper clipping, which shows her bare-chested and
muscular father, head down, with a leg-and-toe hold on an apparently
overmatched opponent.
Boone
& Crockett, unexpectedly
By moving in a circle around the body, the two sisters were
able to twist the spine, winding it somewhat like the rubber band on a
balsa-wood airplane, until the head popped neatly off and the prize was theirs.
But the sisters, Marcia and Mary Grainge, had never intended for this day,
during the winter of 1972, to be a head-hunting expedition. In fact, it had
begun as volunteer work.
The Cheechako Ski Benders Club was preparing for a
snowmachine race, and the Grainge girls were out helping to mark trail. From
their family home on the north shore of Sports Lake, they had driven out on a
pair of snowmachines, an Arctic Cat and an old 12-horse Ski-Do pulling an
ahkio, a narrow, runnerless, low-riding sled convenient for trail use because
of its shape.
The ahkio had been modified with
tubular bars on the sides to allow it to hold a larger load, and on this
particular day, as they traveled over deep snow in minus-15-degree weather, the
sled held a number of trail signs. About eight miles from the house, they were
roaring along Marathon Road, near Kenai, when they stopped to do a little trail
marking.
As they worked, Marcia spotted
something curiously smooth and spiky protruding from the snow a short distance
away. In her one-piece zip-up blue snowsuit, white helmet and sorrels she
ambled nearer, and when she got close enough, she realized that it was a piece
of an antler. Curious, she began to dig with Mary’s help.
What Marcia had suspected was a
dropped caribou antler turned out to be a very large dropped caribou antler, which also turned out to be attached
to the skull of a very large dead caribou bull, and the skull itself was
attached to the matching antler. Except for the single antler tine that had
been poking out, the entire body of the animal had been buried beneath at least
two feet of snow.
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| Marcia (left) and Mary Grainge pose with their trophy caribou antlers. |
Once the upper carcass was
exposed, the sisters could see that body was badly decomposed and had probably
been lying there on the spruce-dotted tundra for quite some time before winter
had gotten under way.
“There was no hide on the
skull,” Marcia said. “It was totally bare and brownish-white.”
Determined to keep their prize,
each sister grabbed an antler and began to move in a circle around the head.
“Not a normal way to harvest antlers,” Marcia said.
After they had detached the
antlers and skull from the rest of the body, they lugged their massive trophy over
to their ahkio, wedged it into the sled, fastened it to the side rails with a
piece of rope, and headed for home. “But we had to keep checking it because the
trail was rough, up and down, bouncing, etc.,” said Marcia.
The antlers sat in their parents’ garage for a number of
years before someone suggested having them measured. Eventually a
representative from the Boone & Crockett Club traveled to the Kenai
Peninsula and performed the official measurement. The representative determined
that the antlers scored 440 2/8 with a double-shovel, enough to enter them into
the “Found” section of the Barren Land Caribou record book with a ranking of 58th
largest in the world—a ranking they continue to hold.
Later, the antlers were mounted professionally and displayed
in the home of Marcia (Grainge) and Rich King. Then, in 1990, Marcia and Rich
relocated to Kauai and gave the antlers on a temporary loan to the Visitor
Center in Soldotna.
A few weeks ago the
sisters told center officials to make the antlers a permanent part of their
collection. The antlers are there now, with a somewhat shorter version of the
story, for public viewing.
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