"Postscripts from the Past"

Howard and Maxine Lee pose with their children, Karen and baby Michael, outside their Soldotna homestead cabin in 1950.
 

POSTSCRIPTS FROM THE PAST

FEBRUARY 2016

Author’s note: The documents used for the Lees’ quotes in this story were provided by the Soldotna Historical Society.

In 1945, Irvin Howard Lee and Thelma Maxine McLaughlin pledged their undying love to each other in holy matrimony. Six years later, despite those vows and the romance of an Alaska adventure together, their love had expired.

Early in 1951, Maxine quit her job, packed up her two children and left Howard alone on their Soldotna homestead. She bolted from Alaska, returned to college, earned a teaching certificate, filed for divorce, split the Soldotna property with her ex, and eventually entered into a second, happier and much longer-lasting marriage.

Howard, meanwhile, tried to tough it out in Soldotna, but his interest soon shifted elsewhere. By November, he had left Alaska and begun working construction in various parts of the country. In March 1952, the lure of further adventure inspired him to re-enlist in the military and accept deployment in Korea.

Originally from San Francisco, Howard died at age 75 in 1999. Maxine, who hailed from Pocatello, Idaho, died last month, just one week shy of her 95th birthday.

Although their physical presence in Soldotna was fleeting, both Howard and Maxine helped shape the community, and their legacy lives on in the land and the home they left behind.

Decades after their departure from Soldotna, Howard and Maxine wrote brief but colorful memoirs of their time together in Alaska. Howard’s undated writing — in which he never mentions Maxine by name, referring to her only as “my wife” — is titled “Reminiscent Ramblings of Early Soldatna.” Maxine’s untitled writing is dated Sept. 7, 2003. Perhaps like the authors themselves, those reminiscences do not always agree.

Both Maxine and Howard served with the U.S. Navy in World War II. An aviator and later an experimental night fighter pilot instructor, Howard was stationed at Vero Beach, Florida, when he wed Maxine, a member of the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), which

Howard and Maxine Lee, in military dress uniforms, posing for their wedding photo in 1945.

was at that time the women’s branch of the U.S. Naval Reserve.

After their daughter, Karen, was born, the Lees were becoming “increasingly disenchanted with the regimental life in the Navy” and were seeking some form of escape, according to Maxine. Howard also recalled “very trying circumstances,” but he recounted them with greater clarity.

“In the fall of 1947,” Howard said, “I had been uprooted from the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida, where I thought I had an assignment of some permanence and was sent to naval duty at a base near Chicago. Selling a recently purchased home, we arrived in [the] Chicago area shocked by the lack of and the expense of housing. Living from hand to mouth in a deplorable, one-room converted garage, plus the fact I was working under a real bastard who’s [sic] greatest joy seemed to be my misery, I was really susceptible to a Saturday Evening Post article expounding the glories of the (Alaska) territory.”

The article focused primarily on the homesteading opportunities for military veterans willing to move to the Matanuska Valley. It sounded simple enough, go to the Anchorage Land Office, file on a suitable parcel, build a habitable abode, live on the land at least six months and a day out of the year, and clear one-tenth of the total acreage.

“Before long,” Howard said, “I had promoted enthusiasm in my wife to go north and requested release from active duty with the Navy.”

Howard headed to Alaska first to secure some land and set up shelter for Maxine and Karen. Leaving his wife and child in Seattle in March 1948, he boarded the Alaska Steamship Company vessel Baranof, bound for Seward. According to Maxine, he arrived and headed straight for Kenai. According to Howard, the journey wasn’t so simple.

First, he wasn’t alone on his travels north. He was accompanied by Maxine’s “brother-in-law-to-be,” Gail Ison. Second, he found the Inside Passage so beautiful that he was tempted in “every port” to jump ship and set down his stakes. Third, when he and Ison arrived in Seward, they failed to realize that they could ride a train north, so they contacted a local Bush pilot to fly them to the Matanuska Valley. Fourth, the Bush pilot changed their minds.

“The pilot sized us up quickly and wasn’t about to haul these two cheechakos without counseling,” Howard said. “He went on to explain that Matanuska was not what we wanted, but that the Kenai Peninsula, where the west side had recently been opened for veterans’ homesteading, was our answer.”

By noon the next day, they were standing in Kenai and wobbling beneath 80-pound backpacks full of “cheechako crap,” such as heavy sleeping bags, iron frying pans and “the firepower of an infantry platoon.”

Howard and Ison began walking east, following a newly cut road (now the Kenai Spur Highway) that roughly paralleled the meandering Kenai River. The road, which Howard compared to a “quagmire” after a recent thaw, led toward what is now Soldotna and, over the course of two days of walking, introduced them to a handful of the locals.

Howard first met Larry Lancashire, followed by Jack and Margaret Irons, and over coffee he learned that, although all the available land abutting the new highway had already been claimed, an intriguing homesteading possibility still existed.

A couple named Peterson, he was told, had a homestead (where Soldotna Elementary School now stands), and they wanted out. According to Howard, Mr. Peterson wanted to go commercial fishing but “felt strapped to his home and much pregnant wife.” Things weren’t working out as they had planned. During the previous winter, the husband had trucked a military Quonset hut over the frozen roadway from Seward and had erected it on his property. Since then, he had done nothing to continue proving up on his land.

Howard located Peterson, who offered to sell him the 60-by-30-foot Quonset for $1,000, a price that included relinquishing his land in full to the Lees. Howard made the deal and filed on the property.

Ison later learned of another nearby parcel that had been abandoned and proceeded to file for a homestead of his own. Before the year was out, however, he relinquished his homesteading claim so he could live in Anchorage and work on the railroad. Ison’s land was then filed on by Dick Gerhardt, who would later name the road along his property Marydale Avenue after his wife.

Meanwhile, Howard took stock of his situation and made this brief and sardonic assessment: “A bride of two and a half years with child in tow must have been thrilled with the accommodations. Our bed was the floor of the hut, softened by pine boughs under a sleeping bag.”

Maxine, once she laid eyes on the place in June, referred to the sight of her new home as “a shock” and was decidedly more critical about the details:

“The Quonset had two small windows and a door on each end, 60 feet apart. There was a black iron wood range for cooking in front on the right. In the middle was a heating stove made of a cast-off oil barrel left by the road commission. It was sitting on a bed of rocks and had a pile of dirt on the inside so that the heat from a fire wouldn’t burn a hole in the barrel stove or in the floor. Behind it was a wall made of gunny sacks and flattened large cardboard boxes which divided the Quonset in two to minimize the area needed to be heated. In the front there were cupboards made of stacked empty apple crates. The table was also made of apple crates. The chairs were tree stumps.”

She was no more excited about the homemaker’s area: “a big round washtub, a washboard, some chipped cups and plates, a coffee pot, a worn-out broom and mop, and some pans made out of the five-gallon Blazo cans.”

Howard referred to most homestead furniture in those days as “Blazo modern.”

Since they had no well on their property, once a day — twice on Saturdays when he could hitch a ride on Larry Lancashire’s Jeep — Howard would hike about a mile to Soldotna Creek to bring in water, five gallons at a time, carried in a Blazo can strapped to a packboard.

“First we’d bathe,” said Maxine. “Then I’d wash clothes in the water. Then I would scrub the floor. Then I carried the wet clothes the mile to Soldotna Creek to rinse them in the icy, glacier-fed water [of the Kenai River] and then carried them back home to hang on bushes to dry.”

Their homesteading life was just beginning.

Although much of early homesteading life required more sweat equity than capital, most residents near the highway junction that would later be called Soldotna sought ways to bring in extra income. The Lancashire family raised chickens and began clearing land for farming. The Mullen family also raised chickens and created a large garden so they could sell vegetables. Many locals tried their hand at commercial fishing.

In 1948, Howard and Maxine opened a general store in the back of their Quonset hut.

“My childhood was involved to a large extent in my family’s grocery business,” Howard said. “I wrote a wholesaler in Seattle and put in an order.”

He erected shelves in the back half of the Quonset and found a trucker in Seward who would haul his first load of merchandise to Soldotna.

“We marked prices very low since we had no overhead and we were ignorant,” said Maxine, who was pregnant at the time with their son, Michael. “We sold out in no time, so we reordered. This time there was a huge storm and the barge sank.”

The merchandise had been insured, but they had to pay new shipping costs when they reordered. Later, the wholesaler informed the Lees that they needed a business license, which could not be acquired locally. Almost as quickly as they had begun, the Lees were out of the grocery business.

They stayed plenty busy, however.

Most days, Howard walked two miles to the Lancashire homestead to work with Larry on his portable sawmill, trimming local timber for house logs, first to replace the Lancashires’ wall tent and then the Lees’ Quonset hut.

In 1949, as their new home neared completion, the Lees dug their own well. As usual, their memoirs vary on the details.

Maxine remembered the effort this way:

“Howard dug a well. It was either 18 or 20 feet deep — I forget. After it was about six feet deep, he rigged up a pulley system. He filled a bucket with dirt and gravel, yelled at me, then raised it up. I got it and dumped it around new cabin to serve as ground insulation. We were finally emancipated (from hauling water) when the well pump arrived from Seward and we pumped up real water from our own well.”

Howard recalled it differently:

“Off and on I had some help with the digging, but a good part of it was dug solo. This entailed climbing down into the hole, filling the bucket with gravel, climbing out of the hole, dumping the bucket, and so on, and making cribbing as I went down. At 40 feet, my discouragement turned to anger … (but) at 43 feet water appeared.”

As Maxine and Howard settled into life near the highway junction — the name Soldotna so far applied only to the creek — they surveyed their growing ensemble of neighbors and found at least one thing on which they could both agree — their first impressions of Lorraine Lancashire, Larry’s wife, known by everyone as “Rusty.”

Rusty Lancashire in Kenai in the 1950s.

Maxine: “Rusty had been a model at the Candy Jones Agency in New York and a socialite in Illinois. Rusty was the most beautiful, striking woman I had ever seen.”

Howard: “Rusty was right off Madison Avenue, so to speak, in her natty suit, silk stockings, high heels, etc.”

Both Lees were also impressed by the Lancashires’ work ethic. While Larry labored at projects all over their homestead, Rusty tended to the livestock and their three young daughters, chopped firewood, baked bread and prepared meals, and busied herself with dozens of other tasks that homesteading women were performing across the western peninsula.

The Lees were busy, too, and then a new opportunity arose.

Prior to the birth of Michael and the Lees’ move from the ratty old Quonset to a new, two-story cabin — for many years the tallest structure in town — homesteader Marge Mullen approached Maxine with a proposition, and with a petition signed by several prominent residents. Mullen proposed that the community should have a post office and that Maxine should be the first postmaster.

“Mail was our only line of communication (back then),” Mullen said. “We had no TV. The Anchorage radio — KFQD, I think it was — was only on five hours during the evening — 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., or something like that. You were just hungry for Outside news.”

In her application for the postmaster position, Maxine submitted three names: Leesburg, Leesville and the eventual town name spelled “Soldatna.” When the postal inspector approved her for the job, the town spelling became official — and almost immediately a point of contention.

It was not until the 1960s that the official spelling became Soldotna. In his memoir, Howard dedicated more than half a page to explain his disapproval over the change.

Although it is generally accepted today that the etymology of the town (based on the creek) comes from the Dena’ina word ts’eldat’nu, meaning “trickling-down creek,” not, as once strongly believed, from the Russian word for “soldier,” Howard demurred.

The front of the Lee homestead house, circa 1950.

Angry that the name had been changed after he moved out of state, and still believing in the Russian origin, he said, “The first spelling did have a meaning, but now it is just gobbley-gook [sic] in any language.” He called the official who had okayed the switch a “jasshonkey.”

For her postal labors, Maxine was paid $14 a month.

“It wasn’t a really high-paying job,” she said. “But when you’re homesteading, 14 bucks is 14 bucks.”

Maxine’s initial list of Soldotna postal clients included 15 names—the two Lees, the two Lancashires, Marge and Frank Mullen, Dolly and Jack Farnsworth, Jack and Margaret Irons, Jesse and Nina Robinson, Bob Murray, Lyle Edgington, and Penrod Buchanan.

Prior to the establishment of the new post office, most local residents had traveled to Kenai for their mail. Suddenly, the mail was coming to Soldotna once a week, and some people from as far away as Longmere Lake made the weekly journey to see what they’d received.

At first, the mail was delivered to the homestead cabin and then carried over to the Quonset hut, where Howard had set up a postal station for Maxine.

“When anyone came for the mail or stamps or money orders, we ran over to the Quonset, unlocked the door and took care of their business,” Maxine said. “In winter I learned to keep my ink and fountain pens in the cabin so they wouldn’t freeze.”

Soon, the homestead cabin was the full-time post office, and it remained that way until 1951, when, much to her surprise, Eleanor (“Mickey”) Faa became Soldotna’s second postmaster.

“Well, I took care of the post office several times for Maxine Lee when she went to town (Anchorage) and had things to do,” Faa said in a 1995 interview.

At the time, Faa and her husband, Joe, were operating the Soldotna Inn (later to become the Bear Den Bar) near the Kenai River bridge.

Postmaster Mickey Faa stands outside the Soldotna Post Office. She was surprised
with the postmaster position when Maxine Lee abruptly departed Alaska and her
husband, Howard, in 1951. The taller, adjoining structure is the original Lee
homestead house.

“One day Maxine asked me again if I’d take care of the post office for her. I said, ‘Sure.’ And that evening she came over with some cardboard boxes containing the whole post office. She was leaving Howard, and she wanted me to keep it — take care of it for her. And, of course, I didn’t know anything about it. I figured she’d just be going to town for a few days. But that wasn’t so. She left — completely.”

Maxine’s memoir does not clarify her reasons for abruptly leaving Howard. She seems to have been motivated to continue her education, and after she became certified to teach, she did return to Alaska, living and teaching for a while in Anchorage in the early and mid-1950s. As often as she could, she packed up her kids and drove down to Soldotna to stay and visit with the Lancashires.

Howard, on the other hand, mentions Maxine’s departure only in passing: “The time I spent in Soldatna was intermittent in ’51, after my wife went Outside.”

Howard left the state that November.

After Maxine filed for divorce, she and Howard used the Kenai Spur Highway to divide their property, with Maxine retaining the homestead east of the road, and Howard keeping what remained to the west.

Maxine donated a small piece of her land to the early Methodist Church and sold some to the Coastal Drilling Company of Bakersfield, California. Over the years, she subdivided the rest and sold it off in lots.

In 1954, according to longtime Soldotna resident Al Hershberger, Howard sent a letter to his friend, Joe Faa, announcing that he wanted to buy a new car — a four-door sedan called the Chrysler Royal — and he needed $4,000 to make the purchase. Howard, who had re-enlisted in the U.S. Navy, offered Faa his share of the homestead for $4,000 (nearly $38,000 in today’s money).

Faa was interested but initially lacked the funds to make the deal. He brought Howard’s letter to Hershberger.

“I would have bought it, except for the fact that at that time I had a hard time coming up with $40,” Hershberger said. “It didn’t take long for Joe to come up with the money. It turned out to be a good investment.”

One sizable piece of that investment later became home to Soldotna Elementary School. Another big chunk became the site of the Borough Building.

The restored original Soldotna post office, as it appears today.

Meanwhile, the postal evolution in Soldotna continued.

In the hands of Mickey Faa, the post office had changed locations three times briefly, but after the Faas bought Howard’s land, Mickey returned the post office to the Lee homestead cabin. Eventually, Joe added on to and remodeled the original cabin, and moved the postal operations into the addition.

Today, the restored original building is the first Soldotna structure on the National Register of Historic Places. It stands on its original site, and bears a simple sign clarifying its place in history: “1949 Homestead Cabin — Howard Lee — First U.S. Post Office, 1949-1951 — Maxine Lee, Postmaster — Soldotna.”

After Maxine’s death last month, Soldotna Historical Society treasurer Barbara Jewell placed a simple wreath on the door of the cabin to commemorate Maxine’s contribution to the community.

In their memoirs, Howard and Maxine provided brief sketches of the earliest years in Soldotna’s history. They described neighbors, the weather, law enforcement, politics, agriculture, progress, social life, medical care, hunting and fishing, and a host of other topics.

Howard’s writing ends with his move to Korea in search of further adventure. Maxine’s, however, concludes on a more thoughtful note.

Writing from the Channing House senior facility in Palo Alto, California, where she lived from 1994 until her death, she said:

“Some of you might think I was brave and suffered on the homestead — not true. I had some extraordinary experiences, which I wouldn’t give up for anything. How else could I have met all those wonderful people or seen a wolverine threatening me as I drove by at night or seen the tidal bore that occurs irregularly in Cook Inlet or been a delegate to a constitutional convention or watched the northern lights? Now I’m happy to be in Channing House where I’ve been able to meet another group of wonderful people. The two great decisions I made in my life were to homestead and to come here.”

 

This 1961 aerial photo of Soldotna shows much of the western portion of the original Lee homestead. The large excavation in the upper left corner later became the site of the Borough Building. In left center is an early version of Soldotna Elementary School. The old original post office can be seen near the lower left corner, standing near Joe Faa's barn and corral, for which Corral Street was later named.