"True Love at Last ... and Too Brief"

Harold and Roxy Pomeroy, 1982.

TRUE LOVE AT LAST … AND TOO BRIEF

March & April 2013

A 1982 color photograph of Harold and Roxy Pomeroy, smiling widely at the camera as they share a shoulder-to-shoulder embrace, reveals two people who appear to be very much in love with each other. Even their eyes are smiling past the crow’s feet at the corners, and the joy in their expressions is impossible to miss.

At the time of the photo, Harold was about 80—he would die in his sleep the following year—and Roxy was approaching 60. They had been married since 1955, and, by any measure, they had led full and vital lives that included California politics, the anti-Nazi underground , the fledgling government of the Kenai Peninsula Borough, and the Anchorage psychiatric establishment.

They had met nearly four decades earlier and half a world away from the smiles in this photograph.

Harold Pomeroy, a dashing—and married—lieutenant colonel in the U. S. Army, had been in post-World War II Vienna, acting as secretary to the American High Commissioner during the three-power occupation of Austria, when he was introduced to his new interpreter, a Ukrainian exile named Roxolana Eurydice Skobelska.

Roxy, as he came to know her, could speak five languages—English, German, French, Russian and Ukrainian—and she could adeptly translate for nearly anyone occupying the seats of power at the table during the negotiations to decide the fate of “displaced persons” living in Austria. Roxy herself was a displaced person, as was her mother.

On the back of this photograph, Roxy wrote "Remember me,
please" and handed it to Harold before she departed Vienna.

In addition to working with Harold, Roxy also assisted his wife, Floretta, a Washington, D.C., lawyer in Vienna to aid Harold in his work. Both Pomeroys became close with Roxy, and it was Floretta who arranged for Roxy and her mother to travel to Bremen, Germany, and from there to board a ship filled with Jewish refugees bound for Boston.

Before she departed from Vienna, however, 24-year-old Roxy gave a black-and-white head-and-shoulders photograph of herself to 46-year-old Harold. Written on the back were these words: “Remember me, please.”

Harold would spend nearly the rest of his life in her company, but in 1948 he had to say goodbye.

According to John Havelock, a former Alaska attorney general and a good friend of the Pomeroys, Roxy was the only refugee aboard the Boston-bound vessel who could speak English. “On arrival Roxy found herself an indispensable linguist in the processing of new Americans,” Havelock wrote in a 2008 remembrance published in the Anchorage Daily News.

But after her arrival in Boston in November 1948, Roxy remained on the East Coast less than one month. As she told a local newspaper reporter, she was bound for Alaska, where she planned to “homestead with friends.”

As part of his negotiations for some of the Europeans whose homes had been taken or destroyed by the Nazis, Harold Pomeroy had sought and arranged for them to become homesteaders in the Territory of Alaska. He had flown over the Kenai Peninsula and had initially liked property he had spotted inside a broad meander of the Kenai River, but he soon learned that the property in question—now part of Soldotna—had already been claimed by Jack and Dolly Farnsworth.

So he kept looking, and from an airplane window high above the peninsula he examined a Kachemak Bay site recommended to him for its beauty and available land. Bear Cove, he decided, was perfect for his plan, and he and three partners in this endeavor arranged for the land purchases, the transfer of refugee belongings, and all the other paperwork and legwork required to create a new home.

In fact, Pomeroy liked Bear Cove so well that he decided to move there himself. And so did his son, Rodney, one of two children from Harold’s first wife, Ruby.

In 1949, Harold settled on 37 acres near an unnamed lake. Rodney and his wife claimed a 24-acre parcel nearby. Roxy garnered about 65 mostly swampy acres adjacent to these properties. And Pomeroy’s partners claimed sites of their own.

But the move was not without problems.

First, of all the displaced persons scheduled to homestead in Bear Cove, only Roxy Skobelska showed up. According to Dolly Farnsworth, most of the others—including Roxy’s own mother—stayed out East, perhaps because they found relatives or encountered persons there who spoke their language.

Second, Pomeroy’s wife, Floretta, chose not to join Harold in Alaska. When he drove up the Alaska Highway to start his new life, she chose to remain in Washington, D.C., and continue her law practice. Eventually, she met an Italian count she was convinced she would marry, so she filed for divorce from Harold—only to learn later that the count had no interest in wedlock.

Third, Pomeroy’s partners did not stick around long. Even Rodney eventually moved. Within a few years, all of them had either sold out or given up their lands. Harold (and Roxy, after their marriage) soon had claim to nearly 150 acres.

Before Roxy joined Harold and the others at Bear Cove, however, she sojourned for a while in Anchorage at the home of her sponsors, the family of realtor Ben Culver, a friend of Harold’s who had purchased the site of an old Bear Cove fox farm and planned to build a lodge there. The Culvers employed Roxy as a nanny for their gaggle of small children, once even traveling for six weeks in the Lower 48 while Roxy tended to the kids.

Harold works on one of Roxy's greenhouses in Bear Cove, 1950.

But by sometime in 1949, Roxy had made her way to Bear Cove, where Harold was living in a small cabin on his property. Roxy assisted Harold in establishing a sawmill on his place, and he in turn used some of his rough-cut lumber to help Roxy construct two large greenhouses, in which she grew a variety of vegetables (especially cucumbers and tomatoes) that she sold to customers around the bay.

Over the next few years, Roxy and Harold ran the sawmill, and Harold helped with the gardening. Roxy lived inside one of her heated greenhouses, eating meals with Rodney and his wife. Harold continued to live in his small cabin and began traveling to Juneau to work as director of Alaska Territorial Civil Defense.

By 1955, the presence of the Italian count had subtracted Floretta from the equation of their intertwining lives, and Roxy and Harold were free to marry. From that point on, despite the myriad activities in which they were involved across Alaska, they kept their Bear Cove home and traveled there again and again like two lovebirds returning to their nest.

Refugees and the Underground

When courier Roxy Skobelska and the rest of the anti-Nazi underground in Vienna learned that the Nazis were planning to clear out the home and office of the renowned psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, they mobilized swiftly.

According to John Havelock, Skobelska and a group of others from the underground removed Freud’s belongings in advance and hid them beneath coal sacks in a horse-drawn coal wagon driven by Skobelska herself. “Think of that,” Havelock wrote, “if you ever see the restored office at the Vienna Freud Museum.”

A handful of years later, Skobelska was living in Bear Cove, growing and selling veggies out of her greenhouse-home, and intensifying a relationship with Pomeroy, a man 22 years her senior and the love of her life.

The eldest child of Edward and Adele Pomeroy, Harold Edward Pomeroy was born in Burbank, California, on Oct. 9, 1902. According to long-time friend Dolly Farnsworth, Pomeroy was raised on a farm and was in his late teens when his mother died of cancer. While their father worked, Harold and his siblings had to mostly fend for themselves, and as a result Harold developed a strong sense of self-sufficiency.



This 1930s photo may show Harold during
his tenure as city mayor for South Gate.

In 1932, he was elected city mayor of South Gate in his home state, and four years later he began a three-year stint as administrator for the California State Relief Administration.

During the 1930s and early ‘40s, he was also active in the League of California Municipalities, the City Housing Authority of Sacramento, the National Homes Registration Division (an advisory commission to the Council of National Defense), and the American Red Cross.

After the United States entered World War II, he joined the U.S. Army in 1943 and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel while serving in North Africa, Italy, England and Austria.

When Pomeroy met the slender, dark-haired refugee, he was in post-war Vienna, having received a presidential appointment as an executive officer of the Austrian Planning Unit during the Allied occupation of Austria. Negotiations, in myriad languages, were often difficult.

But Skobelska’s journey to Vienna had been far more arduous.

Born, according to Havelock, “in the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains” on Aug. 17, 1924, Skobelska was the

daughter and granddaughter of prominent pastors in the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Eastern Rite.

When she was born, said Havelock, her father (Lev Skobelsky) was a chaplain to a cavalry regiment, and Roxy “grew up loving and riding horses, an affection that stood her in good stead later in life.” As a courier for the underground, she was often the only one familiar enough with horses to drive the wagons while transporting goods away from the enemy.

But in the Ukraine, the Russian Revolution soon uprooted her family and whirled her away from her homeland and her family’s large fruit-and-dairy farm. On forged passports, they fled across the border into Austria, the birthplace of Roxy’s mother and the home of relatives who would take them in.

In the Ukraine, they had loaded a wagon with crates of their most precious belongings, and Roxy’s mother had driven the wagon while Roxy and her father walked to the border crossing. According to his passport, Lev Skobelsky was a millworker, but his soft priest’s hands raised suspicion with the border guard when he examined their papers, said Farnsworth.

Roxy's mother.

Roxy.

Roxy’s mother was allowed to pass, and she traveled on to Vienna, but Roxy and her father were held up temporarily and then forced to stay near the border because of her father’s failing health. He was suffering from a heart condition and had to be hospitalized. Although he eventually recovered enough to continue on to Vienna, he later died in his daughter’s arms while his wife was out trying to get food.

In Vienna, despite her family’s strife, young Roxy was able to complete her schooling—a process that had been tumultuous even in the Ukraine. Roxy’s father, who had attended secondary school in England and learned English there, had taught the language to his daughter in addition to their native Ukrainian. But he had hoped for a better education for his daughter than what Farnsworth called the “terrible” schools available in their country at the time. So Roxy’s parents sent her to Germany for her education.

“They put a tag on her and put her on a train—she was six years old at the time—to go to this German Catholic school,” Farnsworth said. “And she arrived there, not speaking one word of German, and was enrolled in that school. She would cause problems, and they would kick her out. And they’d put her in another school.”

But in Austria, at an all-girls school in the Monastery of St. Zion, she completed her secondary education at the age of 15 and was enrolled in the University of Vienna.

Harold and Roxy (and a very big dog) in Vienna, Nov. 1948.

The Nazi annexation of Austria occurred in March 1938, but Roxy continued her studies, even while joining the resistance movement. She completed a degree in mining law, a skill set that would prove valuable in Alaska nearly two decades later.

Then the war ended, and the post-war negotiations began. For Roxy and her widowed mother, post-war Europe meant refugee status. For Pomeroy, post-war Europe provided him an opportunity to continue helping others.

In this crucible, Harold and Roxy met and mingled.

They would rarely be out of each other’s lives for the next 35 years.

Busy, Busy, Busy

In a padded crate in the garage of her Soldotna home, Dolly Farnsworth has a white marble headstone. Crate and marker together weigh nearly 200 pounds, and soon the headstone will stand on a small wooded hill near Bear Cove as a tribute to one of Farnsworth’s great friends, Roxy Pomeroy, who died on St. Patrick’s Day in 2008.

Farnsworth, along with her friend, John Havelock, will transport the crate by boat this summer and deposit it on the beach at Bear Cove. There, they will employ one of their four-wheelers to pull a small trailer to the beach and haul the headstone up Pomeroy Road and onto the hill, where they will place it next to a similar white marble headstone that marks the remains of Roxy’s beloved Harold.

Harold died of a heart condition while napping on Oct. 1, 1983, just eight days shy of his 81^st birthday. Roxy, who had been married to Harold since 1955, was just 59. She had lived with him for 28 years; she would live without him for 24 more.

Roxy and Harold in Bear Cove, 1955.

By the time of Harold’s death, Bear Cove was more of a vacation destination than the home it had been in the 1950s, but Roxy continued her summer sojourns there as often as her health allowed. Each time Roxy came to Bear Cove, Farnsworth said, she made the quarter-mile walk up to visit Harold’s grave at least two or three times.

In the years just after his passing, she had visited even more frequently. She had planted flowers by the grave, and she often rose by 5 a.m. to carry water up the hill to keep them and Harold’s memory alive.

Despite the difference in their ages, Farnsworth said, the relationship between Roxy and Harold was “a perfect match.” Roxy’s only regret in loving Harold, Farnsworth said, was in losing him so soon.

“I think that’s why she died,” Farnsworth said. “I’m surprised she lived as long as she did because she was so much in love with him—and not to have him there. Oh, God, she missed him. That was love, I’ll tell you.”

Together, according to Harold’s 1949 homesteading diary, they tried to carve a home out of the brambly backcountry at Bear Cove. They cut roadways and cleared land, stacked firewood and planted gardens. They started a sawmill operation to produce rough-cut lumber, which they used to build work sheds and homes and greenhouses—even a bridge and a water tower. Surrounded by ocean, mountains and glaciers, they dug clams and shot wild game and worked cooperatively, regardless of weather and insects and other privations.

Harold’s diary is spartan in its details. Written in list form, it mostly delineates tasks and accomplishments, but occasionally a personal sensibility shines through. When Roxy’s large dog, Ruslan, arrived at the cove in mid-September, Harold noted, “Roxy so delighted she cried.” When he was ill for a couple of days, he wrote, “Roxy takes darned good care of me.” And about working with her, he said, “Roxy darned strong + swell.”

By the mid-1950s, their Bear Cove operation was flourishing. At about the same time, Harold and then Roxy began

Harold as director of Alaska Territorial Civil Defense agency, 1950s.

ambitious careers of public service that would cause them to move their home base first to Soldotna and later to Anchorage, always returning to Bear Cove each summer whenever possible.

From 1954 until 1958, Harold began making frequent trips to Juneau as the director of the Alaska Territorial Civil Defense agency. From 1962 until 1969, Roxy began making frequent trips to Anchorage as a land law examiner for the Alaska Division of Lands.

Because Roxy believed that Harold was traveling too much and working too hard to have time to read the news, she pored over each day’s paper and clipped the items she thought he should read. She placed the clippings in a folder, which sat waiting for him whenever he returned home. (After Harold’s death, Roxy’s clipping habit continued, but she began mailing the articles to Farnsworth, instead.)

In 1963 Harold was elected to be the first chairman (now mayor) of the Kenai Peninsula Borough, and the Pomeroys had a home built near the Kenai River in Soldotna. Farnsworth, who served on the early Borough Assembly, recalled that Pomeroy used his extensive political expertise to draft most of the initial resolutions that established the borough’s governmental methodology.

Harold ran for reelection in 1966 but lost to Kenai’s George Navarre by 87 votes.

He finished out the 1960s as the chief administrator for the City of Soldotna, and in 1967 he and Roxy assisted the Tolstoy Foundation in purchasing the land that became the Old Believer community of Nikolaevsk.

By the 1970s, the Pomeroys had moved to Anchorage, eschewing a rented apartment for a home of their own as they continued to diversify their work portfolios.

Roxy as land law examiner for Alaska Division of Lands, 1960s.

Roxy spent six years as a senior administrator for the McLaughlin Youth Center, and in 1985 retired after a decade as the chief administrator for the Alaska Psychiatric Institute. She also worked on the gubernatorial campaigns of Arliss Sturgulewski, and after her retirement became a phone-answering volunteer at Providence Hospital.

Harold served as consultant for British Petroleum, and as a member of the Alaska Growth Policy Council, the state’s Agriculture Task Force, the Resource Development Council, and numerous other committees, task forces, and advisory boards.

After Harold’s death, Roxy continued to live in Anchorage and visit their home in Bear Cove. But changes were inevitable.

When Roxy desired to set up a research fund in Harold’s name, Farnsworth offered to buy the Pomeroy property, with the stipulation that for Roxy a small cabin be constructed there in which she could live as long as she wished. A year after the 1984 sale, Roxy established the Harold E. Pomeroy Public Policy Research Endowment with the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research.

In 2012, Havelock and Farnsworth, as the executrix of Roxy Pomeroy’s estate, placed an additional $288,000 into the endowment.

Farnsworth continues to own, and her family continues to enjoy, the old Pomeroy homestead, in addition to property she had bought there in the early 1960s. Havelock, too, vacations there, and both of them are looking forward to bringing closure to the saga of Harold and Roxy.

In 2008, after Roxy’s death, Havelock and Farnsworth scattered Roxy’s ashes over Harold’s grave. This summer, the stationing of Roxy’s white marble headstone will leave the twin markers standing sentinel above the place that united them and the home they loved.

Addendum: Forgotten Riches

The treasures were astonishing, especially in such a rustic setting.

In 1949, when Roxy first came to Bear Cove, waiting for her were crates of her family’s belongings—some of them unopened since they had fled the Ukraine ahead of the Communist advance in the late 1930s. In the early labor-intensive homesteading years at Bear Cove, the necessary work afforded little time to unpack these crates, and so some of them stood unopened in a storage building for nearly half a century.

When Dolly Farnsworth finally helped her pry open the containers, they discovered a number of high-quality 19^th century oil paintings—mostly painted by one of Roxy’s relatives, they later learned.

The paintings also turned out to be quite valuable.

Roxy’s mother, they discovered, was kin to two famous Ukrainian artists. She was the granddaughter of writer/poet Mykola Ustyianowycz, and the niece of the painter Kornylo Ustyianowycz. Several of the paintings in the crate had been made by Kornylo.

Although the artwork was undamaged by its long travels and the passage of time, Roxy had the paintings sent to San Francisco to be professionally cleaned and restored.

Afterward, she had hoped to send some of the priest-related paintings back to the Greek Orthodox Catholic church in which her father had served as pastor, but the ravages of the Communists and Nazis made those attempts fruitless, so she searched for other options.

Family friend John Havelock finally discovered the Ukrainian National Museum in Chicago, the officials of which were thrilled to take the artwork (via the Pomeroy Portrait Trust) and make them part of an exhibit entitled the “The Heirloom Treasures of Roxolana Skobelska Pomeroy.”

 

"Rudy Builds a Bridge"

RUDY BUILDS A BRIDGE

February 2013

As far as Rudy Johnson was concerned, crossing the river had always been at best an inconvenience and at worst a dangerous maneuver, but when his wife nearly drowned in 1967, he’d had enough. It was time to make this problem go away.

The Rudy Johnson Bridge in British Columbia once spanned a river on the Kenai Peninsula.

In his home on the Buckskin Ranch across the Fraser River from Williams Lake, British Columbia, Johnson began searching for a solution. And nearly a thousand miles away in rural Southcentral Alaska, he found one.

Thus began a series of logistical migraines. Fortunately, Johnson was a man accustomed to overcoming obstacles.

Just after World War II, Rudy and Helen Johnson had moved to the plateau between the Fraser River canyon and the Cariboo Mountains in central British Columbia. They started ranching and running a sawmill on Buckskin Creek on the west side of the river, about six miles downstream from Soda Creek, where a cable-operated ferry comprised the nearest available mode of transportation to the river’s eastern bank.

Other similar ferries were available farther north at Alexandra and Marguerite; otherwise, only two bridges spanned the river in a nearly 75-mile stretch between the east-side cities of Williams Lake and Quesnel. Consequently, west-side residents, bearing loads large or small, suffered the inconvenience of driving tens of miles out of their way or else they confronted the potential risks involved in ferry crossings.

In the early days, the Johnsons usually hauled loads of logs to town via the Soda Creek Ferry, a means they preferred over driving the long way on what were often rut-filled swampy roads.

In winter, when ice choked the Fraser River, west-side residents wishing to gain the other side at Soda Creek had to pull themselves across in a hanging metal cage. In 1948, according to a 2004 Sage Birchwater story in the Williams Lake Tribune, Rudy brought his pregnant wife to the Williams Lake hospital using the Soda Creek cage. Worried that she might give birth during the crossing, Rudy used bailing twine to bind the bottoms of Helen’s coveralls, thus keeping everything inside them. They crossed successfully, and Helen gave birth to twins later that day.

But Helen courted disaster in May 1967 when she attempted to help the ferryman at Soda Creek dislodge a log that was blocking the landing. “She was swept under the ferry but fortunately was able to grab a branch on the other side, and the ferryman pulled her out,” Birchwater wrote. “But this was too much for the rancher.” Determined to erect a bridge across the Fraser—and do it by himself, if necessary—Rudy went into action.

He developed a plan, made preliminary drawings, selected a site, and began a broad search for a used bridge for sale. At the time, according to Irene Stangoe’s book, Looking Back at the Cariboo-Chilcotin, the Fraser River was not considered a navigable waterway at the time, so Johnson was able to avoid the need for a building permit.

Months later, through some American contacts, he learned of a junk dealer in Alaska who had a bridge he might be interested in. The 200-ton, 300-foot-long bridge lay in sections on a gravel lot in Crown Point, near Moose Pass, on the Kenai Peninsula, and it could be his for the low, low price of 40,000 American dollars.  (In 1968, $40,000 had the same buying power as about $270,000 does in 2013.)

The Soldotna Bridge, circa 1960, looking across the river toward town.

Manufactured by the Chicago Bridge & Iron Company, the bridge had originally been purchased and erected in 1948 by the Alaska Road Commission when it was building a new highway along the western Kenai Peninsula. On Sept. 6, 1950, its Soldotna location over the Kenai River had been the site of the official dedication of the Sterling Highway.

In 1965, the state Division of Highways replaced the two-lane bridge with a four-lane span to match its plans to widen the highway through town, thus avoiding a bottleneck at the crossing. Also, the wooden decking of the old bridge was deemed too frail to withstand the increasing amount of heavy freight-hauling traffic on the Sterling Highway.

According to Melvin Tachick, who began living at Mile 11 of Funny River Road in 1962, the old bridge used to vibrate terribly in the years before it was replaced. “I could hear the bridge rattling when the trucks went across it,” he recalled. “That was our old GPS system in those days. You knew which way town was.”

After the old bridge was broken down into small sections, it was stored in the gravel construction yard of Tachick’s father, Paul, a former ARC employee. Paul Tachick, who owned the property immediately across the river from Soldotna, leased a portion of his yard to the Juneau-based bridge-building company of Cole & Paddock.

Another view of the old Soldotna bridge.

After a few years, Cole & Paddock, which had installed the replacement bridge in Soldotna, moved the old bridge sections to a gravel lot near the railroad tracks in Crown Point, where it lay until Rudy Johnson shelled out $40,000.

After Johnson bought the bridge, he hired three men to accompany him in February 1968 to Crown Point, where they spent a week disassembling and labeling all 3,300 pieces (not including bolts, according to Johnson). The men piled all the parts into four railcars and had them hauled to Seward, where they were loaded onto a barge that would cruise the Inside Passage to the British Columbia port of Prince Rupert. From there, the bridge parts would travel overland to Prince George and on to Williams Lake.

Johnson, who was born in northern Sweden and had little formal education, found some shareholders to help him with the finances and hired Victoria-based engineer Howard Elder to help him erect the bridge properly. They spent six months and $200,000 completing the project. By November 1968, the river had been spanned.

Rudy Johnson in more recent years.

Johnson attempted to convince the provincial government to pay for and take control of the bridge, but he was rebuffed. To recoup some of his investment, he began charging a toll to commercial vehicles, while allowing private vehicles to pass freely. Ten years later, the province opted to purchase the bridge and assume control of its maintenance. Despite the official takeover, however, the bridge never lost its identity as the Rudy Johnson Bridge.

Now bright orange, the bridge is a tourist attraction, and passers-by have been known to occasionally spot Rudy, now age 90, nearby.

In 2004, Williams Lake documentary filmmaker, Barb Grossman, released a film about Johnson’s bridge-building efforts. Grossman also succeeded in convincing officials in the Cariboo Regional District to classify the bridge as an engineering heritage site.

“I’ve never regretted doing it,” Johnson said in Stangoe’s book. He maintained that the bridge-building project could not be accomplished today. “Too much red tape and bureaucracy,” he said.

 

"Murder ... and the Rest of the Story"

Arlon Elwood "Jackson" Ball, after his discharge from the military.

MURDER … AND THE REST OF THE STORY

OCTOBER 2012 & JANUARY 2013

THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE RAN IN OCTOBER 2012 IN THE REDOUBT REPORTER. WHEN MORE INFORMATION SURFACED, WE UPDATED THE STORY IN JANUARY 2013. FOR THE SAKE OF COHERENCE, I HAVE MERGED THE TWO PARTS HERE.

On Saturday, Oct. 12, 1968, in the North Kenai cocktail lounge known as Larry’s Club, officer David Ulfers of the Alaska State Troopers arrived at about 3:30 a.m. to find one man moaning near the entrance and another man lying face-up near the bar.

The man near the door was Larry Edwards, and he was fresh from a fight. The man on the floor was local rowdy, Jackson Ball, and Ulfers reported that Ball had a hole in his neck and was bleeding heavily. Within a short time, Ball would be dead.

According to the Cheechako News, Ball was 46 years old. According to the online Social Security Death Index, he had been born on Aug. 24, 1921, which meant that he was 47. A photograph of the headstone on his grave in Angelus Memorial Park in Anchorage, however, shows that he was born on Aug. 25, 1922, so, unless the grave marker is wrong, the newspaper was correct.

Regardless, at a hearing on Oct. 31, diver Phillip Howard Cook testified that on the night Ball was killed, a fight “with a pile of guys involved” had started at one end of the bar. Cook said that he tried to help the bartender move the men and their skirmish outdoors; he also said that he heard the accused, Jerry Thomas Edwards, say, “Don’t hurt my brother!” and then threaten to get his gun.

A few minutes later, Cook reported, the door flew open: “I saw Jerry first. Within seconds I saw Larry (Edwards) come in with his shirt off, and he fell down by the entrance…. Jerry paused and said, ‘Where is the fat guy (Ball)?’ Jackson Ball raised up from the stool where he had been seated, took three or four steps towards Jerry with his hands raised up and said, ‘You can’t.’ Jerry pivoted and shot him.”

Cook further testified that bar owner Larry Lancashire then managed to take the gun (a .38-caliber revolver) away from Jerry Edwards and attempt to calm him down. Cook said that Edwards had been “in a rage, yelling, screaming, cursing and staggering, saying, ‘I’m going to kill that fat man!’”

Arlon Elwood “Jackson” Ball was a polarizing figure, likely to draw a variety of viewpoints concerning his character. Most folks, however, would probably mention Ball’s penchant for drinking in bars, for talking loud and rough, and for his streak of bigotry.

Soldotna’s Al Hershberger, who knew Ball, said that Ball’s aggressive talk was “definitely more bark than bite,” but he admitted that Ball, who hailed originally from Connecticut, could be mean and had a low tolerance for people with an ethnicity different than his own.

“I think his notoriety was somewhat embellished,” Hershberger said. “He did not like newcomers and frequently told them to ‘go back to America.’ I did enjoy talking to him, (though), as he always made me laugh. He definitely was opinionated. I guess it would be fair to call him a bigot, or at least very outspoken and vociferous. A lot of people thought of Jackson as more of a clown than a terrorist.”

But Ball’s opinions and attitudes occasionally led to confrontations: “(In the mid-1950s), he hit a guy over the head with a bar stool and was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon,” Hershberger recalled. “The jury found him not guilty, saying a bar stool was not a dangerous weapon.”

According to an obituary in the Cheechako, Ball had been a member of Pile Driver’s Local 2502 and was survived by a wife and four young daughters, all of whom apparently lived in Anchorage. Ball, the paper said, was an Anchorage resident who had a North Kenai homestead near Salamatof Lake and was the owner/operator of the fishing vessel Iron Mule.

Services for Ball were held at Green Memorial Chapel in Anchorage, and he was buried in Angelus Memorial Park.

Shortly after the incident in Larry’s Club, Larry Edwards was transported to Providence Hospital in Anchorage, where he was listed in “fair condition.” His brother, Jerry, who had only recently arrived in the state, was arraigned later that morning and then transferred to the state jail in Anchorage to await a preliminary hearing.

The state initially recommended $100,000 bail, but Dep. Magistrate Jess Nicholas Jr. set the bail at half that amount. In the hearings and trials that followed, the state was represented by Anchorage attorney Stan McCutcheon, while Edwards used court-appointed counsel until he acquired Wendell P. Kay as his own attorney. In mid-November, an Anchorage grand jury indicted Edwards on first-degree murder.

THE REST OF THE STORY….

In Niantic, Connecticut, in 2008—40 years after the shooting at Larry’s Club—an archaeological team of seniors from East Lyme High School was searching for evidence of a 19^th century blacksmith shop when the students encountered several curiosities: an oval medallion depicting Jesus, a small brass shield bearing the images of a swastika and a German monument, and a World War II-era sweetheart bracelet.

Sweetheart bracelets often purchased or made by soldiers for their love interests back home, were in vogue during World War II. The wife or girlfriend of a serviceman would wear her man’s dog-tag information on a sterling silver chain while he was overseas. The bracelet found by the East Lyme students bore the name “Arlon E. Ball” and his Army serial number (20155871).

Information about the discovery was published in The Post Review in December 2009 by East Lyme anthropology teacher James Littlefield. One year later, Christine Durkee, writing in the East Lyme student newspaper, The Viking Saga, updated the tale, and in 2012 Al Hershberger in Soldotna found both stories online and brought them to the attention of the Redoubt Reporter.

According to Durkee’s story, Littlefield’s article generated new information and, much to their surprise, it caught the attention of one of Ball’s daughters, Margaret Ball, who happened to be living in Connecticut. Margaret Ball sent a letter to Littlefield, explaining how little she knew about her father’s military career and enclosing a photograph of Arlon in uniform.

Private First Class Ball had been an Army soldier well decorated for his achievements. Part of an elite unit, the 101^st Airborne (also known as the Screaming Eagles), he had won several notable awards.

“This guy was in some pretty serious action,” said Littlefield. “He was not just pushing a pencil somewhere.”

According to military records, the 21-year-old Ball enlisted on Sept. 16, 1940. As a civilian he had earned only a grammar school education and was considered a farm hand. As a soldier, however, he became a member of the Coast Artillery Corps or Mine Planter Service, and during the two and a half years he served overseas he was involved in some intense fighting.

When he was photographed in uniform during his discharge, his many military accomplishments were on display. On his left shoulder was a patch for the Screaming Eagles. On his right breast above the pocket was a patch nicknamed the “ruptured duck,” which was sewn onto the uniforms of WWII veterans who were honorably discharged. The patch allowed such soldiers to wear their uniforms for 30 days after discharge; they were also given a small lapel pin to wear on civilian clothes.

The "ruptured duck" patch.

Below the “ruptured duck” patch was a Presidential Unit Citation pin, awarded by the president for distinguished action by the soldier’s unit, usually a regiment but sometimes a battalion or even an entire company.

On his left breast were his paratroopers wings, awarded after a specific number of qualified jumps. Below the wings was a strip of ribbons representing other medals earned by Ball, including an award for good conduct, the WWII Victory Medal, and the European African Middle East Campaign Medal.

According to Hershberger, the two stars on the campaign medal indicate the number of battles in which Ball fought. In the monochrome photograph, it is difficult to distinguish the color of the medals, but Hershberger said a bronze star indicates a single battle, while a silver star indicates five battles. Based upon his knowledge of the history of the 101^st Airborne—Hershberger also served in the military in Europe in WWII—he believes that Ball likely earned one bronze star and one silver star.

The pin below the ribbons is the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, awarded after 30 days of infantry combat.

In the photograph, Ball was also wearing a wedding ring.

As for the sweetheart bracelet: Sometime after Durkee’s article in The Viking Saga, Littlefield and Margaret Ball arranged to meet for breakfast and conversation at a Friendly’s Restaurant in Mystic, Conn. They shared information, and Littlefield presented the daughter with the bracelet, which she donned for a photograph.

Margaret Ball (with Jim Littlefield) poses with the bracelet.

According to Margaret, after her father was killed in North Kenai, her mother and her sisters left their furniture and most of their belongings and returned to Connecticut to live. Littlefield said that Margaret remembered her father fondly and had wondered for decades what he had really been like.

“She told me she frequently went online with her sister to find out about her enigmatic, war-hero father they loved dearly,” Littlefield said.

More than a month after appearance of the first Redoubt Reporter story about Ball, another of Arlon’s daughters, Kayleen (Ball) Hanrahan, also made an effort to learn more. In a postscript to an email to the newspaper, she wrote: “My dad named me Kayleen. My older sister named her son Arlon. My older sister named her older son’s middle name Jackson, and I named my son’s middle name Elwood after my father’s middle name. I know my father loved my mother and all of his daughters very much. I also know there is much to be learned about who my father really was.”

Although the bracelet had never belonged to Arlon Ball’s wife, its recipient, its connection (if any) to the Jesus medallion and the swastika shield, and the reason for its burial out in Niantic remain a mystery.

 

 

"Model A, with Butter, Please"

The Model A, during its first homestead appearance, 1966, with Jane, Janeice and Clark Fair.

MODEL A, WITH BUTTER, PLEASE

MAY 2013

THIS IS A VASTLY UPDATED VERSION OF AN OLDER STORY PUBLISHED IN THIS BLOG.

Back when the Alaska Highway was mostly gravel, potholes and frost heaves, it was difficult to haul precious or fragile cargo up its entire length without incurring some damage. So in 1966, when a Soldotna dentist, Dr. Calvin Fair, wanted to retrieve his beloved Model A Ford from an Indiana garage, he contacted entrepreneurial Wayne Finley, whose approach was unusual but effective.

Finley, a former Iowa farmer working summers in Alaska as a commercial set-netter, often spent the remainder of each year conspiring to make money with his large box truck. In 1964, for instance, he had hauled old Ford tractors north from the Midwest and sold them to homesteaders on the central Kenai Peninsula. Fair had purchased one of those tractors—a gray-and-red 1948 Ford 8N, along with a plow and other farming implements.

In 1966, when Finley was headed to the States for another load of goods, Fair enlisted him to pick up his Model A. Finley’s plan called for him to stop first in Indiana to load the vehicle and then drive north to Chicago to pack the remainder of his cargo hold with cases of fresh butter.

Although the Model A would arrive safely, this dairy-laden delivery was just the beginning of an odyssey that would—more often than not, over the succeeding decades—prevent Fair from driving the car he’d bought as a teen-ager and loved ever since.

Two ‘New’ Cars

In 1950, when Fair graduated from high school in tiny Walton, Indiana, and enrolled in undergraduate studies at Purdue University in West Lafayette, he required reliable transportation. He found someone at Purdue who wanted to sell a pair of 1931 Model A Fords—one all-black sedan and one light-gray coupe.

The price tag was $100 each (about $950 apiece in today’s money), and Fair asked his dentist father, Dr. Lowell Fair, for permission to make the purchase. Lowell gave his blessing, contingent upon his son footing the bill, and Calvin bought both rigs.

Steve's Model A coupe.

When Calvin’s car-loving younger brother, Steve, was 14 or 15, Calvin gave him the coupe. Meanwhile, he continued to use the sedan (now with a Boilermakers sticker in the rear window) to drive back and forth to college, and in about 1953 he asked his cousin, Paul Munson, to repaint the old car and give it a flashier appearance.

According to Fair’s sister, Joyce Beechy, their mother helped determine the new hue, which was starkly different than the original black. The new body color was a General Motors paint called “Bittersweet,” an off-orange that was tinged slightly toward rose. The fenders, the running board, the wheels and spokes, and the roof all remained black, and Fair’s mother reupholstered the interior.

Fair’s girlfriend, Jane Jump, who referred to the car as “his little baby,” was not impressed. She recalled the first time she saw it—in about 1955 when Fair drove it over to Jump’s parents’ home to see if she would like go out for a ride.

 “I didn’t think that it was all that great,” she said. She was particularly repulsed by the new paint job, and she turned down the offer of a ride in the countryside.

Fortunately for Fair, Jump was not so revolted by the car that she lost interest in him. They married in June 1956, and she moved to be with him in Whittier, Alaska, in late 1957 when Fair was stationed there as an Army dentist.

Unfortunately for Fair, a three-year stint in the military meant leaving behind his Model A. Before heading for basic training in San Antonio, Texas, he stored the car in the garage of Annie Richeson, a Walton woman who lived near his Aunt Blanche.

A Pair of Mistakes

While Fair was doing dental work for the Army, his brother Steve—a self-described “motorhead” in love with fast cars—was beginning to modify the coupe. In addition to repainting it a darker shade of gray and mounting sportier wheels, he removed the original four-cylinder engine and replaced it with a 1952 flathead V-8. Older brother disapproved: “’You’ll be sorry for that,’ he said,” admitted Steve. “And I was.” He came to rue the day that he altered the car from its original state.

When Steve moved to Alaska in 1971, he, too, placed his coupe in storage and planned for the day he would have it with him once again. Then, hard up for cash while living in Seward in the mid-1970s, he sold the car to a coworker and almost immediately regretted it.

“I kick my rear-end (now),” he said. “Stupid! I wish I’d given it back to Calvin, or something.”

He also may have regretted the role he played in the planned refurbishing of his brother’s sedan.

Calvin's mother stands by Finley's truck, which had
been loaded with the Model A for its trip to Alaska.

In 1969, while visiting Alaska for the first time, Steve had helped convince Calvin that they could disassemble, restore and rebuild the sedan, which had spent most of its Alaska life inside a cramped wooden garage on the Fair homestead. So they spent much of the remainder of Steve’s vacation removing the body from the chassis, repainting the frame, having Cotton Moore perform some welding repairs, and ordering new parts and new upholstery from a catalog.

But when Steve returned to Indiana, Calvin’s work on the car came to a standstill.

The delay lasted for years—almost 20 of them.

When Steve moved to Alaska permanently, he brought with him a girlfriend he soon would marry, and his priorities included finding a job and a place to live. Calvin himself was busy with his growing dental practice, his growing family, and his sprawling homestead. As a result, neither brother had time to devote to the restoration project.

Consequently, the Model A languished in the old garage—a building renamed “the meathouse” because each fall its rafters supported the weight of moose meat from the latest hunting season. Through season after season, the Model A sat neglected in the darkness, its engine covered in oily rags to ward off the dust, as Fair’s three children grew up, graduated from high school, and headed off to college.

It emerged finally in 1987 when local mechanic and family friend, Paul Reger, offered to complete the restoration in exchange for dental work.

“I’ve got a lot of gold in my mouth,” Reger says now, “and that’s where it all came from.”

Restoration, at Last

Reger had more than a passing acquaintance with Fair’s Model A. After it had arrived in 1966 in the back of Finley’s butter-filled cargo truck, Fair had taken the vehicle over to Ingram’s Garage (formerly Reger’s Garage when it was owned by Paul’s father, Harry) and asked Paul to drive it around for two or three days. Then in the fall, he had asked Paul to perform a service check and standard maintenance on it.

The following spring, Paul Reger had entered the Navy and spent part of the Vietnam War as a military mechanic. When he finally got his hands on the Model A again some two decades later, he initially had no time to work on it. Fair had hauled the chassis and body and all the parts new and old over to Reger’s home in Sterling, but Reger was forced to store everything “out back” in a shed until he could start the refurbishing project.

Fair would have to wait five or six more years for the work to begin.

Reger was in business for himself until 1990, when he began working as a mechanic for the City of Soldotna. He started the restoration in 1992-93 and completed the entire project in 1995. Reger had John Fox do the body work and repaint the vehicle. He had Terry Speakman install the new upholstery. Then Reger himself replaced the engine with a like-model Sears & Roebuck rebuild, and reassembled the vehicle.

The results were spectacular. In 1966, when the Model A had first arrived on the homestead, Fair had driven it out onto an open dirt area near the family trailer. There, he had posed Jane and two of the children along the left flank of his pinkish pride and joy. In 1995, when the restored sedan was driven back onto the homestead, it was hard to believe it was the same vehicle.

The restored version of the 1931 Model A Ford.

The old pink beast was gone. In its place was a sleek machine of forest green, with cream-colored hubs and spokes, and black fenders, roof and running board. Fair was justifiably proud of his new car. He drove it or allowed it to be driven several times in Kenai’s Fourth of July and Soldotna’s Progress Days parades. He and Jane also occasionally took it out for a brief spin on a sunny summer day, after which he carefully washed and wiped away all of the dust.

But mostly he babied the old car, just as he’d always done, parking it again in the meathouse and later in his new shop, and protecting it with a specially fitted grey cover to prevent scratching or scraping of any kind. He uncovered it periodically to check the charge on the battery or change the oil or fiddle with the levers and buttons. And then he covered it right back up, fretting over it like a precious memento of a time gone by.

 

"What's Up, Doc Wilson?"

WHAT'S UP, DOC WILSON?

August 2012

In a narrow hallway of the McLane Building on the Kenai River Campus of Kenai Peninsula College hangs a large framed photograph of a 60-something gentleman posing for a formal portrait. He has thinning grey hair, a generous nose, big laid-back ears, and large glasses, and he is smiling somewhat uncomfortably, as if he dislikes being in front of a camera.

Dr. William S. Wilson, 1977.

This gentleman is Dr. William S. Wilson, and the chemistry lab at the end of the hallway, built in the mid-1970s to enhance the school’s Water/Waste Water Certificate program, was named for him, even though he was never a KPC instructor, staff member or administrator. In fact, by the time the lab was dedicated to him at the May 1974 commencement exercises, Wilson had been retired for two years from the University of Alaska campus in Fairbanks.

At the university, Wilson was a Professor Emeritus in chemistry and general sciences, and he was a popular instructor, brilliant enough to master abstract concepts concerning auroras and electrical storms, but partial to teaching lower-level courses because he enjoyed generating excitement about science in younger students.

“Doc,” as he was almost universally known, began a 25-year teaching career in Fairbanks in 1947, and during his tenure he also served briefly as the acting director of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute. The 1961 edition of the Denali, UAF’s yearbook, was dedicated to Wilson and included a two-page spread that featured a photograph of the professor on the left and a caricature of him and a formal dedication on the right.

Caricature of Doc Wilson
from 1961 UAF yearbook.

The dedication stated that Wilson had “never been too busy to stop and talk, to tell a good story, to offer a kindly word.” It also lauded his understanding of student needs, his respect from students and staff, and his ability to increase the “intellectual content” of the university.

After his retirement, Wilson moved to Kenai, where he was given an opportunity to set up a new science lab from scratch. He was told that he could design the layout of the lab and array it with the latest and best equipment. He accepted this task enthusiastically. As former KPC instructor, Lance Petersen, wrote in his 1992 history of the college, Wilson “came out of retirement and attacked the job with zest.”

The result was “one of the best-equipped labs in the state,” according to Dr. Charles Behlke, Dean of the College of Mathematics, Physical Science and Engineering at Fairbanks, who at the 1974 commencement presented a plaque naming the lab after Wilson.

Doc Wilson (L) in the KPC lab named in his honor.

 Other than the lab, “Doc” Wilson’s main connection to Kenai concerns a long-term relationship with another teacher of chemistry and general science, Shirley Henley (then Denison), whom he had met when she was his student in 1960 in Fairbanks. Henley, who had worked as an adjunct at KPC starting in college’s inaugural year of 1964, was a long-time faculty fixture at Kenai Central High School, where she retired after 20 years.

In 1960, Henley, seeking to improve her education and to have some time away from an unhappy marriage, sent her two daughters to spend the summer with her parents in Birmingham, Alabama, and traveled to Fairbanks to study. Her schedule included one of Wilson’s chemistry courses.

One day, Wilson failed to show up for class, and Henley, who had come to Alaska in 1949 as a registered nurse, decided to go to Wilson’s cabin on the Chena River and check on him. She knocked on his door, noting that the windows were boarded over, and she waited for an answer. When Doc came to the door, she said, “he looked like death warmed over.” She offered to examine him or to get him some medication, but he declined both offers, promising he would be back at work the next day. And he was.

Two days later, Wilson tracked down Henley in the cafeteria, where she was dining with a couple of friends. After standing behind her briefly, he asked her to go to dinner with him at Chena Hot Springs, and thus began an intimate friendship that lasted for nearly 20 years, when in the spring of 1979 she finally divorced her husband and married Doc one month later.

Shirley (Denison) Henley, about the time
she first met Doc Wilson.

Although Henley said their long relationship was enriching to them both, their marriage turned out to be star-crossed.

On Nov. 30, 1979, Doc was driving Henley to her job at the Health Department in Kenai, and was planning afterward to drive on to the college to read in the library. But by Candlelight Road, near KCHS, an oncoming car slid on the icy roads into the front of their two-door Datsun hatchback and was subsequently slammed into by another car, and Wilson was killed instantly. Henley was critically injured and hospitalized for weeks. Doc had been 71.



Henley, now in her late 80s, still mourns the loss of Wilson, but she looks back on her time with him with admiration and sometimes considerable laughter. She called him “quite the character,” and said, “I don’t think there were two people on earth anywhere near like Doc.” She said that although she loved his mind—“he was a wonderful one-on-one teacher; he was patience itself”—he was fraught with eccentricities.

For instance, he wore pants with overly wide legs because he liked to put on his shoes before he put on his pants; since he was “chubby” around the middle, he found bending over to tie his shoes difficult if his pants were on first. And his shoes were “funny-looking,” she said, because they had “great big toes” to fit over his “funny-looking feet.”

A much younger Doc Wilson.

Although he enjoyed talking with almost anyone, he rarely looked at other people when he spoke to them. Instead, he squinted his eyes nearly closed as he talked, opening them only after he’d finished speaking. And although he wore thick lenses to correct astigmatisms, his glasses were usually so dirty that they were difficult to see through.

Sometimes in retirement when he would drive up to KPC to read in library, he would lie down on the floor between the rows of books and fall asleep. One of the first times he did so, then-librarian Ethel Clausen found him and was “about scared to death” because she feared that he might have passed away.

The boarded-up windows on his Chena River cabin were the result of Doc’s irritation from all the daylight during summers in Fairbanks, plus his desire to keep out the cold during the long winters there.

He had two big mixed-breed dogs, one of which he named “Puppy,” and the other “Chandrasekhar,” after a renowned Indian-American astrophysics professor.

He was “quite the gardener,” having worked with produce since about the age of eight, and having used his gardening prowess as a source of income during his days spent earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Brown University. And he was also a “great cook,” Henley said, “but there wouldn’t be a clean dish or utensil in the house after he was finished.” In the chemistry lab, however, she said, he was “clean and organized and meticulous.”

Born at home in 1908 in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in southeastern Ohio, Doc went through life with only a baptismal record and no birth certificate. His father, who had taught in public school, had married Doc’s mother, who had been a student there. She was only 15 when Doc was born.

From these humble beginnings, Doc Wilson went on to earn a doctorate at Yale University and completed a distinguished career as a university professor.

In memorializing Wilson, former colleague Neil Davis, who was a professor with the Geophysical Institute when Doc died, wrote: “We remember Doc Wilson as the man with the misleadingly vacant stare and the powerful intellect. Always the scientist and teacher but also an astute observer of the intricate affairs of mankind, Doc saw far more through his trick, often smudged, glasses than could the clearer eyes of the youths who surrounded him.”

 

"Conquering Kegler"



Exhausted Tony Bordenelli poses after setting a world bowling record in Soldotna.

CONQUERING KEGLER

January 2009

Near the end of his attempt at the record, Tony Bordenelli’s badly blistered left hand was sporting a rubber glove, and his right thumb was wound with wrinkled medical tape. He staggered from lane to lane in Soldotna’s new bowling alley, the Sky Bowl, sending one ball after another toward the pins at the other end of the hardwood.

Doggedly he persisted until, at 3:19 a.m. on June 26, 1960, he completed his 1,002^nd consecutive game, breaking the world record of 1,001 straight games set by Plainville, Connecticut’s 37-year-old Steve Karpinski, who had completed the task in 110 hours and 7 minutes.

At that point, according to a July 8, 1960, article in The Cheechako News, Bordenelli’s wife, Eyvohn, gave him a celebratory hug and a kiss, which prompted the 45-year-old, 147-pound Bordenelli to pick up his bride and swing her around in his arms.

Then someone in the crowd of spectators called out, “Are you through?” And Bordenelli replied, “Well, I think I’ll just bowl six more games and give that fool in Connecticut something to shoot at.”

Bordenelli had bowled a 106 in game number 1,002. In the next six games, he went on to post a 112, a 107, a 115, a 104, a 133, and a 116, mostly to the cheering of spectators marveling at his endurance.

In the end, he had bowled 1,008 straight games in 79 hours and 45 minutes, averaging 101.7 pins per game and nearly 13 games an hour. By the estimate of Sky Bowl owner, Burton Carver, the right-handed Bordenelli had bowled about 40 percent of his games left-handed, including his low-score game (his 880^th) of 13. His highest score for one game had been a 183.

A team of eight scorekeepers had worked in shifts to keep track of Bordenelli’s progress and to form an official record of the event. After all the numbers were tallied, they determined that Bordenelli had made 924 strikes and had knocked down a total of 102,548 pins.

Alan Phillips, who had been a 15-year-old scorekeeper during some of the evening and early-morning hours, said that the attempt at the record “was the most exciting thing going on in the whole town.” Soldotna at that time had fewer than 500 residents and was still four years away from incorporation.

“Back in those days, the bowling alley was one of the only gathering places, other than the post office,” Philips said, and so local residents wandered in and out during all times of the day to check on Bordenelli’s progress.

After the final game, Bordenelli posed for a photograph with Carver and with his trainer, Charlie Hill, who then gave the exhausted bowler a rub-down for his aching muscles. In the victory photo—which appeared on page one of the newspaper under a banner-headline proclaiming his success—all three men are holding bowling balls, but Bordenelli is holding his ball with his wrists instead of his gnarled hands. Blood can be seen on his right hand, while both of his thumbs are coiled in tape.

According to Bordenelli’s good friend, Ray LaFrenere, who wrote about the incident in Once Upon the Kenai, the whole affair came about because of Bordenelli’s affinity for gambling—a predilection also remembered by other area residents of that time. LaFrenere said that if his friend had been alive in the days of Skagway’s famous Soapy Smith, “I’d guess that Smith would have had to take a back seat.”

LaFrenere claimed that Bordenelli, who hailed from Colorado Springs, Colorado, and owned the Jet Bar in Kenai, “bet a couple high rollers that he could bowl 1,000 games nonstop.” That bet apparently led Bordenelli to Carver, who helped him set up the event.

They began by contacting the American Bowling Congress to find out information concerning the feat, and that is when they learned of Karpinski’s mark. The Sky Bowl sponsored Bordenelli, and Carver promised him a check for $1,000 if he succeeded in breaking the record. Carver also encouraged spectators to contribute to the pot, and Bordenelli said he would give all the money to charity if he failed.

The Brunswick bowling company furnished Bordenelli with three specially fitted balls since he planned to bowl on three lanes simultaneously. He was allowed to break for 15 minutes each hour, but was not allowed to save his breaks and use them cumulatively. Plans were made to have a physician standing by in the latter stages of the attempt—just in case.

On Day Two, when a bloody callous had developed on the thumb of Bordenelli’s left hand, Dr. Paul Isaak arrived to remove the callous, tape the thumb, and cover the digit with a protective metal guard.

Painful hands and fingers were not the first major hurdle that Bordenelli encountered, however, according to the newspaper. The Cheechako reported that the bowler’s biggest problem early on was his desire to sleep. Once he overcame that, the paper said, he stayed on pace for the record.

*****

In his later years, Bordenelli moved to Anchorage, where at the age of 89 he once again made headlines by demonstrating his toughness. In a 2003 article in the Anchorage Daily News is a report of Bordenelli trying to fight off an intruder in his Fairview neighborhood home. Accompanying the story is a color photograph that shows Bordenelli with a small cut on his left temple and with a swirl of yellow and dark purple around his left eye.

According to the story, on the evening of June 16, he and his second wife, Patty, and their infant daughter, were at home when a man burst in through the front door they had propped open to help circulate the air inside. While his wife and child hid in a closet, Bordenelli faced the intruder.

The attacker, wielding a pellet gun, shoved Bordenelli into a bathroom and onto the floor, where he straddled the elderly man, demanding money. Bordenelli kicked the man between the legs.

“That’s when he shot me,” Bordenelli told the paper, showing a reporter a bandage on his upper chest. And when Bordenelli tried to rise, the attacker pistol-whipped him across the left temple before stealing money and other items from his pants pockets and fleeing the scene.

The reporter, in recounting the incident, called Bordenelli “a former boxer” and referred to a newspaper clipping of his bowling record framed on one wall.

Bordenelli, for his part, remained tough and resolute, even in defeat. “If I saw him coming in,” he said of the intruder, “it would have been a different story.”

 

 

"Dispatch for a Wounded Bear"

Larry Lewis and a partner relax after dispatching a bear that had been wounded in a defense-of-life-and-property shooting.

DISPATCH FOR A WOUNDED BEAR

June 2009

The brown bear sow had been shot in the face and in the backside by a fisherman along Russian River. When the bear hurried off into the brush, ushering her three butterball cubs ahead of her, someone called the Soldotna office of the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, and within a short time Larry Lewis was picking his way through the alders in search of an animal he was expected to put out of its misery, while simultaneously protecting the public.

Lewis, a wildlife technician with ADFG, was accompanied by two officers from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Lewis was on point, acting as tracker, occasionally down on his hands and knees, alert for a blood trail or crushed vegetation that might indicate the passage of the wounded animal. Behind him were the other two men, their eyes casting out to the periphery, alert especially to the sides and behind them.

What the three men didn’t know, as they worked their way up the brushy side of a mountain, was that the sow had urged her cubs up a tree and then reversed course on the trackers.

“She circled around and got downwind of us,” Lewis recalled. “She circled around on us and was watching her back trail. She was laying down. She was hunting.” Lying flat and facing forward, she was awaiting her opportunity. Fortunately for the men, who had already passed her when she rose to all fours in the brush only eight feet away, they were prepared.

“I just saw her out of my peripheral vision,” Lewis said. “She stood up, and the guy that was standing there was looking directly at her. As I turned around, he was already shooting. He had a semi-automatic rifle, and he brought it up and just shot three quick times. I just had time enough to turn and shoot twice, too.”

They fired at “center mass,” the biggest target offered by the animal, and she went down quickly. 

 That’s the way Lewis likes it—quick and merciful, as humane as possible—but he doesn’t like it when a wounded bear gets that close.

Usually, he said, a wounded bear tries to flee the area, tries to escape whatever “bad experience” it has just endured—a defense-of-life-and-property shooting, most commonly—but occasionally it can turn the tables on the trackers. And that is when Lewis prefers to be in the company of another tracker he knows well and trusts.

With the department since 1993, Lewis honed his tracking skills with long-time ADFG biologist Ted Spraker. For the last several years, since Spraker’s retirement, Lewis has been tracking with ADFG wildlife biologist Jeff Selinger, with whom he has developed a special rapport on the trail.

“You can’t pick up a manual and read how to do this,” he said. “You kind of develop things, and you develop even your working relationships. Jeff and I could be at each other’s throat and angry at each other that day, but when we get called out on a bear call like that, we’re like married. We’re one hundred percent there for each other, and we’re in synch.”

Such synchronous behavior and thinking has served them well, as they are called out numerous times each year to dispatch animals that have been shot but not killed—and sometimes to take care of unhurt bears that are perceived as threatening human lives.

“I kind of look at us as sort of like a fireman,” Lewis said. “We’re here doing public service work, you know, phone calls, walk-ins, emails, all that kind of stuff, until the phone rings. Something bad’s going on, and you’re out the door and running. The next thing you know, you’re out literally crawling through the pucker brush, looking for a wounded brown bear. You never know what you’re going to be doing.

“I love it. You can rest in the grave. It keeps you young.”

On the trail, Lewis prefers to pack a Remington Model 870 12-gauge pump-action shotgun loaded with 1¼-ounce Brenneke slugs, forged of lead alloyed to a small percentage of antimony to harden the load and help it remain intact as it penetrates the body of a bear.

Brenneke slug extracted from a bear kill. Note the higher retention of original mass.

In his department office, Lewis has an old Brenneke slug that he extracted from a bear he shot. Careful weighing of the slug showed that 472 of its original 500 grains remained after passing through the bear and lodging in the thick hide on its backside. Lewis referred to such weight retention as “incredible,” and said that such a slug, traveling out of the muzzle of his gun at 1,500 feet per second, is capable of inflicting maximum damage, which is essential when dealing with powerful, dangerous animals in close quarters.

“When we go out and deal with an animal, it’s not a hunting situation,” Lewis said. “We’re going out with the intention of putting an animal down. It’s not like we’re going to get up close to it, and we’re going to try to figure out what we’re going to do when we get there.

“We’re (also) not worrying about trying to preserve the meat and all those sorts of things. We want to stop the threat.”

The trackers do, however, make every attempt possible to salvage meat from the animals they dispatch. ADFG works with the State Troopers to donate the meat to people who need it, or to organizations that can use it. Sometimes, salvaging the meat is not practical—for instance, the meat from a bear shot in an isolated area or in especially difficult terrain.

Also a matter of practicality may be the fate of any cubs involved. ADFG’s Permitting Section in Juneau usually has a plan in place for the acquisition of a certain number of cubs—for zoos or other institutions—and when officers go into the field on a bear call, they know whether any cubs can be saved.

Another aspect of keeping the cubs alive, versus euthanizing them, involves their age. Cubs born in that year are usually too young to survive on their own, and those that might survive are likely, according to Lewis, to do so by relying on humans. Such reliance often produces “nuisance bears,” and nuisance bears are often shot at in defense of life and property.

In the case of the three cubs up in a tree on a mountainside above Russian River, the department had no plan in place for them, so they were killed by the officers. Lewis considered the killings the most practical and most humane action to take. “I think it would have been less humane to leave them there,” he said. “There are no nice deaths in nature.”

Lewis said that the hunt for a wounded bear may take a few minutes—usually when the bear has simply wandered off a short distance and died—but can also take several hours. The hunt can be complicated by the density of the brush and difficulty of the terrain, by the weather and the amount of ambient light, by the extent of the bear’s injuries and how badly it is bleeding, and even by officer fatigue, biting bugs, wind direction, and area noise.

Generally, however, “we sneak up on them,” Lewis said. “We’re really close before that animal realizes we’re there.”

Larry Lewis.

In more than a decade of dispatching wounded bears, Lewis and his accompanying officers have avoided getting hurt because of a combination of preparedness, caution and good fortune.

“I won’t glamorize it,” Lewis said. “But I won’t negate the danger, either. It’s the real deal. I go home at night after dealing with one of these (situations), and I’m ready to put my feet up and have a glass of scotch and go to bed early. Because it drains you.

“We’re not just focused on that bear. We’re all focused on getting home safe, too.”