"Anatomy of a Building, in Reverse"

Beemun's Variety in recent years.

ANATOMY OF BUILDING, IN REVERSE

OCTOBER 2010

Beneath the large, modern grey-and-white linoleum squares on the ground floor of Beemun’s Variety lies a concrete slab dating back more than half a century and connecting to business origins that pre-date Alaska’s statehood and Soldotna’s birth as a city.

That hidden 40x80-foot stone foundation is the only original piece remaining of a 52-year history that has spanned four main businesses and more than a half-dozen ancillary ones. Looking backward over the history of this structure reveals the shifting currents of local commerce and some of the individuals who made those shifts possible.

Beemun’s has adjusted with the times—altering its stock as the economy shifted, tastes changed, or another big-box store moved into the area and attempted to under-price them. The same sharp business acumen that has brought success to Earl and Alice Mundell in their Sol-Ken Enterprises, MCK Properties and other ventures has seen them through the changes at Beemun’s over the years.

Today, Beemun’s is thriving—with a variety store downstairs and a bicycle shop and a main office upstairs—and it is tied profitably to a national supplier, the True Value Company. The “Bee” in the name refers to Steve and Cheryl Beeson, while the “mun” refers to Earl and Alice Mundell. Steve and Cheryl are the son-in-law and daughter of Earl and Alice, and the business is truly all in the family.

Steve Beeson, who guides the business’s day-to-day operation, knows that although the fortunes and the structure of the store have remained relatively unchanged for the last two decades, a tumultuous number of months preceded that state of calm.

Just before 11 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 14, 1990—while temperatures hovered around minus-15 degrees, and ashy particulate from a Mount Redoubt eruption lingered in the air—an electrical short at the back of the building triggered a fire, which climbed to the flat mansard roof and spread. Soldotna resident Norm Blakeley was motoring by, spotted the blaze, and drove to the fire department to notify the authorities. He banged on an outside door until he got someone’s attention.

Firefighters battled the 1990 Beemun's blaze throughout the frigid night.

In less than five minutes, firefighters were on the scene, hooking up to the water main and dousing the blaze, which had gained vitality in the air space between the tar roof and the insulation in the attic. Upstairs indoors, there hung a suspended ceiling, above which was sheetrock nailed to roofing trusses and about a foot of blown-in cellulose insulation. Above that was three to four feet of empty space. As a consequence of this architecture, firefighters on the inside struggled initially to find the fire and arrest its progress.

According to estimates by Central Emergency Services, quelling the large commercial fire required approximately 500,000 gallons of water and just over six hours of firefighting. During the fire, however, the roof collapsed and snapped a large-volume, high-pressure pipe running just above the suspended ceiling. The pipe was connected to Beemun’s fire-suppression system, and as a result, water poured unchecked for hours—resulting in nearly another half-million gallons of water expended.

The upper portion of the structure was a total loss.

Later that morning, after the fire had been extinguished and mostly investigatory and mop-up operations were under way, Brad Carver, a long-time Beemun’s employee, was one of the first individuals allowed into the building. He discovered the broken pipe, which was still gushing water, and was able to get to a shut-down valve and stop the flow.

“It was like a waterfall coming down the stairs,” Carver said.

Water from the broken pipe and the firefighting efforts filled the Beemun’s parking lot and then flowed over E. Park Avenue and covered the parking lot at Soldotna Elementary School. Borough plows had to be sent in to scrape the resulting slush into freezing piles and ensure safety for drivers, students and staff on Monday morning.

Beemun's in the aftermath of the fire, January 1990.

By 10:30 a.m., the last of the firefighting equipment was pulled from the lot, and a fuller assessment of the damage was made by the Beemun’s staff: Smoke, water and heat had ruined most of the stock on the ground floor. Beemun’s was forced to lease space in a nearby building and proceed with a fire sale.

Beemun’s is a T-shaped building, with a single perpendicular wing that projects north-northwest from the main structure toward the elementary school. Before the fire, a portion of the upper floor of that wing was occupied by music teacher Tom Houglum, who ran his Houglum Studio of Music out of the last room at the end of the upstairs hallway. Across the hall was an art and drafting studio run by Tom Fischer.

Houglum said that he had been preceded in the studio by piano teacher Jan Ireland, who began subletting the space and her piano to Houglum in 1988 when she left the state to join the music staff of the University of South Dakota. When he was notified of the fire at Beemun’s, he drove over toward the store, parked his car across the Spur Highway, and sat and watched helplessly as his studio was destroyed.

“I could see the fire burn,” he said. “And through the one window in the studio I could see things dropping that were flaming down to the floor.” Inside, Ireland’s ebony upright grand piano was warped by the heat and burned down to the wires.

Miraculously, however, Houglum’s precious Bach organ folios, which had been on a shelf less than 10 feet from the piano, escaped only lightly singed.

After the fire, the building was shut down for repairs, and Earl Mundell decided later to use the entire structure solely for Beemun’s sales and storage.

As winter eased into spring, Mundell hired a contractor to cut the ruined upper story from the lower story and to rebuild. The entire interior was repaired or rebuilt as needed, and the somewhat beveled-looking edges of the old roof were replaced by a more squared-off appearance. By July 1990, the Beemun’s staff had new stock ordered and was ready for a grand re-opening.

*****

Only 23 months earlier, Beemun’s had had its original grand opening.

Back then, the sign on the front of the building had not advertised The Bike Loft, as it does now. Instead, between the name Beemun’s and the word Variety were two letters separated by an ampersand: “V&S,” for “Value & Sincerity,” denoting the store’s connection to the True Value family of businesses.

The sign and the general appearance of the building in 1988 were the result of a three-year effort to revamp the original structure and prepare it for Earl Mundell’s venture into variety.

When the makeover began in 1985, the building was decidedly not as square as it would become.

Before the building was a variety store called Beemun's, it was the Golden Nugget Bakery. Before that, it was Soldotna Drug.

Two grey-domed Quonset huts were joined in the shape of a large T, and the business inside then was the Golden Nugget Bakery. When Mundell, who had owned the building since 1971, decided to give the old place a facelift, his decision had been prompted by a windstorm a few months earlier that had ripped some of the tin from the Quonset section closest to the elementary school. That tin had proved virtually impossible to replace, so Mundell determined to fix the problem another way.

He hired contractor Mike Poppin to build a squared-off, wooden-framed building as a self-supported shell around the entire tin-covered structure, essentially encasing it in a box-like façade. Then, over the next two years, he hired Rich King to gut the insides and rebuild.

In the winter of 1986, King started with the wing and set out to dismantle the Quonset arches that formed the second story over the concrete-block first-floor foundation. He and his crew then constructed a new interior, with retail space downstairs and storage space upstairs.

The following winter, King and his workers disassembled the full Quonset that made up the interior of the main building. They began by tearing out the floor that separated the upper and lower stories.

“The gnarliest part of that whole project was the insulation,” King said. “It had ancient fiberglass in big sheets, and it was in four-foot layouts, so it was almost like a sleeping bag or something like that—big rolls and sheets—and they were held in place by this board that was really kind of mooshy, maybe a predecessor of today’s particle board. And the tin that was on that building was super-heavy gauge, compared to the tin that was on the addition.”

Once the tin and the laminated wooden ribs holding it in place were removed, only the box-like wooden shell remained. Inside, then, they built a new second floor and sub-contracted all new wiring and plumbing, including the fire-suppression system.

No one on the Beemun’s staff remembers the fate of all that extracted tin, but after some of the wooden ribs were sold, the rest were bundled, covered and hauled to the storage yard next to a Kalifornsky Beach Road warehouse owned in part by Mundell. They are still there, slowly rotting.

And as the new-look building was completed and Beemun’s sign hung out front, only the concrete-slab floor remained to remind anyone of 30 more years of history still tied to that place.

*****

By 1988, newcomers to Soldotna might never have known that the conjoined cylindrical structures had ever existed. A squarish Beemun’s building stood starkly in their place and was all that anyone could see.

But if one could “peel back the onion” just three years, the picture changed.

In 1985, there was no Beemun’s—only the Golden Nugget Bakery, with its perpetual smell of frosted donuts and baking bread and rolls. The bakery, which had been there when the transformation from “rounded” to “squared-off” building began, was, by the end of the process, was only a part of history.

The Golden Nugget Bakery began in the main Quonset in 1977. Paul and Joyce Fischer leased the building from Earl Mundell when he pulled out his own Pay & Save business and moved it next door (where the former Liquidation World now stands vacant).

Paul and Joyce Fischer and their large family during the Golden Nugget days.
(Both Fischer photos from the Ruralite magazine, circa early 1980s.)

Paul Fischer, who would be elected state senator in 1982, said that he and Joyce decided to open a bakery in Soldotna to fill a public need, despite the fact that at the time they were both lacking in bakery experience.

“I’d never baked a cake or anything at that point,” said the former borough assemblyman. “I had one day of experience,” a reference to the time he drove to the bakery in Seward and spent the night watching the baker there preparing his goods for the next day. Later, Fischer hired a man who had worked as a baker on the North Slope, although Fischer said that he soon knew more about baking than his baker did.

The store’s specialty was donuts, but the Fischers also created home-style bread products—selling sandwich bread to Sal’s Klondike Diner in Soldotna and sweet rolls to the Rig Café in Kenai. They also sold pastries to D&A Grocery in Kenai, and Paul Fischer said that he was asked at one point if he would be interested in becoming a baker for Carr’s grocery—but he turned the offer down.

One of the Fischer daughters eyeballs a selection of fresh doughnuts.

Paul and Joyce took a step back from the bakery business after Paul was elected to the Legislature. For a while, then, the Golden Nugget was run by their son, David, and later they sub-let the building and leased their equipment to a family named Mendenhall, and even later to a young man who Paul said had big ideas but failed quickly.

As the building was taking on a more square appearance in the mid-1980s, the Fischers came back to the bakery to sell off the equipment and terminate their lease.

In the attached wing at about that same time, the Peninsula Beauty Academy also moved off the premises, and Paul Fischer remembers that, early in his time there, a tanning-and-toning place, a T-shirt silk-screening business, and even a shoe store were among the smaller commercial ventures that came and went in the building.

Before the Golden Nugget Bakery, however, the Quonset complex had been home to Soldotna Drug—the city’s first drugstore, although this was its second location.

*****

Soldotna Drug, owned initially by Toby Buckler, began in a strip mall called the Village Inn near where Midas is now located, across the Sterling Highway from Fred Meyer. The Village Inn—built by Jack Johnson on land leased from Jack and Dolly Farnsworth—featured a restaurant, a bar, a motel, a pair of clothing stores and a beauty salon in addition to the drugstore, and, according to Lee Bowman, who started there as a pharmacist in July 1966, the entire structure had

The Village Inn in the 1960s.

no firewalls.

Consequently, Bowman said, the building’s fire insurance classification and rates matched the highest of any similar-sized building in the United States, and Buckler began seeking a safer location.

In 1968, he found one: a recently vacated single Quonset hut on a large lot just across E. Park Avenue from Soldotna Elementary School. The Quonset was owned by George and Shirley Denison, who had recently closed their own business and were delighted to find an interested buyer.

At the time of the purchase, the interior of the 40x80-foot Quonset was entirely open inside, with the exception of two small overhead rooms just inside the front doors. Before moving his drugstore business inside that fall, Buckler had a full upstairs installed, and thus the steel posts that are still inside Beemun’s today were bolted to the original concrete floor for support.

Inside the original Soldotna Drug.

Buckler used the upstairs primarily for storage, and the downstairs for retail space and a small office, and in its new location Soldotna Drug prospered, largely because it was the only pharmacy in town.

But a few years later, when the Mundells moved in from Denver and bought the whole business from Buckler, Soldotna Drug was transformed into a thriving enterprise.

An ironic aspect of this success stems from the fact that, according to Steve Beeson, Earl Mundell had never really intended to come to Soldotna. Mundell moved north in late 1969 bearing an agreement to buy a pharmacy in Palmer, but when he and Alice arrived there they were informed that the seller had changed his mind.

So Mundell—who had worked in his brother’s pharmacy in Denver after leaving the Navy around the end of World War II—went to work in Anchorage in the Providence Hospital pharmacy, and he spent his spare time looking for another pharmacy to buy. Eventually, he found Soldotna Drug, and in March 1971 the Mundells became the new owners.

*****

At first, Soldotna Drug pharmacist Lee Bowman wasn’t sure the new owners were going to be good for his career: “We bought the homestead here in November of 1969, assuming that I had a steady job,” Bowman said. “And when Earl bought the store, the first thing he did was tell me I would be unemployed directly.”

Fortunately for Bowman, it didn’t work out that way.

Soldotna Drug in the early days.

Mundell soon learned that the earning potential for his new pharmacy was stronger than he had anticipated, said Bowman, and that Soldotna Drug might be capable of supporting another pharmacist besides himself. Additionally, Bowman said, Mundell learned that the two men shared similar notions about how a pharmacy should be run. Consequently, Mundell invited Bowman to stay on a couple months longer—and then to stay on part time—and then to switch to full time. (In the end, Bowman stayed with Soldotna Drug until it was purchased by Pay N Save in 1983, and he retired from Pay N Save in 1985. And Soldotna Drug became so successful that Mundell eventually brought in a third pharmacist, Tom Hodel, current owner of Soldotna Professional Pharmacy, and others later on, as well.) By 1973, business was so good that Mundell decided to expand. The original concrete floor was about to change its footprint.

*****

Rich King’s very first job upon coming to Alaska in 1973 was working for Earl and Alice Mundell, adding a perpendicular Quonset-style wing to the grey tin Quonset hut known as Soldotna Drug. Joining the two structures correctly was tricky, King said, but his on-site boss worked out the details on a lunch table.

To supervise the project, Mundell had hired Wiley Graham, whom King said was a “sort of a jack-of-all-trades”—a Cat-skinner, an electrician, a welder, a pilot, a carpenter. “Wiley was the only person who was smart enough to figure out how to do that back then. He engineered the whole thing on a napkin over at Glady’s (Café). It was Wiley Graham and Earl Mundell scratching their heads together. We’d go to Glady’s for lunch, and those two would hash out what was going to happen.”

The aspect of the architecture generating the most difficulty was the eight-foot concrete-block retaining wall that framed the first story of the addition, and upon which the Quonset-like second story would rest. Graham devised a means of joining the straight walls and arched roof of the addition to the curved northern wall of the original building.

At the same time, the renovators capped the original Quonset’s freshwater well and had Soldotna Drug hooked up to the city’s water main in order to power its new fire-suppression sprinkler system.

After some expansion and improvements, Soldotna Drug prospered.

With the extra retail space, inventory expanded and business at the drugstore continued to boom, so two years later Mundell began construction on a larger separate building on the adjoining property, and in 1976 Soldotna Drug was moved across the parking lot.

In 1977, the Golden Nugget Bakery opened in the older building, and in 1983, the national chain, Pay N Save, bought out Soldotna Drug.

*****

But before all of this expansion and change—before Soldotna Drug even existed, in fact—the original Quonset served another purpose: It was the central Kenai Peninsula’s first full-time movie theater.

The origins of public cinema in Soldotna date back to 1957, two years before statehood, when Alaska Road Commission worker George Denison began showing commercial films in the Soldotna Community Building. Denison built a four-by-four-foot projection box to house a pair of 16-milimeter projectors, and he installed a wall-sized screen on one end of the large, flat room.

“Our ceiling wasn’t too high,” wrote Denison in Once upon the Kenai. “In fact, we had to constantly try to keep folks from standing up. We had enough break-downs to allow sessions for stretching.”

At first, Denison borrowed commercial films from the Army in Wildwood, according to then-wife, Shirley. “But then there was the discussion that that wasn’t really legal,” Shirley said. “Those films were to be used only for the troops. They weren’t supposed to be shared with anybody else. I think it was just a few months before they shut that down.”

George then began renting films from a supplier in Anchorage, and the Community Building continued as a venue until the following year.

Shirley Denison, early 1960s.

Shirley (now Henley) made it clear that owning and operating a theater had been more George’s dream than her own. She said she had had more than enough to do caring for their daughters and teaching high school chemistry and science in Kenai; still, at first she went along with George’s idea.

From Joe Faa, who then owned the old Howard Lee homestead—the center of which is now Soldotna Elementary School—the Denisons purchased a piece of land just south of E. Park Avenue and ordered a 40x80-foot Quonset-style building as a do-it-yourself kit from an East Coast company called Timber Rib. “It was about the cheapest thing we could afford to build,” Shirley said.

George hired builder Robert S. “Bob” Oehler to put it all together. Oehler began the project but failed to complete it, necessitating the hiring of Joe Faa himself to finish the job in time for the planned grand opening on Sept. 6, 1958.

Outside, the building was fairly nondescript: a grey half-cylinder, with four windows and a set of double doors below a brown-painted awning on the lower portion of the front, and above were three blacked-out windows and a white rectangular sign bearing red lettering—SOLDOTNA THEATRE.

Inside, through the double front doors, was a ticket window to the right and a second set of double doors straight ahead. In the lobby, to the right were the restrooms, and to the left was a concessions stand and a set of stairs leading to two small upper rooms—the projection room, built high so that films could be projected out over the heads of the audience, and a cry room, which George claimed was the first on the peninsula and maybe one of the first in the Territory of Alaska.

The concessions stand was manned almost exclusively by local teen-agers, who worked for about 50 cents an hour. Among the workers in the early 1960s were Louise (Grainge) Martin, Mary Alice (Grainge) Casebeer, Gary Martin, Kenny Moss and Peggy Mullen.

Many of the girls started out hawking popcorn and graduated to selling tickets. The boys, on the other hand, began as janitorial workers, cleaning up after the films had finished, listening to Denison’s jukebox as they cleaned and then playing ping-pong on Denison’s table once they had finished. Soon, one of the boys, Gary Martin, moved on to projectionist.

Beyond the lobby was the main theater: a high-ceilinged, wide-open room with a huge screen and a low stage at the far end, and filling the large floor were numerous rows of used theater seats that Denison had purchased from an auction house. Two aisles divided the rows of seats, which Denison claimed could hold about 180 audience members—and more than 200 if kids sat on the floor up front.

The seats were connected in sections of five to seven, built on strips of oak flooring that would allow them to be easily slid aside on the flat concrete floor. The seats could be scooted around for cleaning purposes, but they also were moved on special nights for public performances, community dances, potlucks and meetings.

The Soldotna Theatre, first full-time cinema on the central Kenai Peninsula ... and much, much more.

One of the first live onstage performers at the Soldotna Theatre was long-time Clam Gulch resident, Emil Bartolowits, who belonged to American Legion Post 18 in the village of Ninilchik. Post 18 (and the Women’s Auxiliary) used to occasionally put on stage plays to entertain the masses from the lower peninsula.

In early 1960s, the legion troupe performed Tiger House, a 1930 three-act mystery-comedy by Robert St. Clair. Post 18 paid $3 in royalty fees to the Hansen Play & Novelty Company of Salt Lake City for the rights to perform in public, and, according to Bartolowits, the enthusiasm from the entertainment-starved public was well worth the money they had shelled out.

“We went there and had a real good performance—we thought so, anyway,” Bartolowits said. The full house roared with approval, as the legionnaires provided the acting, directing, costumes, lighting and sets.

Rehearsal for the performance of
Night of January 16th.

In 1964 and 1965, the Soldotna Players, under the direction of Gail Smith, provided more onstage drama, with Ayn Rand’s Night of January 16^th, followed by John Van Druten’s romantic comedy, Bell, Book and Candle.

Long-time Soldotna resident, Dolly Farnsworth, also remembers the frequent dances at the theater. The Elks Club, in particular, held teen dances there, and Dolly’s husband, Jack, was often one of the chaperones.

On holidays, she said, it was common to have parties in the big open space that the theater could provide. Farnsworth laughed as she remembered one particular masquerade party: “Oh, God, we had fun! My husband dressed as a lady, and nobody knew who he was. And he didn’t wear a mask; he just had a lot of makeup and a wig and some extra padding.”

The biggest cinematic hit at the Soldotna Theatre was John Wayne’s North to Alaska. “It ran for a full week,” wrote Denison. “People came from all over the peninsula and Anchorage. The first night, the cars were stacked past the Cheechako News building (in Ridgeway).”

Not everything about the theater was rosy, however. Because both Denisons worked full-time jobs, extra time spent at the theater became “a sore subject” between them, Shirley said. Since the theater income paid for the heat, lights and film rentals, they kept it going but later leased its operation to Bill and Vivian Cardwell, who kept the theater in business until sometime before it was purchased as a drugstore in 1968.

Then, over the years, the building evolved, and slowly the original structure slipped away, glimpsed only on occasion through the frenetic activity of passing decades.

In the late 1980s, when the old rounded structures were covered by a squared-up wood-frame shell, the decision was made to tear out the Quonsets from the inside and rebuild something more modern; behind one of the walls workers discovered the original theater ticket window and old movie posters, which were eventually sold or given away.

The tin and timber ribs were hauled off. Debris was burned. History disappeared.

But a fragment of that long history remains. Visitors to Beemun’s today can still run their hands down the steel posts that supported the second floor of Soldotna Drug more than 40 years ago, and they can still feel the solid floor of the original Soldotna Theatre concrete beneath the linoleum.

Although progress has never stopped, the footprint of history remains.