"Unlucky in Love"

Donnis Thompson in the 1950s.

UNLUCKY IN LOVE

MARCH 2012

Donnis Thompson had a bad feeling about the marriage—not her own, of course, which was just fine, but the one she was about to officiate. Still, she had a job to do.

In her early 20s in 1953, Donnis had come to Kenai to marry Stan Thompson, with whom she had worked in Fairbanks for the Army Corps of Engineers. Shortly after the couple settled in Kenai, Stan, who was in the process of creating a building-supply business named Kenai Korners, was appointed as U.S. Commissioner (a magistrate, essentially, in pre-statehood days), and Donnis became his assistant commissioner. Therefore, when Stan was away, Donnis had a part to play—of commissioner.

And thus it was that she was called upon to marry a middle-aged Kenai couple—a pair she does not wish to identify, except to say that they were known in the area as “heavy drinkers.”

In those days, Kenai had a population of about 300 people, was still seven years away from voting to become a city instead of a village, and offered few commercially profitable opportunities. The groom, as an example, was a professional net-mender, and he repaired commercial fishing nets year round. “All the time, really good, very fast,” Donnis said.

The bride had never cut her hair and typically braided it into two thick pigtails that hung down her back to well below her waist. She was proud of her long hair, and those braids would play a part in the lives of the Thompsons again at a later time.

With Stan out of town, Donnis was approached about doing the ceremony, and she didn’t like the stress. “I was scared silly,” she said. “I’d never performed a marriage ceremony before, and I thought, ‘What if I don’t do it right? What are the repercussions? Would the kids be illegitimate? What’s going to happen?’”

Donnis decided that her best course was to strictly follow the rules of such ceremonies and do everything precisely according to the book.

The book, in this case, was the U.S. Commissioner’s little black book of rules, regulations and guidelines. In this book was a wedding ceremony. “I read word for word from the little black book,” Donnis said. “And I got every word in.”

The ceremony was performed in the commissioner’s Kenai office, which Donnis described as being “about as big as a grandmother’s pantry,” with a wall-to-wall counter behind which she stood to officiate. Dressed in town clothes—nothing formal or fancy--the bride and groom, along with their handful of witnesses, stood on the opposite side of the counter, crammed into the tiny space.

Although she performed the ceremony flawlessly, she said, she disliked the experience, and she hated the way the marriage turned out.

A short time after the ceremony, the couple moved out of state. “They seemed fine at the time,” Donnis said. Within a few months, however, alarming gossip began to filter back into the Kenai area: First, the husband had had a heart attack (but survived). Second, the wife had tried to commit suicide (but survived). Third, they had gotten a divorce.

Both of them eventually returned to the Kenai area, and the Thompsons crossed paths, albeit briefly, with the ex-wife once again.

A few years later—still before statehood, when Stan’s commission expired—the woman was sleeping on a couch at Eadie’s Frontier Club. She had announced that she was tired because of some medication a doctor had prescribed to her, and so she slept soundly. One of her long pigtails was tucked underneath her, while the other one lay draped over an arm of the couch.

The sight of this dangling pigtail apparently posed too great a temptation for a young taxi driver who ambled into Eadie’s to pick up a fare. With no provocation, the cabbie pulled out his knife and proceeded to saw off the pigtail before leaving the premises.

When she awoke and was informed of what had happened to her hair and who had done the deed, the barbering victim went to the U.S. Commissioner and filed charges against the taxi driver, who hadn’t exactly been hiding his crime. In fact, he had been parading around other bars in town and bragging about what he had done.

At the trial, Donnis said, the woman came into the courtroom with her single braid wrapped around her head and tied up inside a bandana. She won her case and received some sort of financial settlement from the young cabbie. Afterward, she went into a beauty salon, had the lone pigtail lopped off, got herself a perm, and came out “looking 20 years younger.”

Until statehood in 1959, Donnis continued in her capacity as assistant commissioner, but she never again performed a marriage ceremony. “I figured it wasn’t my thing,” she said. “I should not marry people. I couldn’t give blessings, obviously.”

She decided not to officiate again, even if asked to do so. “I said I’m not going to do any more. I told my husband, ‘Don’t go away if there’s a wedding coming up.’ And he made sure that never happened again.”

Fortunately for the Thompsons, their own marriage has withstood the test of time, despite some initial struggles. They arranged the wedding by telephone between Fairbanks and Kenai; Donnis flew into Anchorage to be married in a wine-colored dress that Stan called “purple,” a color he disliked; Stan, who was hungry from an all-night, no-food working spree on the plumbing at their home in Kenai, ate five plates of food at the all-you-can-eat buffet at the Silver Dollar Club after the ceremony; the Kenai “cabin” that Donnis had romanticized about was actually a two-room building with gray sheathing on the outside and was “cleverly” placed between a muddy alley and the back of a garage.

Despite such things, the Thompsons will celebrate 59 years together in 2012.

 

"Going Nordic"

Skiing the trails of the Kenai National Moose Range in the 1960s and '70s could be a tranquil, rustic experience.

GOING NORDIC

MARCH 2012

The cross-country ski trails on Kenai National Wildlife Refuge land near Headquarters Lake exist largely because of Dick Mommsen and the Billingslea family, who moved from Anchorage to their new home four miles south of Soldotna in 1967. The Billingsleas knew little about skiing back then, but they had plenty of energy and enthusiasm. And Mommsen had connections.

“When we came down here, we could barely ski,” said Freddie Billingslea, now 79. “We were just learning, but we loved it, and it was a family thing.”

When they had started skiing a year earlier, they had done so mainly for health reasons. Freddie’s husband, Earl, had a torn knee ligament that he was trying to strengthen. Freddie herself had arthritis and wanted to stay active.

Progress was slow, but they pursued their new activity with great vigor. “We would ski from here into town,” Freddie said, “and (some friends) would give us a ride back in their truck.” Soon, however, the Billingsleas were helping to form the Kalifonsky Nordic Ski Club, working to carve trails from wilderness, and Freddie was skiing nearly every day, regardless of the weather.

In high school, daughter Sydney and son Everett participated in the very first Kenai Central High School cross-country ski team, which formed in 1977. Coincidentally, that team was coached by Alan Boraas, who later became the last president of the ski club.

In that first winter, however, the Kalifonsky Nordic Ski Club was just a loose affiliation, featuring the Billingsleas, Bill and Charlotte Ischi, Nels Kjelstad, and a handful of others who would soon help create a community trail system. Among that “handful” was Mommsen, who had grown up around Mount McKinley National Park, where his father had worked for the railroad. A Department of Transportation employee, Mommsen spent much of his free time outdoors, mostly skiing and hiking.

Mommsen knew people who knew people who knew how to get things done. In the late 1960s, he used his connections to help the growing core of skiing enthusiasts get permission from what was then the Kenai National Moose Range to construct a series of ski trails in the area between the Soldotna Ski Hill and Headquarters and Nordic lakes.

Dozens of local skiers competed each year in the Stampede between Kenai and Soldotna.

Then into the story stepped Joe Stanski, a ski enthusiast who worked in the area in the summers. “He knew a lot about building trails,” said Freddie, “and he wanted to build them for races.”

Together with Mommsen, Stanski laid out the first 2.5-kilometer loop in 1968, and then Mommsen led a trail-building crew of ski club volunteers, who followed the prescribed route with hand tools, sawing logs and hacking away at the undergrowth.

In the winter, Mommsen did most of the grooming—all of it, in fact, if no help was available. Grooming was also done by hand—well, by foot, actually.

If three people were available, all would don traditional wooden snowshoes. The lead groomer would walk firmly down the center of the trail, snowshoes close together to pack the snow as well as possible. Then the other groomers would overlap the leader’s tracks by one snowshoe per side, producing a four-shoe-wide trail.

Later, another 2.5-km trail was added to the first, and eventually a third 2.5-km loop was connected to the second one. Each of these trails was groomed manually until the ski club, which was responsible for trail maintenance, was able to obtain a snowmobile.

Most skiers from the early days remember a particularly precipitous descent in one section of the trail, Stanski’s Drop, named for the trail’s designer. At the bottom of the hill, the trail veered sharply, and those who could not navigate the turn had to hope to at least avoid the large birch tree on the corner. At some point, a mattress was tied around the tree to soften any collisions, and much later the trail was actually re-routed for safety.

The first KCHS cross country ski team, 1977. (Alan Boraas, coach, is front, left.)

Meanwhile, the Kalifonsky Nordic Ski Club—so named to give it a more central peninsula feel—was burgeoning. A club roster from about 1970 shows well over 100 members, and club-sponsored activities going strong. Mimi Morton designed and made a club patch—a large black snowflake, black lettering and black trim on a field of white—which the club sold for a dollar apiece.

Youth memberships in the club cost $1 a year, while adult memberships were $2, and family memberships were $4. The entry fees for most activities ranged from 50 cents to $2. It was possible to outfit an adult skier with standard wooden skis, plus boots, poles and bindings for less than $100.

The activities ranged from a free 1968 cross-country ski clinic put on by the Army biathlon team at Fort Richardson in Anchorage to a club-sponsored, U.S. Ski Association-sanctioned race on refuge trails in 1970.

In the 1970s, the club also sponsored an event known as the Stampede, a race along the Spur Highway between Kenai and Soldotna. To please the participants in both cities, the starting and finishing lines altered annually.

When the club wasn’t hosting races or participating in races elsewhere, members frequently headed for the hills. On most weekends, Mommsen led day tours and some overnight trips into the mountains around Cooper Landing or Summit Lake. One of his favorite destinations was Manitoba Mountain, but he also led club skiers on some wild treks across avalanche chutes and up mountain ridges, and he once took a group down the ice over the Kenai River from the lower canyon to the upper end of Skilak Lake.

The Kalifonsky Nordic Ski Club climbs the lower slopes of Mount Manitoba, 1972.

Freddie Billingslea, who accompanied Mommsen on several of those backcountry adventures, said that she didn’t worry about the danger as long as Mommsen was leading the way. “He knew these mountains, and all over and every place,” she said. “I trusted him implicitly.”

By the 1980s, however, some of the original torchbearers for the ski club were tired of being leaders and wanted change. A few early members had moved away or on to other interests, and those remaining were ready to let someone else lead for a while. Also, with the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980, the refuge had changed its policy on sanctioning races on its trails, and the interest in local racing began to wane.

By the mid-1980s, Boraas, along with Charlotte Ischi, had closed out the club account at the bank and attempted to reformulate the organization as the Kenai Peninsula Nordic Ski Club. But the new effort didn’t spark the desired enthusiasm, and it wasn’t until the late 1980s that the fortunes of organized cross-country skiing on the central peninsula began to improve.

The change came shortly after construction began on Skyview High School, just across the highway from the Soldotna Ski Hill. Boraas inquired about the hilly land adjoining the campus, and soon he and a few others had laid out a tentative first trail and sought permission of the Borough Assembly to build it. Then Allan Miller, an Olympics-caliber skier, joined the Skyview staff and, as Boraas put it, “energized a lot of trail work.”

The formation of Tsalteshi Trails and the Tsalteshi Trails Association transformed
and reinvigorated the sport of cross country skiing on the central Kenai Peninsula.

By the time the school opened in the fall of 1990, the Green Trail was in, and others soon followed. The resulting trail system and the Tsalteshi Trail Association filled the void left by the demise of the Kalifonsky Nordic Ski Club.

And now, as Boraas, an anthropology professor at Kenai Peninsula College, likes to say, there is once again in place a northern sport participated in by a northern people living in a northern land. He believes that sports involving the natural landscape best allow the people living in that landscape to bond with their environment.

“If nothing you do is ‘here,’ why live here?” he said. “It’s hard to live here. But you do live here, and we have to create the culture of the north that allows us to embrace this place.”

Freddie Billingslea agrees. Although bad knees keep her off her skis these days, she still loves outdoor exercise, and when she speaks of skiing, the enthusiasm rises in her voice, perhaps as it did more than 40 years ago when she was just getting the hang of an exhilarating sport.

 

"Nor Sleet, Nor Hail, Nor Dark of Night"

Kenai Postmaster Beverly Sabrowski and her husband Joe in 1935, early in the more modern era of mail delivery.
 

NOR SLEET, NOR HAIL, NOR DARK OF NIGHT

MARCH 2009

When the price of sending a letter through the U.S. Postal Service rises to 44 cents in May, people will complain.

Those 44 cents, however, can carry their letters all the way across country, winging in swift jets often in just two or three days. A hundred years ago, when the price was about two or three cents per letter, the mail routes were more arduous, and letters and package took much longer to reach distant destinations.

The difficulty of delivering the mail was perhaps more acute in Alaska than anywhere else in the nation. For instance, a resident of the village of Kenai a century ago might receive mail occasionally by boat from Homer in the summertime, but seldom or not at all throughout the winter. When ice made boat traffic unsafe on Cook Inlet, any mail that actually reached Homer had to be transported overland to Kenai, or held onto until better conditions existed.

According to Ruth Grueninger’s postal history in Once Upon the Kenai, the beach and overland routes were used initially by Paddy Ryan, who toted the mail on foot to Kenai’s first postmaster, Eugene R. Bogart, who was appointed in 1899, and to Bogart’s many successors.

Ryan was followed by Gregory George Brown, who used a horse to make the trip, and by Nick Kalifornsky, who employed a dog team. According to Alan Boraas, anthropology professor at Kenai Peninsula College, many Dena’ina men other than Kalifornsky also ran the mail route.

When any of these mail carriers encountered significant water barriers, such as the Kenai and Kasilof rivers, they most likely crossed on boats, left by canneries operating near the river mouths. When the boats were on the wrong side, Boraas said, they probably hailed the cannery caretaker (or winter watchman) to haul them across in his dory.

At smaller streams, such as the Ninilchik River, Deep Creek, or the Anchor River, they likely headed upstream to find a suitable crossing over the ice, he said.

Mail teams prepare for departure on the Anchorage-Seward route, 1916.



When most of the mail began to channel through the “Gateway City” of Seward—arriving in the ice-free port via steamship, then heading out from the southern terminus of the recently established Iditarod Trail—the challenge of hauling the mail to Kenai changed. In 1918, long-time Kenai resident, Paul Wilson Sr., was awarded a Star Route contract to carry the mail by dog team to town.

Star Routes were devised by the U.S. Congress in 1845 to provide the swiftest and most secure means of mail delivery at the lowest possible price. A contract, which typically lasted four years, was put out to bid, and the lowest bidder was usually awarded the deal.

In Alaska, over terrain that could change drastically with each passing storm or warming trend, the task of arriving on time and in one piece could be exceedingly difficult, according to Dr. Linda Chamberlain, a Homer-based sled-dog musher and epidemiologist who is currently writing a book on the historic use of dog sleds to deliver the mail.

The first Star Route in Alaska was awarded in 1894 to Tlingit musher, Jimmie Jackson, who had the prodigious task of delivering mail from Juneau more than 1,000 miles to Circle, north of Fairbanks. He managed the feat a single time, traveling from Juneau by a canoe to Atlin Lake, B.C., and then on foot and by dog team the rest of the way.

On the trip, Jackson had to hunt and fish to feed himself and his team; however, the rigors were too much. “Two dogs dropped dead in their traces,” Chamberlain said. “He had to use the last one for food.”

Another tough Star Route pioneer was Ben Downing, who ran a mail sled between Dawson and Eagle, starting in 1899. In 1903, on the way to Dawson, Chamberlain said, Downing and his dog team went through the ice. He managed to extract himself from the water, but the dogs did not survive. Alone, then, and with his feet frozen, he walked the rest of the way—nearly 300 miles—to Dawson.

“When he arrived in town, the bloody footprints came all the way in,” Chamberlain said. Downing refused to allow his feet to be amputated, and he died two years later of complications resulting from his injuries.

Downing’s story, Chamberlain added, is indicative of the toughness and perseverance of the pioneer sled-dog mail carriers. They were expected to be on time, and they knew they could lose money or even their contracts if they were late. Star Routes, according to Chamberlain, were “a very important source of income for rural Alaskans. There were many, many Native carriers. The Star Routes created a whole economy.”

This economic boost became particularly evident when the Alaska Road Commission surveyed the Iditarod Trail, from Seward to Nome, in 1910, and when it became the official northern mail route in 1911. Every 25 to 50 miles along the trail, roadhouses sprang up, as people in the Bush found ways to tap into local travel, said Chamberlain, whose book, Mushing the Mail, she hopes to have ready for publication by the 100^th anniversary of the Iditarod Trail in 2011.

Fred Henton, owner of Henton's lodge in Cooper Landing, was an early mail carrier.



The trail sprang up initially as a means for prospectors and fortune-seekers to reach the gold-mining towns of Iditarod and Nome. “It was brutal out there,” Chamberlain said. “So the Iditarod Trail created a system of safety and support.”



Chamberlain recalled one particularly gruesome pre-trail tale: “They found a mail carrier frozen (in 1907). He was buried in snow outside of Nome, and somebody saw a protruding hand and dug down and found him with his dogs wrapped around him. And the mail was dated 1901.”

From the main Iditarod Trail sprang up ancillary trails, such as Paul Wilson’s route to Kenai, which began in Cooper Landing or in Lawing, depending on which site had the official U.S. post office at the time.



Mail and freight delivery, 1920.

According to U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service historian, Gary Titus, who has researched and traced the Seward-to-Kenai mail run, the route varied somewhat from winter to winter because the conditions were so variable.  In 1923, he said, the ARC performed a reconnaissance of the route and prompted some upgrades. Those upgrades included new shelter cabins, some repairs to existing structures, and widening of the trail in places. Eighteen miles of new trail was cut to a width of nine feet, Titus said, and 27 miles of the old trail were widened to five feet.



In virtually all types of weather, carriers traveled with freight sleds, often packed with hundreds of pounds of mail. These sleds were longer than a modern racing sled, and narrower and more sturdily built, usually of hickory or ash. Carriers rarely rode on the backs of their sleds, and travel could be very slow as they occasionally walked in snowshoes out in front of the dogs to break trail in heavy snow.

Generally, according to Titus, the carriers followed this route into Kenai: From the west (or river outlet) end of Kenai Lake, they followed a light-duty wagon road along the southern bank of the Kenai River until they reached Schooner Bend, where a bridge had been constructed in 1920. Now on the river’s northern bank, they followed a continuation of the wagon road until they moved onto a higher bench for easier travel.



A mail plane parked on Pollard Lake in Kasilof in the 1930s.

They followed the bench until they reached Jean Creek, which they followed up to Jean Lake. They crossed the length of the lake and climbed the low pass to Upper Jean Lake, from which they descended into a series of lowland lakes and swamps that led them to the Moose River. They followed the Moose River to its confluence with the Kenai River, and then followed a Native river trail on into Kenai.

The round trip could be made in seven to eight days under good conditions, but the carriers were given 30 days in which to do it.

In 1930, airplanes began to land on the Kenai beach once a month with the mail, and by 1934 an airstrip was created on the bluff. By 1940, the end of the mail-sled era was at hand. The bulk of the mail throughout Alaska was now being carried by airplanes, which could arrive every day on the airstrips carved next to some rural communities.

By 1940, Kenai had had 13 different postmasters and had moved its post office nearly a dozen times, usually from one person’s home to another, but the price of postage to send a letter across the country was still three cents.

The price rose to four cents in 1958, and, as usual, people complained.

 

"Building a Road to the Future"

Morris Coursen (left, back row) and his parents, Ken and Manila Coursen (front left) pose with the rest of the family. Morris, Ken and Manila worked together on the original construction of Swanson River Road, gateway to the first commercially successful oil well in Alaska. (Photos courtesy of the Coursen family)

BUILDING A ROAD TO THE FUTURE

JULY 2012

It looked like some malformed mechanical inchworm: a large bulldozer clanking in reverse, towing an 8x14-foot wooden shack on skids, cabled to an old school bus, trailed by a Jeep, all creeping down a freshly made dirt path through the wilderness of the Kenai National Moose Range in the fall of 1956.

Today, while many residents of the Last Frontier know that the 1957 discovery well on Swanson River Road produced the first major commercial oil strike in Alaska and heralded a new economic future for the territory, few are probably aware of the work involved in creating the road that allowed the strike to happen in the first place.

The strange procession in 1956 was part of that work, according to an article in the April 1959 issue of The Alaska Sportsman by  Manila Coursen, who served on the crew that carved out the pilot road to the drilling site.

Morris Coursen was the chief Cat operator on the project.

The road building, as it turned out, became something of a family affair for the Coursens, beginning with Manila’s son, Morris, a Caterpillar operator who had already spent years on the Kenai Peninsula clearing land for homesteaders and building area roads. In 1956, Morris was hired by officials of the Richfield Oil Corporation. Morris in turn hired his father, Ken, and his neighbor, Jesse Robinson, to help with the road construction. Once it became apparent that a movable camp would be expedient on a project that might last several months, Manila asked for the job of camp cook and was also hired.

Two other peninsula homesteaders, Blaine Saunders and Jimmy Hovis, were brought on by Richfield as scouts to round out the crew.

When Manila Coursen first heard what her son was up to, she was confused by the concept of a pilot road. “I wondered how a pilot could use a road,” she wrote.

Morris had to explain to her the alternate use of the word “pilot,” and how Richfield would benefit strategically and financially from the creation of an avenue over which to transport its drilling equipment, supplies and employees. Richfield geologists, she learned, had “more than a hunch” that a rich deposit of oil lay beneath the remote location, but the site itself lay 23 miles of swamp land, lakes and forest from the Sterling Highway.

To start the process of road building, Morris boarded a helicopter with Richfield officials and flew several times over the area, seeking the “most feasible” route and cross-checking their observations with data from available topographic maps. Once they had roughed in a suitable course, they also determined that the new road would branch north off the Sterling Highway near the Sterling schoolhouse (about where Sterling Elementary stands today).

The next step involved more flyovers, with officials dropping rolls of white toilet paper—“one roll to each two slow counts”—to mark the path for the scouts, who would blaze the trail for the bulldozer operators.

The scouts began their work in mid-September, followed shortly thereafter by the heavy equipment: Morris’s Cat and a rented bulldozer operated by Robinson and the elder Coursen. The first bulldozer stripped off the trees and overlying moss, and the second graded and ditched a road about 16 feet wide.

Ken and Manila Coursen.

Soon, however, it became apparent that their time and fuel were being spent inefficiently by traveling back and forth from their homes each night, so they planned for a portable camp, which is the point at which Manila entered the picture.

The white-painted wooden shack, with its tall and ungainly stovepipe wired into place, was hauled in to the worksite, as was the old bus, which was “unable to move under its own power but (was) towable.” The shack served as a cookhouse and portable sleeping quarters for Manila and Ken, while the bus became the storage facility and men’s dormitory for the remainder of the crew.

Inside the bus, the seats had been removed and replaced by four cots, an oil heater, a makeshift dining table, and cases of groceries. When the bus was being towed behind the cook shack, Hovis had to sit behind the wheel and steer to keep the vehicle moving as smoothly forward as possible. From September through December when the job was complete, they moved the camp four times, through mud and dirt, through sand, through snow.

“No cook ever served a more congenial, less complaining crew,” wrote Manila, “and I promptly observed that fresh, hot rolls and meringue pies were supper favorites.” When bitter cold weather arrived in November, the crew supplemented Manila’s grocery supplies with fresh moose meat, which kept frozen under a canvas on the back of the cook shack.

But the cold weather created difficulties, too, making cold steel brittle as the men worked, and exacerbating the problems of keeping warm the interiors of both bus and shack.

As winter wore on, the temperatures at times dipped well below freezing, at least once all the way to minus-40 degrees.

“Our magazines did double duty,” wrote Manila of the struggle to stay warm. “After everyone had read them, I put them under the bedding on our cots as insulation. During one very cold spell I hung my housecoat in the corner to keep the cold draft from our heads at night.”

Despite the occasional strains, however, Manila enjoyed the work. “I love that remote wilderness, just as I have always loved our homesite here in these rugged mountains,” she wrote. “I enjoyed the daily outside chores—filling the lanterns, carrying in the wood, getting the necessary six pails of water from lake or stream.”

The crew got along well, she said, discussing the experiences of the day over dinner, and sometimes listening to the strains of Hovis and Saunders’s harmonicas after a meal. They listened to a battery-operated radio to keep in tuned to current events, and the men made trips home when possible to visit family and gather more groceries.

After the snows arrived and covered or ruined the trails of toilet paper, more T-P arrived—blue, this time—to re-mark the trail and keep the crew on track as they marched slowly forward, building log bridges or changing course whenever necessary.

On Nov. 25, they reached the designated drilling site, where Richfield officials directed Morris to strip about four acres of forest—except for a single, tall spruce which they decorated like a Christmas tree and gave rise to the nickname of the eventual discovery well.

Under the Christmas tree, starting April 15, 1957, drilling began. The bit went down more than 11,000 feet, and on July 15 Richfield struck oil, dramatically changing the course of events for the Kenai Peninsula and all of Alaska.

The month after the discovery was announced to the public, Manila made her first trip to the well site since she had finished her job as camp cook, and there she saw her old cook shack, “with its stovepipe still askew.” No longer a location for hot rolls and meringue, however, the sign on the building indicated the changing times: OFFICE.

 

 

"The Lodge that Went up in Smoke"

Photo by Theresa Zimmerman, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project. The Glacier Ski Lodge at Manitoba in 1946 with the Kenai Mountains to the west of the Seward Highway in the background.

THE LODGE THAT WENT UP IN SMOKE

OCTOBER 2012

Oliver Amend was working in Seward in the spring of 1960 when he heard that his ski lodge on Mount Manitoba was on fire. As soon as he could, he fired up his single-engine airplane and flew over the mountains to check things out.

By the time he arrived, Glacier Ski Lodge was gone.

Photo by Bruce McClellan, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project. The view is from

the top of the ski run on Manitoba in 1942.

Five years earlier, Amend had been given the lodge by its original builder, Gentry Schuster, when Schuster decided he was too busy with his bush-flying business, Safeway Airways, to bother any longer with an alpine skiing venture. “He just turned it over to Oliver Amend to operate—no sale—just a ‘you take it,’” said Schuster’s ex-wife, Virginia, in a 2006 letter published on the Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project website.

Mount Manitoba is located along the Seward Highway near the confluence of Mills and Canyon creeks, about three miles north of Summit Lake Lodge. When Schuster built Glacier Ski Lodge in 1941, no Seward Highway existed, so the road designation was Mile 50 of the Seward-Hope Highway.

By the time Amend took control in 1955, the Schuster marriage was ending, and neither Gentry nor Virginia continued with the lodge in any capacity. Amend, a resident of Seward who had a regular job during the week, ran the place as “strictly a weekend affair,” according to the ALSAP website.



Photo by Virginia Schuster, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project. Army personnel from

Seward are ready to ski on Manitoba in 1942.

Whenever he was gone from the mountain, however, problems occurred. While the lodge was vacated during the weekdays, Amend’s absence left it vulnerable to uninvited and often destructive visitors.

During the week, these vandals—Amend blamed Army soldiers then stationed at Seward—took residence at the lodge without permission. They often burned through the firewood that Amend had stored there for the weekend, and once they apparently began incinerating wooden skis for warmth when they exhausted the supply of stove wood.

According to ALSAP, Amend suspected that in the spring of 1960 the perpetrators were more careless than usual and caught the whole place on fire. Glacier Ski Lodge was never rebuilt, and its special-use permit with the Chugach National Forest was never renewed.

Before disaster struck, however, Amend had put in considerable work to make the lodge an enjoyable recreation destination. The current switchback trail along the base of the mountain’s southern flank was created by Amend with a willing buddy and a D-8 Caterpillar.

Photo by Bruce McClellan, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project . Gentry Schuster works

to build his Glacier Ski Lodge in 1942, referred to at the time by the Schuster family as simply

“the cabin.”

He used tracked military-surplus vehicles called “Weasels” to haul skiers in a sleigh up the mountain, and he often flew to the mountain with ribbon-festooned Jerry jugs full of gasoline and dropped them into the snow so he could retrieve them later with Weasels and fuel up the Model A Ford truck engines that powered his rope-tow system.

He also used dynamite, according to ALSAP, to “shape” the ski slopes up on Manitoba: “Apparently he was doing enough blasting to raise the brow of the local mining community. He remembers one day when a fellow showed up with $30,000 cash. He was hoping Oliver would sell, as there was bound to be something good in the rock to justify all the blasting. It took some time for Oliver to convince the fellow otherwise.”

Photo by Bruce McClellan, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project. A Model A truck

engine was used to power a tram for hauling materials to the construction site in 1942. Later,

it helped power the system of rope tows on the mountain.

From 1955 until the demise of Glacier Ski Lodge, Amend did all the shuttling of skiers and all of the maintenance, while his wife, Cecilia, did all the cooking. Skiers who volunteered to help set up equipment at the beginning of the day and help take it down at the end were able to earn “free days” on the mountain; otherwise, the Amends charged $2 for a ride up the hill and $3 to ski all day.

But the lodge would never have existed if not for Gentry Schuster.

On Oct. 22, 1941, Schuster applied to the U.S. Forest Service to build a ski tow and a “ski hut” above timberline on Mount Manitoba. On Nov. 25, he was granted a permit to build, and he paid a $5.40 first-year fee.

Photo courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project. A special-use permit card for

Manitoba ski area in 1942.

By the summer of 1942, he had constructed a rough tram system to haul his building materials to timberline and was busy framing the structure, with physical and financial assistance from his friend, Dick Blissner.

“We had intended the place to be for the use of ourselves and friends, but World War II put about 5,000 troops in the Seward area, and a great many of them were skiers, so we just welcomed all who came up,” said Virginia Schuster.

The lodge had two bedrooms, a dormitory that slept eight, and a loft with open space for numerous guests with sleeping bags. Although no liquor was allowed in the lodge, Virginia said, the G.I.’s sneaked in plenty of booze. “After the war, when Gentry entered the loft, he was annoyed to find thousands of beer ‘empties’ and spent the weekend clearing out the loft,” she said.

Photo by Virginia Schuster, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project.

Lunch is served in the lodge in 1942. Gentry Schuster is seated at far

right. This table reportedly seated 20. The interior was heated with a wood

stove constructed from an old oil drum.

Downstairs, the lodge had a boarded-off area with a large cast-iron woodstove and served as the kitchen. “One Sunday,” Virginia said, “I served a roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy and coleslaw lunch to 67 persons. Since the table seated (up to) 20, that meant setting it four times and washing dishes in melting snow—no sink. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, and thereafter lunch consisted of cold cuts, cheese, canned fruit and cookies.”

Like Amend, Gentry Schuster was a weekend lodge operator. (He was chief operating officer of the Seward dock during the week.) Unlike Amend, he suffered no vandalism, according to Virginia.

But the lodge was not without conflicts. Virginia indicated that Gentry may have had his fingers in too many proverbial pies: “During the war, a pilot wandered into town in a Taylorcraft, and Gentry learned to fly and as soon as he could, bought a small plane and with a private pilot’s license, bought a bush operation,” said Virginia. “Starr Airways of Anchorage went into receivership upon the death of the owner, and Gentry bought their place from the bank, and that become our Anchorage headquarters. He had the Harley-Davidson franchise for Alaska from about 1936, and just as he was in Jack Haven, Penn., to pick up a new plane (Piper) he’d purchased, the Piper Co. had a default by the then-distributor in Alaska, and in disgust they asked Gentry if he’d like the franchise, and of course he said yes.”



Photo by Seth DePasqual, courtesy of Alaska

Lost Ski Areas Project. In 2005, Chugach National

Forest archaeologist Seth DePasqual performed an

archaeological study of the old Glacier Ski Lodge

site on Manitoba. Pictured are a few of the cans

he discovered in the lodge’s dump site.

Gentry was also a lieutenant in the Alaska National Guard during the war years.

Eventually, his other interests took precedence over managing a ski lodge, and he dropped the Manitoba operation into the lap of Oliver Amend.

Remains of the Glacier Ski Lodge can still be viewed in the summer in the hemlocks at timberline. Chugach National Forest archaeologist Seth DePasqual performed an archaeological survey of the lodge site during the summer of 2005, and some photos from the relics he discovered are available on the ALSAP site.

Photo by Tim Kelley, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project.

Pictured in 2011, a section of cable wrapped around a hemlock stump

indicates where the top anchor of the rope tow was.

 

 

"Kaknu Days"

Some of the very first high school cheerleaders in Kenai.

KAKNU DAYS

JULY 2011

Going ‘Old School’

The history of schooling, public or otherwise, in Kenai stretches back more than a hundred years. In that time, there have been odd and sometimes unfortunate occurrences, periods of staggering growth, and the laying down of high school traditions that are carried on in the present time.

Once a Kenai High School was established as part of the Kenai School, for instance, students wove into the fabric of their educational experience the “Kardinal” as mascot, red and white as school colors, and Kaknu as the official name of the yearbook. Following traditions established across the United States, they also began the first sports and cheerleading programs, set up the first pep club, performed the first stage plays, and put on the first prom.

But the deeper origins of the Kenai school system delve deeper—to  Russian occupation. The first school on the Kenai Peninsula was the Russian Church School in Kenai, and it remained operational—with classes taught primarily in Russian, and with Native languages forbidden—until the school closed in 1921. After that, it was used mainly for parish

The old Russian school building as it appeared in 1930 when Paul Wilson delivered the
mail by dog team.

functions before being torn down in the late 1950s, according to Once Upon the Kenai by the Kenai Historical Society.

By the time of the Russian school’s closure, a $5,500 U.S. government-run public school was already in business, having been built in 1907. This one-and-a-half-story building was 55 feet long and 22 feet wide, and its first teacher was a Missourian named Arch R. Law. Two years after it opened its doors, the U.S. school had 58 students.

In 1911, two Midwestern sisters took over teaching duties and later wrote about their three-year stint in the school and the village. The sisters, Willietta and Alice Dolan, penned The Clenched Fist (published in 1948 under their married names, Alice M. Brooks and Willietta E. Kuppler), a revealing but controversial book. Valuable historically, the book illustrates the sisters’ missionary-like zeal for “enlightening” the uncivilized of Kenai, and their sometimes pejorative views regarding the local Natives.

The first territorial school in Kenai, seen here in 1928.

In 1917, the U.S. Congress granted the Territory of Alaska the right to control its own schools, so the Kenai site became an official territorial school and was allocated funds to keep it running. By the time it burned down in 1930, however, it had already been replaced by the newer Kenai Territorial School, which was constructed in 1926.

Kenai Territorial School featured four classrooms on the ground floor and two teacher apartments on the second floor, and in 1941 it was the educational home to Kenai’s first-ever high school student. Two years later, long-time Kasilof educator, Enid McLane, became the school’s principal.

By the late 1940s, the school was “in poor shape,” according to the historical society, so a lobbyist was sent to Juneau to petition the territorial legislature for a new school. The successful lobbying effort resulted in the Kenai School (currently the home of the Boys & Girls Club and the Aurora Borealis Charter School).

The second Kenai Territorial School, 1949.

The Kenai School opened its doors in the fall of 1951 and rapidly began to fill. Propelled by population spikes from a new highway system and homesteading opportunities, the installation of the Wildwood Army Station, oil and natural gas discoveries, and statehood, enrollment numbers skyrocketed.

Starting with 86 students in 1951-52, the enrollment more than doubled to 178 the following year, shot up to 285 in 1954-55, to 415 in 1957-58, and to 543 in 1959-60. The burgeoning enrollment figures prompted new staff hirings, occasional overcrowding, new classroom construction, and, in 1957, a whole new addition, including a new gymnasium, that gave the entire structure an L-shape and became known separately as Kenai High School.

Despite all the growth and modernization, however, there were constant reminders of Kenai’s more rustic village days.

Carol (Covich) Anderson, a former student of the Kenai School, recalled the day that she and a friend were accosted by a belligerent moose while they were walking to school, according to a brief account in Once upon the Kenai. The moose was so aggressive that the two elementary-age girls were forced to climb a tree to escape, and they stayed there until the school’s first principal, O.C. Connelly, came to their rescue with gun in hand and chased the moose away.

The Kenai School, before the addition of the high school and gym, 1953.

Several students and former teachers also remember the days when George J. Fabricius, who came from Wrangell to become Kenai’s principal in 1952, would open a window in one of the teacher apartments above the school, cradle a BB rifle, and draw a bead on one of the many dogs that regularly invaded the playground and carried off sack lunches. “Sometimes it wasn’t a BB gun,” added Mary France, who began teaching at the Kenai School in 1954.

There were many encounters with animals in those days, France said. In the coldest part of the winters, the moose enjoyed entering the playground and lying next to the building for warmth. “We went outside to play,” France said. “You played outside until it was 20 below, and everybody went out. Mr. Fabricius or one of the teachers would have to go check to see if there were moose out there. If there were, you couldn’t go out for recess.”

Reunited

On the spine of the 2011 Kenai Central High School yearbook—and nowhere else in or on the publication—is the word “Kaknu,” a variant of a Dena’ina name (Kahtnu) for the Kenai River; it is also the lone remnant of the name given 50 years ago to the first-ever high school yearbook in Kenai.

The first Kenai High School yearbook.

In 1961, “Kaknu” linked the language of a once-dominant culture to an educational tradition of the present time. Simultaneously, it united two eras via a symbol of the central Kenai Peninsula’s lifeblood—the river itself—and implied with that symbolism the flow or passage of time.

How fitting it was, then, that in early July the woman who concocted the name for the first yearbook jetted across country from her home in western New York to join other members of the Kenai High School Class of 1961 for a 50-year reunion.

At a Friday dinner at Paradisos Restaurant in Kenai and a Saturday picnic on the old Cotton Moore homestead in Sterling, class members, now mostly in their late 60s, united to celebrate old times and catch up on more recent ones.

Among the graduates was Kathy “Dolly” (Wilson) Lecceardone, who had submitted the name Kaknu for the yearbook after brainstorming with her former gradeschool teacher, Jettie Petersen. Wilson, who was born in 1943 in a house on Mission Avenue in Kenai, and whose family continues to have a long history in the area, was well aware of the important ties between the fishing village that Kenai had been before statehood and the river that lured the salmon home each summer.

She was also aware that the area was beginning a period of rapid growth, and the Kenai School was bursting at the seams because of it.

She said she remembered leaving behind the old Kenai Territorial School, where she was once allowed to toll the large bell on the roof, for the new one in the early 1950s. She remembered all of the students placing their chairs upon their heads one day at the old school and marching down the street to the new one.

Quickly that new school also filled with students, and in 1957—when the members of the Class of ’61 were freshmen—the addition was constructed on the end nearest the Methodist Church. It was the precursor to the current Kenai Central High School, which was constructed east of Kenai along the Spur Highway, and which opened its doors in the fall of 1964.

The first Kaknu pictured 35 members of the graduating senior class. Of those 35, five—Don Lewis, Gary and Grant Wilson, Stanley Brower, and William “Bill” Robinson—have died. Of the 30 remaining, 21 (or 70 percent) still live in Alaska—mostly on the Kenai Peninsula.

Of the 30 graduates still living, 20 attended the reunion festivities, many of them with spouses or significant others. The dinner drew about 70 individuals, while the picnic drew about 80. Also in attendance were a smattering of former teachers, a bus driver, a school board member, and other students who also attended either Kenai High School or the Kenai Territorial School through the spring of 1964.

Not everyone who had been a part of the KHS Class of ’61, however, was able to graduate with the 35 students pictured in the yearbook. Carroll (Madden) Knutson, for instance, got married during her senior year and left school; she did finish her schooling but missed the graduation ceremony. And Nancy Savage and Virginia Murto were sent to high school in Homer for their senior year, apparently because the school boundaries south of Kenai were changed as enrollments climbed.

The reunion effort was spearheaded by class president Patricia (McCollum) Falkenberg, without whom, according to several attendees, the get-together never would have taken place. Falkenberg put together a six-person committee more than a year in advance of the event, and the number of volunteers grew as the reunion dates neared. Besides event planning, committee members also gathered information about their classmates. One of the many lists they kept showed how many students’ families had been tied into businesses in the local economy.

The parents of Doug Jones owned Kenai Commercial. Eric Thompson’s folks owned the Kenai Korners lumber yard. Mike Seaman’s parents owned Seaman’s Furniture. Martha (Lancashire) Merry’s parents owned Larry’s Club. Other businesses tied to students included: Bing’s Landing, Dianne (Moran) Cooper; “Ribs by Cotton,” Myla (Moore) McFarland; Gibbs’ Apparel, Jimmy Gibbs; Reger’s Garage, Doug Reger; Northern Oil Operations, Falkenberg.

Students from the Class of ’61 included Native kids, homestead kids, fishing-family kids, military kids, oilfield kids, and Alaska Road Commission kids, among others. They came to school from as far south as Anchor Point and as far north as Nikiski. They were a reflection of the times.

Just getting to school each day back then could be a time-consuming trial for some students. McFarland was a Sterling girl back in the late 1950s and early ’60s, and she lived on the Cotton Moore homestead down two miles of bad road from the graveled Sterling Highway. The road crossed two swamps, but in the early days the road itself was uncrossable except when frozen; consequently, McFarland had to walk to the highway, at times balancing precariously upon poles that had been laid in the marsh for safe foot travel. “If you fell off, you were ruined for the day,” she said.

At the highway, she and her buddy, Cooper, caught a regularly scheduled ride into town to the Sky Bowl, where a school bus driven by Dan France picked them up and drove them into Kenai. During their junior and senior years, the bus route expanded to include Sterling, but the journey was just as long.

McFarland said that she occasionally rowed a boat down the lazy waters of the Moose River to the bridge to catch a ride, and on cold winter days she sometimes skated down the meandering ribbon of river ice to the main road. “It was a long day by the time you got 26 miles into Kenai,” Cooper said. “And then you’d get back, and heaven forbid if you wanted to do something in the evening.”

“My dad, all he had (in those days) was a ’49 Jeep,” said McFarland, “and so if I was coming home late, I can remember coming down the Sterling Highway looking for—you know how Jeep headlights are close together—I remember looking to make sure if he was coming after me.”

In the Class of ’61, the class officers besides Falkenberg were Jimmy Gibbs, vice president; Karin (Mainwaring) Newcomb, secretary; Barbara (O’Rourke) Minich, treasurer. The class valedictorian was Merry, and the salutatorian was Newcomb.

Class colors were blue and white, the class flower was the lupine, and the class motto was “First in Work, First in Fun, Senior Class of ’61.” And the class song was “Memories Are Made of This,” a tune written in 1955 by Terry Gilkyson, Richard Dehr and Frank Miller, and popularized by Dean Martin, whose version spent six weeks as Number One on the Billboard Top 40 charts in 1956.

At the reunion dinner, one of the featured speakers was former KHS (and KCHS) chemistry teacher, Shirley (Denison) Henley, who entertained the crowd with funny stories and a few playful jabs at administrators of the time.

Former KHS chemistry teacher, Shirley Denison, circa 1960.

Henley had transferred from Tustumena Elementary School, where she was helping to run a small pilot high school program, to KHS during the 1959-60 school year after being asked to teach some typing classes. “The only course I ever dropped in high school was typing,” she said. “I just am totally uncoordinated.”

At the dinner, she apologized to the students who had taken her first-ever chemistry offering: “I told them about the asbestos plates that were used under the Bunsen burners,” she said. “Now I see these advertisements for mesothelioma, and I think, ‘Oh my God, what have I done!’”

Fortunately for everyone concerned, the members of the Class of ’61 seem to have done just fine. Many of them married within a year or two of graduation. Myla and Lee McFarland, for instance, recently celebrated their 50^th wedding anniversary, and several others aren’t far behind in celebrating their own.

The graduates have also produced plenty of offspring, traveled far and wide, hve created businesses and had careers, made a substantive difference in their communities, and shared the bond of once belonging to a small collective called the Class of ’61.

Many of them were friends in high school and have remained so, regardless of distances and the long passage of time.

Sports & Other Traditions

The first KHS prom occurred in the spring of 1959. The theme was “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.” Music for the evening came from long-running vinyl records played over the loud speakers from the main office.



At the recent 50-year reunion for the KHS Class of '61, there was some disagreement over the genesis of the current KCHS mascot, but one former member of that class, Shane Griffin, who moved to Missouri to complete his final year of school--offered this email explanation concerning the origin: "I can assure you, with no equivocation whatsoever, that it was the valedictorian of the Class of '59, then student council president, Kim Griffin, that submitted, campaigned and secured the Kenai Kardinal as our mascot." Shane was a KHS sophomore when his older sister, Kim, succeeded in her mascot-naming efforts.

"Just as the Bald Eagle is not spread over all America, I (not anyone I know) have never seen a cardinal in the Kenai area," Griffin wrote. "But Kim's mother was from Missouri, and we had been there a lot visiting our grandparents, etc. So, for the same reasons the baseball team of St. Louis, Missouri, chose the Cardinal as their namesake and mascot, Kim was enamored of the red (C)Kardinal, and got enough support to get it voted in."

Most of the other mascot choices have been lost to memories fading over more than five decades, but one of the possibilities not selected in the school vote was the “Kenai Koyotes.”

There is also some disagreement about who drew the first Kardinal once the mascot was decided upon. Some insist that first image came from Cary Bear, but Myla (Moore) McFarland was the creator of the first-ever Kenai Kardinals banner.

“I designed the Kardinal banner and won the contest for the design,” said McFarland. “It (the banner) was at Kenai High for a long time until someone stole it, and they made a new one with a similar design.”



With a mascot and colors selected, and a new gymnasium in place, it was natural that basketball became an official school sport, starting in 1958-59. Coached by Paul Smith and playing against mainly JV squads from other schools, the fledgling Kards hit the hardwood to the boisterous approval of local fans.

Mary France remembers the first game in the old gym (which later became a sort of multi-purpose room): “It was packed. I mean there was standing room only in there. It was the first time anybody in town had ever even seen a (local) basketball game. I can’t tell you who the team was that came there to play, but I took tickets at the first game. Everybody in town was there.”

Basketball gave area residents an excuse to venture out into the cold and also gave them a unified rooting interest. “All of the teachers there, we went with the basketball team to Seldovia to watch them play,” France said. “We went over by boat and stayed the night. The boys played ball, and we came back the next day.”

In addition to the ballplayers there were newly minted cheerleaders and a pep club to boost team spirits and stir up the crowd.

In the second year, under new coach Jim Evenson, the Kardinals began playing varsity ball. Among the best players in those early seasons, according to Evenson, were Ross and Chris Cooper, Bill Robinson, Eric Thompson, Vic Tyler, Doug Jones and Gary Davis. Evenson said that his teams fared well against the other squads in the Southcentral League—Kodiak, Homer and Seward—and even won occasionally against teams from the much bigger Anchorage schools.




Before hoops became a hit, however, other high school sports got their starts. A 1956-57 copy of the student gazette, The Moosepaper, makes reference to school teams in track, softball, volleyball and soccer. Track meets in Homer were held out on the spit until the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake altered the geography and forced the athletes to compete farther inland.

One of the sports that may go back the furthest in time is ice hockey, which France recalls being played as far back as 1954 on a rink between the Kenai School (pre-expansion) and the Methodist Church.

“When I taught Home Ec one year, I ended up driving part of the team to Ninilchik,” France said. “Wayne Tachick was playing, and he got hit in the mouth with a hockey stick, and he skated over to me and handed me half of his two front teeth.”

After 104 years of public school in Kenai, some of the rules have changed: Most Kenai students are now actually from Kenai itself; hockey players have better protection for their mouths; and neither principals nor anyone else is allowed to bring guns onto campus, even to confront surly moose or mooching dogs.

But much of the rest has remained the same: Students still start in the fall, still battle the snows of winter and Kenai’s persistent wind, and still graduate in the spring when most of the frost has left the soil. And in KCHS, students are still urged not to step on the part of the commons floor containing the Kardinal logo—thereby demonstrating a sign of respect for a traditional symbol concocted more than a half-century before many of those students enrolled as freshmen.