"Answering the Call"

An early Kenai Peninsula phone bill--for Warner Petty of Homer, June 1962.

ANSWERING THE CALL

JULY 2010

The object in the wooden shed sitting just off Smith Way, to the west of the Y in Soldotna, was one-of-a-kind in this tiny community in 1952. Inside the 10x12-foot structure was Soldotna’s lone telephone, and anyone wishing to make a call had to come to step inside the shed.

The telephone—the old Army field variety, with a switch to push in one direction for talking and another direction for listening—hung from one interior wall. Connected to the instrument was a string of Army phone wire that wound out of the building and traveled along the road system all the way to Kenai, where an operator stood by 24 hours a day in the Kenai Telephone Company building.

The phone in that Soldotna shed, which sat on land deeded for phone service by Jack and Dolly Farnsworth, was free to the public but was good only for calling any party in Kenai who happened to also have a phone. Finding phone owners in 1952 meant slim pickings.

The telephone wire had been laid by Morris Porter, who, along with Chuck Brady, had begun Kenai’s first phone service just a few months earlier. According to longtime Soldotna resident Al Hershberger, phone service was appreciated in the early days, but the system was notoriously unreliable.

“In some places, it (the wire) ran through culverts,” Hershberger said. “With high water it would short out, so outages were frequent. Occasionally a moose would get tangled up in the line.”

When the Soldotna-Kenai line—or any other line, for that matter—went down, it was Brady’s job fix the problem. However, when he was busy elsewhere, his wife, Kitty, sometimes had to go out on repair runs, according to her entry in Once Upon the Kenai. In addition to running a cab service with Porter, Chuck Brady also drove a school bus, so Kitty frequently drove out to locate and splice together the broken line.

According to Kitty, she and Chuck started Red’s Cab service in Kenai in the fall of 1951, and they hired a man named Buddy Wetbrow to string some telephone wires to each bar in town and to the Wildwood M.P. gate, figuring that this rudimentary communications system would improve their business. The following year, when the Porters moved to Kenai, the Bradys brought them into the business.

Bertha Porter’s own entry in Once Upon the Kenai offers a slightly different version of the story. According to Bertha, she and Morris started the cab service with the Bradys, and both of the Porters drove cabs. They also were involved, she wrote, in stringing wires and installing field phones in businesses that had the most potential to increase the need for taxi rides.

The Bradys lived above Kenai’s old territorial schoolhouse and offered 24-hour phone service, which was enhanced in

After the single-page, card-stock directory that appeared in the Cheechako News earlier in 1961 came
this first "real" (and well-used) directory, created the Trans-Alaska Telephone Company.

1954 by the construction of a new phone building and the purchase of an “obsolete” switchboard from the Homer Telephone Company.

Also starting that year in Kenai was long-distance service, via the Wildwood Army Station. Kenai residents wishing to call Outside could come (for one specified hour in the morning and another in the afternoon) to the phone company, located diagonally across from the Rainbow Bar. There, in a private booth and with the help of an operator, they would be connected to Wildwood and then to their party in the States.

In 1956, the Bradys and Porters made a deal: The Bradys would assume full control of the taxi service, and the Porters would assume full control of the phone service. It was after this, according to Bertha Porter, that the actual Kenai Telephone Company began, when she and Morris took out a $2,000 personal loan—after being turned down by a bank—and established the business, complete with a system of billing.

One of the Porters’ first operators was their daughter, Ami Jo (now Rediske), who said that eventually they were also able to offer overseas connections, via the White Alice system, to their Kenai customers.

In the summer of 1959, Carroll Knutson (then Madden) became a part-time switchboard operator for the Porters. Knutson’s family had recently settled along the Sterling Highway eight miles south of Soldotna, and she had just completed her sophomore year of high school. Because her father wouldn’t allow her to get her driver’s license, she was forced to make alternate living arrangements in order to take the job.

Knutson worked four nights a week, from midnight to 7 a.m., and she stayed with the family of Civil Aeronautics Administration employee Carl White during those periods, going home only when she was not working. When her junior year began, she worked for part of the first semester before quitting so she could concentrate solely on schoolwork.

On school days when she was working, she man the switchboard all night and then attend school for a full day before walking over to the Whites’ home to sleep until it was time to go to work again.

Because of the time of day she worked, her job at Kenai Telephone involved mainly fielding calls for taxi service. The phones in Kenai at that time were mostly on party lines, and so phone numbers were accompanied by a pattern of long and short rings. When someone picked up a phone to make a call, Knutson’s board alerted her and she in turn connected one male jack of a two-jack cord circuit to the female jack corresponding to the caller.

At this point, caller and operator could speak to each other. The caller would identify whom he or she was calling, and Knutson would insert the other male jack from the cord circuit in the appropriate female jack, thereby connecting both parties.

However, since the recipient of the call was on a party line, the phones of everyone in the party—sometimes 6-10 other families and/or businesses—would ring simultaneously. Consequently, Knutson had to ring the correct pattern (two long rings and one short, for instance) in order to alert the correct party. It was a common practice in those days, Knutson said, for people to listen in on each other’s phone conversations.

Because of the phone office’s proximity to the Rainbow Bar, Knutson had an agreement with the bartender of the establishment: “Drinking and fishing didn’t get invented recently,” she said. “These guys would come in after midnight, you know, and so this bartender said, ‘If you feel like you’re in trouble because of one of these guys coming in, you ring the bar.’ And I did that a couple of times, and the bartender would come over and be a bouncer on my behalf. It didn’t take him long to get over there.”

Another part of the phone company was its telegram service, so Knutson had to learn to operate the teletype, which routed all messages through a soldier stationed at Fort Richardson in Anchorage. Most of the telegrams, she said, were business orders to Outside companies, and she remembers the time she made an error—and heard about it quickly.

As a teletype operator, she had to punch in a series of numbers to indicate the sender and another series to indicate the recipient, and after she completed the numbers for an order of meat from a wholesaler in Seattle, she tried to type “Please ship”; however, she accidentally typed a “t” instead the final “p,” and she almost immediately received a response from Fort Rich: “You can’t say that in a telegram.”

By late 1959, as Knutson’s operator career was winding down, a big change in telephone service was announced in an open letter in The Cheechako News. John E. Field, president of the Trans-Alaska Telephone Company, told readers that his company had purchased the private Homer and Kenai phone businesses in May and were planning a major revamping of service and equipment.

According to Field, the new phone utility was expected to be up and running by Oct. 1, 1960, with full service to not only Kenai, but also Soldotna, Kasilof, Sterling, North Kenai and “all homesteads and roads in the greater area.”

The first peninsula-wide phone directory, 1962.

Because none of these places would be incorporated until the following year—and then only Soldotna and Kenai—there was no tax base to draw upon for funding, so Trans-Alaska had spent about $25,000 of its own money on the rehabilitation and repair of existing facilities and equipment.

In October 1960, the new system came online, and the Cheechako published the area’s first-ever phone directory: a single-page card-stock insert in its paper. On May 6, 1961, Trans-Alaska published its own first “temporary” directory, followed by a more complete and permanent edition in the fall.

And in 1962, AVA Publications showed that it recognized profit potential when it saw it, and published the first Kenai Peninsula directory, complete with Yellow Pages, and an “Anchorage Classified and Buyers Guide.”

Meanwhile, the single-telephone system in Soldotna went the way of the dinosaur, and, although its evolutionary replacement was a definite improvement, no-cost service was also a thing of the past.

 

"They Did What They Could"

Dr. Paul Isaak was one of the earliest--and longest-lasting--pioneers of medicine on the central Kenai Peninsula. Photo circa 1960 in Soldotna.

THEY DID WHAT THEY COULD

SEPTEMBER 2009

Soldotna resident and six-year Navy veteran Jack Farnsworth was feeling so lousy at one point in 1952 that he decided to visit Kenai nurse Jo Davidson to see if she could determine what was ailing him. After examining Farnsworth, Davidson grew concerned.

She told him that he likely had appendicitis and needed to get to the military hospital in Anchorage as swiftly as possible. She injected him with penicillin and contacted the 10^th Air Rescue, which happened to be flying back from a mission to Kodiak and agreed to stop in Kenai to pick up the patient.

Air Rescue flew Farnsworth directly to the Elmendorf Air Force Base hospital, where doctors operated and discovered an appendix nearly ready to rupture. Afterward, the patient spent the next two weeks recuperating and—as his wife, Dolly, put it—receiving 48 separate injections of penicillin in his butt, which was sore even after he was discharged.

Jack Farnsworth at his Soldotna home, late 1940s.

Despite the hospital stay and all the discomfort, however, Farnsworth was a lucky man. In addition to receiving competent urgent care while living in a place nearly devoid of advanced medicine, he was cured, and he walked away from it all free of charge. As a veteran, he qualified for free military medical service.

On top of that, he had been lucky even before he got hit with appendicitis. When Dolly had joined him in Soldotna, she had left behind a job in Anchorage with the Army Exchange, which had provided her with medical coverage. Before she moved south, she became pregnant, and under the terms of her insurance she had to be covered until the baby was delivered, even after she quit her job.

Like the bill for the appendectomy, the maternity charges were nil.

Until at least statehood, most residents of the central Kenai Peninsula were not so fortunate. Very few had any sort of medical insurance, and the vast majority operated on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The Farnsworths, in fact, were uninsured for most of their first 25 years on the peninsula. Jack, who died in 1967, received family coverage temporarily when he worked for the Teamsters—long enough to pay for tonsillectomies for his twin daughters. And Dolly said that the first time she earned health insurance on her own was in 1973, when she went to work as part of the Indian Action Program in Wildwood.

The rest of the time, Dolly said, the Farnsworths paid for each medical expense as it arose, just as did most people on the central peninsula prior to about 1960. In fact, for many residents not involved in some government-based occupation—transportation, law enforcement, and education, for example—regular medical coverage did not begin until the local economy began to boom in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In those early days—and in the village days of Kenai before ground was even broken in Soldotna—medical care, and the ability to pay for it, was a much more tenuous affair than it is today.

Prior to 1960, when Dr. Paul Isaak and Dr. Elmer Gaede opened the Soldotna Medical Clinic, there had been few regular doctors in the area, and none had stayed for long.

In the mid-1950s, Dr. Marion Goble opened a practice in Kenai, starting in the leased ice cream parlor of Louisa Miller and then moving into her own residence on McCollum Drive. Goble fixed broken arms, delivered babies, helped the Farnsworths when their twins had ear infections—and sent the worst cases to hospitals in Seward or Anchorage.

Physician Robert Struthers (left) and dentist Charles Bailie chat in 1966.

From the mid-1960s to the mid-1960s, other physicians--Dr. Robert Alden Struther, Dr. Joseph Deisher, Dr. Allen W. Barr, and Dr. Osric Armstrong--also came briefly and went quickly.

And for dental care—before Dr. Calvin Fair began his practice in 1960—there were four choices: semi-retired Dr. Clayton Pollard of Kasilof, who usually worked on patients in his kitchen; Dr. Russell Wagner in Seward, who by 1960 was hampered by the effects of polio and nearing retirement; John Monfor, a Kenai resident who was trained by the U.S. Army in dentistry in the Philippines; and Dr. Lloyd Jones of Anchorage, who made periodic trips to the Kenai until Dr. Fair arrived.

Beyond those services, there were midwives, public and private nurses, home treatments, and people who knew enough to be helpful in a pinch.

Residents who needed care that couldn’t be provided locally needed to get to Seward or Anchorage, a move that could be problematic in the early days of the Sterling and Seward highways, especially when the weather was bad.

In an emergency, if 10^th Air Rescue was unavailable, private pilots might be called upon to fly to Anchorage or through the pass to Seward. If flying was impossible, someone usually volunteered to navigate the rough gravel roads to a distant facility.

“You could always find someone, if it was a real emergency, in Kenai or Homer, who would fly ’em— if they could beg, borrow or steal the gas,” said Shirley Henley, a former public health nurse.

And, regardless of the situation, most folks had no insurance to help them with the costs of getting well. Consequently, most people expected to pay in full immediately after services were rendered, or to begin a series of payments until the debt was cleared.

“People were pretty honest around here (back then),” Henley said. “And if you didn’t pay your bill, people weren’t very

Dr. Clayton Pollard, many years before moving his
family to Kasilof and settling in to semi-retirement.

friendly to you.” Most people realized, she said, that each person who failed to pay his bill meant that the bill for everyone else would climb higher.

For residents whose families required considerable medical or dental care, the costs meant skimping elsewhere. For instance, Henley’s daughter, Ruth Denison, needed orthodontia, and the treatment required the Denisons to travel frequently to the orthodontist in Anchorage. Since the roads were bad, they usually spent the night in a motel and returned the next day.

“I remember one time George (her first husband) mentioned the fact that Ruth had a Cadillac in her mouth,” Henley said.

Dr. Charles Bailie, who became Kenai’s first full-time dentist in 1963, said that, although people were expected to pay, no doctor or dentist was going to refuse care, especially for a serious condition.

“I’m an old-time dentist. I used to take the people, whether they had the money or not,” said Bailie, who retired in 1993. “A lot of homesteaders didn’t have a lot of money. If they were in pain, you took care of the pain. If they paid, that was fine. If they didn’t, that was fine, too. Some people just didn’t have the money, and they’d bring these kids in. And you can’t let little kids suffer. And so I would take care of what I could.”

Generally, people found ways to cope. When Dan and Mary France moved from Soldotna to King Salmon for a few years, Mary used to call back to Dr. Isaak whenever one of their sons became ill. “He always took my calls, regardless,” she said. “I would tell him what I thought was wrong with the boys, and he would tell the health nurse (in King Salmon) what to give them, that he would prescribe.”

Another time, according to Soldotna resident Al Hershberger, Art Frisbie accidentally shot himself in the armpit with a 30.06 rifle. “It was at night in the winter, and I was re-covering the skis from my airplane in Emmett Karsten’s garage when they came looking for me to take (Frisbie) to Anchorage,” said Hershberger.

“Of course, I couldn’t go without skis, so I took him to Wildwood Station, and the Army doctor patched him up and had the C.A.A. call an Air Force plane flying nearby to land and pick him up. The MPs and the doctor escorted us to the Kenai airstrip where the plane was waiting. They took him on to Elmendorf Hospital.”

Hershberger, who has lived in Soldotna for more than 60 years, also remembered that once Dr. Howard Romig told him that the Matanuska Valley colonists in the 1930s “would give him a hind-quarter of moose for an appendectomy.”

Whatever it took, whatever currency was required. Insurance may not have been commonplace, but common decency was.

 

"History Blown to Smithereens"

The well-protected Cliff House, November 1966.

HISTORY BLOWN TO SMITHEREENS

MARCH 2009

Alaskans may be accustomed to the idea of fireworks on Independence Day, but about 30 years ago Miles Dean got a little more “bang for his buck” than he had bargained for.

The problem actually began in June 1978, when John Swanson decided to install propane in his cabin called the Cliff House on upper Tustumena Lake. Swanson, the owner of Peninsula Building Supply who in 1960 had become the new City of Kenai’s first mayor, wanted gas-powered lights and a gas-powered cookstove in his place. But the installation was not error free.

According to Swanson’s son-in-law, David Letzring of Kasilof, Dave Donald went up on the lake in late June and discovered a leak in the system. Donald turned off the valve on the propane tanks and returned to Kenai to notify Swanson of the problem. A short time later, Letzring himself went up on the lake with Swanson’s son, Ron, and they, too, tested the system and found it in need of repair.

“We went in there, and yeah, you could smell the propane,” said Letzring. “We turned it off. And I told John about it, too. John says, ‘I’ll go up there and fix it up.’ This was June-something, and Dean went up there on the Fourth of July. And he goes in and turns the gas on and lights the lights, and he built a fire in the woodstove. And then he got in his boat and went over to Clear Creek to fish. And the Cliff House ceased to exist. The metal roof was almost to the glacial flat. Pieces of the place were in the lake. It was all over. There was nothing left. It blew up. It was just like a little bomb.”

The Cliff House had disappeared. And in the wake of its destruction, a piece of Kenai Peninsula history that may have dated back as far as 1910 vanished, too.

Both Gary Titus, a historian for the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, and George Pollard, who has lived in the Tustumena area since the late 1930s, agree that the original builder of the Cliff House was August “Gust” Ness. The first historical mention of the structure can be found in a 1921 entry in the diary of big-game guide Andrew Berg, who lived on Tustumena Lake in the early 1900s.

Ness selected an ideal location for his log structure: near the back end of Devils Bay, on a small point of sandy land just below a set of cliffs that inspired the name and provided shelter from glacial winds. Protected also by a stand of spruce along the northern and eastern sides, the cabin was a safe haven in nearly all bad weather. According to Pollard, it was

Cliff House on Tustumena Lake, November 1966.

vulnerable only to a strong wind out of the southwest.

The cabin door faced roughly west toward the cliffs, near the entrance of a trail to Tustumena Glacier. The picture window faced in a southerly direction, and Pollard recalls sitting at the table by the window to watch brown bears feeding on spawning sockeye on Clear Creek less than a quarter-mile away.

By the 1960s a steep metal roof, with a long gable over the front porch, provided protection from the rain and easily shed the snow. In the open, empty space between roof and ceiling boards had been dumped loads of sand as insulation. Letzring remembers that after a night in the Cliff House, he needed to brush off his sleeping bag because sand continually sifted through the boards.



Big-game trophies decorated the exterior walls
 of the Cliff House in the early 1970s.

By the 1970s, the southern exterior wall was draped with several sets of moose antlers. The eastern wall, too, featured an array of trophies, including at least two bear hides.

When Ness died of a heart attack in 1937, the cabin passed into the possession of Tony Johansen, whom Titus, Pollard and Letzring believe was either Ness’s nephew or his son. According to Alaska’s No. 1 Guide by Titus and Catherine Cassidy, Johansen, via his mother’s first marriage, was the son of Mary Ness. The book also states that when Mary wed Gust in about 1924, she was known as Mary Demidoff Johansen, suggesting that perhaps in this union Gust became Tony’s step-father.

Tony Johansen hung onto the Cliff House until 1951, the year (according to U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service records) that Swanson reported that he purchased the cabin. According to Once Upon the Kenai, Swanson moved to Kenai in 1952, but he was in Kodiak for many years, and later in Anchorage, prior to the move and may have made the purchase then.

The Cliff House was considered Swanson’s property for most of three decades, and, at the time of the explosion, no one was living permanently on the lake any longer. When Tustumena Lake passed from being part of the Chugach National Forest to part of the Kenai National Moose Range in 1941, federal officials allowed individuals living on the lake to stay in homes on unpatented land until their deaths. No new cabins were allowed on refuge land, however, and many of the old cabins either deteriorated badly or became the temporary shelters for hunters traveling up into the hills for big game.

Gold miner Joe Secora was the last of the numerous old-timers who once could be found living year-round on the lake, and his death in a plane crash in 1972 signaled an end to an era.

But the obliteration of the Cliff House was not the end of this particular story, at least according to Letzring. He said that Swanson came to him to August 1978 and told him that he had unwritten permission from the refuge to rebuild the cabin. “He says we can rebuild it, but we gotta get it done right now, this year,” Letzring said.

Titus is skeptical of Swanson’s claim. To allow a single instance of building, or rebuilding, a private cabin on the refuge, he said, is to “open a can of worms.”

“I don’t think so,” Titus said. “If that would have been done, it would have been illegal because that was federal land. If you give one person permission to do that, you’d have to give everyone permission.”



John Swanson, with friends George Calvin and Joe Megargel, poses
at the front of the Cliff House in August 1975.

When Bob Richey, who was the assistant manager of the moose range at the time, learned recently of Swanson’s claim, he said, “I have never heard that. I can’t believe that is likely, and I think I would remember.”

Whether Swanson truly had permission to rebuild, he moved forward with his plans to do so, Letzring said. Swanson and a handful of his friends—most notably George Calvin and Chuck Raymond of Kasilof—began gathering materials and storing them in Raymond’s Quonset hut on the Tustumena Lake road. Letzring said they were waiting for winter snow and freeze-up so they could use snowmobiles to haul in the materials over the ice.

Late that year, however, Swanson was diagnosed with liver cancer and traveled Outside for treatment. Without his leadership, Letzring said, the heart went out of the rebuilding effort. “The spark plug wasn’t there,” he said.

Swanson died in 1982, and to this day the small sandy point remains devoid of a cabin, which is how the federal government plans to keep it. According to Richey, who said he spent many nights at the Cliff House in his 26 years with USFWS, the greatest loss in the destruction of the cabin was not the structure itself, but the log book inside that was also destroyed. That book, he said, contained a wealth of names and histories that can never be fully recovered.

Although some of that lost history has been forgotten, the fireworks on that particular Fourth of July were something to remember.

 

 

"The Man with All the Time in the World Runs out of Time"

Joe Secora in his element, along the north fork of Indian Creek, high above Tustumena Lake, 1962.

THE MAN WITH ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD RUNS OUT OF TIME

JUNE 2011

Joe Secora was not known as a letter writer. Although he was an avid reader, he never filled the pages of a journal with words of his own. Taciturn without the dour demeanor, he seldom initiated communication but was genial enough once engaged in conversation.

Consequently,  when Secora died suddenly nearly 40 years ago, he left little record except in the memories of those who knew him. His voice comes filtered through the recollections of others and through his Tustumena handiwork, of which there was plenty.

In the years after arriving at Tustumena Lake in 1938, just before his 30th birthday, Secora built three cabins and mined for gold in the turbulent glacier-fed waters of Indian Creek. He hand-dug trenches and canals in the coarse gravel; he built mining tools and fashioned sluice boxes; he moved heavy earth in search for ore.

Secora dumps creek gravel into his sluice box--late 1950s.

As the years passed, Secora walked the upper lakeshore and the mountains at its periphery. He learned their convolutions and best passages, and he found their hidden, magical places, such as an ancient, giant cottonwood grove near the glacier flats.

He also learned the ways of the animals that trod these hills and valleys, and when young George Pollard became an area big-game guide in 1958 and asked Secora to work for him, he said yes and he excelled.

“He was the best, if you could keep up with him,” Pollard said. “He wasn’t so fast, but he was steady, up and down the mountains. He just never quit.”

Secora (center) poses with clients and a trophy, 1950s.

With clients, Secora remained generally aloof but was personable and friendly when necessary, just as he was with almost everyone. “I don’t think he changed any in regard to his clients or the people he guided, but they just worshipped him, probably for his independence and his ability to live without the rest of the world,” Pollard said.

Perhaps, Pollard mused, they admired Secora because he seemed to do easily what they knew they could never accomplish. “Most people couldn’t do it, wouldn’t last two weeks. You have to be able to live with yourself,” Pollard said.

Secora lived alone at Tustumena Lake for 34 years.

At his main cabin on the lake, Secora fashioned many of the accoutrements with which he worked and which made his home practical and secure.



In front of the cabin he created a covered porch, beneath which stood several Blazo boxes acting as sets of shelves. There were also various tools and a tidy head-high pile of hand-hewn lumber, whipsawed to precise dimensions. Beyond the porch was a vegetable garden, surrounded by a fence of wooden slats and rails.


Secora's main cabin (seen here in 1985) stood at the edge of the timber near the shore of Tustumena Lake.

Around the cabin, a visitor might spy Secora’s wheelbarrow, handcrafted from wood and tin atop a single steel wheel, and his homemade sawhorse, a number of wooden ladders, a two-seater outhouse, a small meat-drying building, a wooden walkway leading toward the lakeshore, and a shoulder-high stack of extra wooden shakes (or shingles) hand-cut with a hatchet and ready to replace the ones that covered his roof.

Shortly after Secora’s death in February 1972, Pollard said, individuals who suspected that the reclusive miner might have been hiding a fortune in gold ventured to his property and gave it a thorough going-over.

Secora's sawhorse and garden fence.

Secora's homemade wheelbarrow.

“There were snowmobile trails going into his cabin, and his place was torn up,” Pollard said. “They tore the rocks out—he had boxes of rocks under his bunk, samples that he’d picked up over on Fox River or on the Indian—and scattered them around. They looked in his cooler under the floor; that’s where he kept his potatoes in the winter time to keep them from freezing.”

Pollard said that he never heard of anyone actually finding any gold in the cabin, but it wasn’t necessarily a discovery that one would brag about.

Uphill from the Big Lake

About a thousand vertical feet above Secora’s Tustumena residence, at the end of a winding, wooded trail along the high north bank of Indian Creek, stood his second home—the Lake Emma cabin—erected on a small rise overlooking the lake and the tiny outlet stream that dropped into Indian Creek itself.

Secora at his cabin on Lake Emma in the 1950s.

Handcrafted from native timber, the Lake Emma cabin appeared simple in its architecture—rows of mainly horizontal logs, small windows, a roof of wooden shakes, a solitary stovepipe, a large sun-bleached set of moose antlers nailed to the front wall, a solid front door constructed of vertical planks, and a small attached woodshed just to the left of the door.

But this simplicity belied the cabin’s most impressive features—flat and plumb interior walls, and plank floorboards, all hewn smooth and uniform by hand. Comfortable and solid, this was Secora’s home base when working his mining claim on Indian Creek, some 400 to 500 vertical feet below the lake.

The front of the Lake Emma cabin, 1985.

The Emma cabin gave Secora even more solitude than the one on Tustumena, and it supplied him with a convenient dinner on those occasions that he had a hankering for Dolly Varden. All he needed to do was wander down to the lake and make a few expert casts with his handmade rod.

Secora nails a Dolly Varden while fishing for
dinner on Lake Emma.

“He roamed around quite a while to find that long beautiful rod—I don’t know whether it was birch or aspen—I think maybe it was aspen—and then season it,” Pollard said. “It must have been about 12 feet long, and he had about a 20-foot piece of line on it and a piece of fish fin or something for bait.”

When it was time to mine on Indian Creek, Secora followed a steep, sometimes slippery trail down from the Emma cabin to an even smaller shelter cabin situated next to two large curving aspens somewhat back from the creek itself. There he worked the creek gravels for color, meeting with only occasional success, according to Pollard.

Once, during some flooding, the creek cut a new bend near his trail and exposed an expanse of fresh gravel. “Joe told me that he was picking gold right off the surface in the gravel there,” Pollard said. “He really worked that over good.”

Secora's Indian Creek cabin in 1985. It was destroyed in a flood
several years later.

Still, Secora never found enough gold to get rich. “He had a hunter one time that wanted to buy some gold from him, and he went under his bunk or something and got out some flecks of gold he measured out,” Pollard said.  “That was back when gold was $33 an ounce.”

Secora worked hard for his paydays, gouging out diversion channels, prying up boulders and strong-arming them out of his way, dumping wheelbarrow-loads of gravel into his long, low sluice, and using a gold pan to filter out the sediments and find the color.

In his work, Pollard said, Secora had one gear—deliberate and steady. Standing about 5-foot-10, with spectacles and a receding hairline, he was lean and wiry and strong. “His movements were quick and sure, and he never got tired.”

Eventually, however, even this seemingly tireless worker began showing signs that not all was right in his world—or at least, according to Pollard, signs that he feared that something bad was about to happen.

Hints of Paranoia

After Secora was laid to rest beneath the mossy loam of Spruce Grove Memorial Park Cemetery in Kasilof, Pollard mourned the loss of a man he had considered a friend. Then, after intruders invaded Secora’s Tustumena Lake cabin, Pollard also reevaluated the paranoia he had once perceived in the tough old gold miner.

Secora, he said, worried that other individuals were after his gold: “I think he figured they thought, ‘That old prospector up there, he’s got a fortune under his floorboards.’”

Years earlier, recalled Pollard, he had begun to feel concerned about Secora’s mental state. In the mid-1960s on one of his many visits to Secora’s home, located just west of the Indian Creek mouth, he and Secora had shared an odd conversation:

“He said, ‘There was a couple of guys here, and they left me a bottle of wine. And I drank that wine and got terribly sick. I thought I was going to die.’ He said, ‘They must have poisoned it.’ So I said, ‘How could they? Was it sealed?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Well, how could they poison it?’ He said, ‘Oh, with a hypodermic needle. They could stick it through the cork.’ I got to thinking, ‘This is pretty loopy, you know.’”

Sometime later, on another visit, he and Secora had an eerily similar exchange: “Someone left him a dozen eggs, and he said, ‘You know, I ate a couple of those eggs and I got sick. I almost died.’ I said, ‘Are they rotten?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘How could the eggs make you sick?’ I knew he hadn’t had eggs for years and years. He said, ‘They could stick a hypodermic needle in them.’”

The reclusive Secora was known as a reticent man who could be amiable if necessary, but as a rule he listened far more than he spoke, and he kept to primarily himself, venturing to civilization—mostly Kasilof—only once or twice a year, ostensibly to resupply his staple goods and occasionally to play pinochle with his brother John’s in-laws (the Hermansens) or another small group of friends.

Leaving the lake was an involved process and a long journey. Secora had to pull-start the five-horse Mercury engine on the transom of his 16-foot, kit-built Chris-Craft and, in good weather, spend about four hours motoring more than 20 miles down the lake to its Kasilof River outlet. About two miles downstream, he would tie off his boat at the head of an old Army trail, unload his homemade wheelbarrow (for toting supplies), and push it for the next five miles to the nearest store.

“Time had a different connotation to Joe Secora than to the rest of us—probably a better one,” said Pollard, who believes that Secora never wore a watch or worried much about the time of day. His primary concerns were gathering enough to eat, assuring his warmth and security, searching hard for flecks of gold, and working as a trapper or assistant guide for extra money.



Secora (far right) poses with friends who visited him at his Tustumena home.

So it may have seemed odd to the man with nothing but time when Martin Hermansen came to him—after hearing from others of Secora’s paranoia—and insisted that it was time for Secora to take a vacation.

Hermansen attempted to persuade Secora to sojourn in California, where he’d been a prospector before heading north to Alaska in the 1930s. Secora argued that he didn’t have the money to cover the airfare, but Hermansen convinced him to accept a personal loan.

When he returned sometime later to Alaska, he had yet another tale to relate to Pollard:

In northern California, he had headed straight for the mountains to prospect and soon found paydirt. Unfortunately, it was located on private property, so Secora offered the owner a deal: He and the owner would file a joint mining claim, Secora would do the mining, and the two men would share the profits.

The landowner agreed, but insisted that a friend of his be included in the deal; he said that he and his friend would take care of the paperwork. When they returned, however, only the two friends’ names were on the claim. Discouraged that circumstances were once again conspiring against him, Secora grew determined to return home directly.

But Secora had no money. So he sold his good pair of Bausch & Lomb binoculars, according to Pollard, and may have sold his Exakta camera as well to raise the necessary funds to fly north.

Then, in the early 1970s, Secora met a Ninilchik entrepreneur named Wayne Bishop, owner of Inlet View Cabins and Café. Bishop, a former hard-rock miner originally from Wyoming, was also the owner of a single-engine Aeronca Champ. He flew in to the upper lake three or four times to chat with Secora and bring him old mining magazines.

On Feb. 23, 1972, he brought Secora one of his wife’s homemade pies, and he convinced his new friend to make the short flight with him up Indian Creek to Lake Emma, where they would land on skis, auger a few holes through the ice, and see if they could catch a few Dolly Varden.

Beginnings and Endings

Joe Secora, according to Pollard, was born in or around Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Dec. 30, 1908. Alaska’s No. 1 Guide: The History and Journals of Andrew Berg 1869-1939, by Catherine Cassidy and Gary Titus, doesn’t specify a birthplace but says that Secora and his brother came from New Jersey.

Eventually, the Secora brothers trekked transcontinentally to California to prospect for gold, and Pollard said he thinks that Joe Secora’s next move was into the Susitna Valley, where he continued prospecting until taking up residence on Tustumena Lake in 1938.

With the exception of military service, Secora would spend the rest of his life at the lake. At Spruce Grove Memorial Park Cemetery, Secora’s grave marker indicates that he was a Private First Class in the Army Air Forces during World War II. Pollard said that Secora was also involved in a rescue on Mount McKinley during this time.

The grave marker for Joseph Secora at Spruce Grove Memorial Park Cemetery in Kasilof.

At Tustumena Lake about four decades earlier—in May 1901, according to Cassidy and Titus—51 placer claims were located and filed along the lower stretch of Indian Creek. In July, those claims were consolidated under the Northwestern Development & Mining Company, which issued $50,000 in bonds to fund the enterprise.

In Oct. 1901, Andrew Berg, his brother, Emil, and two other men also filed on 80 acres of placer ground along Indian Creek. Over the next three years, while Berg built a cabin near the creek mouth, the NWD&M Co. installed a small sawmill along the lakeshore just north of Berg, began building a road from the mill up to creek itself, and then set up a hydraulic mining system. In 1904, the company reported having a “fairly good season,” but then it abandoned its operations and never returned.

In November 1930, on the site of the old sawmill, one of Berg’s friends, Erling Frostad, began but never finished a log cabin.

At some point after his own arrival at the lake, Secora enlisted the assistance of his brother and either Jimmy or Buddy Minano to take up the task of completing Frostad’s project, said Pollard.

The cabin they finished became Secora’s main home until his death on Wednesday, Feb. 23, 1972.

On that day, Secora sat in the passenger’s seat of Bishop’s plane as they flew into Lake Emma. Pollard said he remembers Bob Richey of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service saying that he had seen ski tracks and evidence of ice fishing in the snow covering the lake ice. Richey had noticed the tracks on Thursday, Feb. 24, while assisting the Civil Air Patrol in searching for Bishop’s plane after it was reported missing at 10 o’clock the night before.

Richey then spotted the wreckage of an airplane at 11:25 a.m. on Thursday in the mountainous terrain between Indian Creek and the Tustumena Glacier. He identified the wreckage as Bishop’s Aeronca, and, according to the Cheechako News, a helicopter was called in from the Rescue Coordination Center at Elmendorf Air Force Base. The chopper carried two State Troopers from the Soldotna detachment who recovered the bodies and transported them to Walsh Mortuary in Kenai.

“They (Bishop and Secora) took off toward the south fork of the Indian, and they turned around to come back and crashed,” said Pollard. “There were a couple of little rises there he had to get over, and he didn’t get over the second one. I think he overestimated the power of his plane.”

Bishop, who left behind a wife and daughter and a business, was 56. Secora, who left behind three cabins and a gold-mining operation, was 63. Whether Secora also left behind any gold only the intruders to his Tustumena home may ever know.

 

 

 

"Justice Wasn't Easy"

JUSTICE WASN’T EASY

DECEMBER 2012

When Victor Frolich announced in the spring of 1962 that he was having a contest to rename his recently purchased Soldotna motel, he was doing more than merely stamping his own identity on the place. He was masking a stain from its past.

On Dec. 18, 1961, Arthur Vernon Watson had shot and killed Marion T. Grissom, a former employee who had been assisting in the construction of the Watson Motel.

Watson, 53, never denied shooting Grissom. In fact, he was the one who had called the authorities after Grissom dropped dead on Watson’s kitchen floor. But Watson claimed that he had pulled the trigger in self-defense, and the facts of the case were muddled enough to generate doubt.

One problem was a lack of witnesses. Grissom, after all, was dead. Watson’s 65-year-old wife, Elizabeth, had been on the premises when the killing occurred, but she claimed to remember nothing. Consequently, Watson himself provided the only first-hand testimony.

For members of the public—and for attorneys at the 1962 trial—the decision concerning whom and what to believe seemed to boil down to a matter of character.

Marion Grissom, by all accounts, was a poorly educated, hard-working man who liked to drink. The accounts were more mixed when it came to his behavior while intoxicated. Defense attorney Peter B. Walton described an intoxicated Grissom as a “savage beast” and said that Watson’s fear of this beast played a part in the shooting.

On the other hand, Warren Wright, a former employee at Watson’s motel, testified that Grissom was “playful” when drinking, and his depiction was echoed by Frank Mullen, owner of a local Laundromat, who added that Grissom was “boisterous” when intoxicated. Bar owner Maxine Bear testified that Grissom was “a working man … a happy-go-lucky type of guy … very friendly”; she said she’d never seen him display anger when intoxicated.

But Mrs. Watson, who was originally from San Francisco and had married Watson in Las Vegas in 1959, offered a contrary and more damning view. She testified that Grissom was a strong man who “couldn’t think for himself” and “always had a bottle hid around on the job.” She also recalled an incident from the previous October during which Grissom had brutally mistreated the Watson family dog. Another time, she said, Grissom “started grabbing me and pushing me around.”

She told the court that at the Watson residence she had once witnessed her husband and Grissom fighting for possession of a rifle that Watson had taken up in order to force Grissom from the house; she said the two men had fought to an impasse that time, and Grissom had left.

Meanwhile, the character of Arthur Vernon Watson proved at first more difficult to pin down, partly because of something else his wife said.

According to Watson, he was protecting his wife and himself on the night of the killing. Watson testified—and evidence at the scene indicated—that Grissom and the Watsons were drinking alcohol together on that night. Watson said that at about 6 o’clock that evening he left his wife and Grissom at his home while he went to have his truck fixed. When he returned at 8 p.m., he testified that he discovered his wife lying on the floor with her face bloody, and as he leaned down to pick her up, Grissom assaulted him.

Watson claimed that he and Grissom struggled until he grabbed a knife from the kitchen drainboard and used it to force Grissom to leave the house. When Grissom started to walk away, Watson said, he set the knife down to tend to his wife. Then he heard a noise and spun to see Grissom coming at him again. He picked up a nearby rifle, levered a cartridge into the chamber, pointed the weapon at Grissom, and told him to get out. But Grissom kept advancing, Watson testified, so he shot and killed him.

According to court documents, a state police officer named Morgan testified that Mrs. Watson was in bed when he arrived at the scene of the crime. Officer Morgan said that he and another officer interrogated Watson for approximately two hours before Mrs. Watson emerged from the bedroom. The officers noted that Mrs. Watson had “suffered contusions of the neck, facial cuts, and a blow on the head which caused swelling,” according to an Anchorage Daily Times story from March 9, 1962.

Officer Morgan testified that when Mrs. Watson saw blood on the floor, she asked what it was. When she was told it was blood, she asked, “From what?” When she was informed that Watson had shot Grissom, she exclaimed, “Oh, no!” and then turned to her husband and said, “It’s your temper! Your temper has done it again!”

At trial, the defense attorney argued against the admission of this testimony as evidence, calling it hearsay, but the judge allowed it. During Watson’s later appeal of his conviction for second-degree murder, the Alaska Supreme Court would side with Watson and demand a retrial. According to the written court decision, Mrs. Watson had claimed to have no recollection of the shooting incident, so her uninformed reaction to news of the incident was prejudicial, especially since district attorney James Merbs had failed to elicit from either officer any testimony concerning whether Watson had reacted to his wife’s supposition.

But Watson had other problems during that first trial. Since he and his attorney were attempting to establish that Watson was afraid of Grissom, Mrs. Watson’s testimony concerning their earlier battle over a rifle appeared to contradict that premise.

Watson’s attorney said that, six months before the shooting, Watson had reported to Officer Morgan the incident with the rifle in order to urge Morgan to tell Grissom to stay away from him, especially when Grissom was drinking. During redirect testimony, however, Officer Morgan testified that Watson never came to him with this request; instead, he said, he had gone to Watson after Watson’s former employee, Wright, had complained to the police that Watson had taken a shot at him.

Besides, if Watson was afraid of an intoxicated Grissom, it seemed odd that on the night of Dec. 18, 1961, he had invited Grissom in to drink with him and his wife.

In the end, the jury found Watson guilty, and during the 1964 second trial the verdict once again was guilty of murder in the second degree. However, even that was not the end of the case.

Watson and his attorney appealed again—and for good reason.

On Friday, Nov. 6, 1964—the last day of the trial before the jury was to begin deliberation—several jurors had read a newspaper article that described Mrs. Watson’s disallowed hearsay testimony from the first trial. In a written affidavit, juror Gene R. Jones admitted to seeing the story: “On the afternoon of Nov. 6, 1964, I remember going downstairs in the State Court Building and buying an Anchorage Daily Times from the blind fellow who has the concession stand. I took this newspaper back to the jury assembly room as the jury was out of the courtroom on that date from 2 p.m. to approximately 4 p.m. In this newspaper, I remember reading an item pertaining to the State of Alaska vs. Arthur V. Watson case.”

Because of the jurors’ actions, the Alaska State Supreme Court in April 1966 once again sided with Watson and demanded another new trial.

Meanwhile, Watson was making life tougher on himself. Pending the Supreme Court decision on his appeal from the 1964 retrial, Watson had been released on bail. At some point in early 1965, he slipped out of the state and wound up back in San Francisco. Unfortunately for Watson, his disappearance generated a manhunt and attracted the FBI.

In February 1965, the Associated Press produced a story about the arrest of Arthur Vernon Watson, calling him a “San Francisco ex-convict.” Watson had been about to board an express bus for Southern California when he was nabbed by FBI agents in a crowded Greyhound terminal. Highlights in the brief story included Watson’s murder conviction in Alaska, a note that Watson “had spent a third of his life thus far in prisons throughout the United States,” and mention of his recent firearm-possession arrest in Anchorage.

Although the facts are somewhat unclear beyond his arrest in San Francisco and the Supreme Court’s guilty verdict the following spring, Watson somehow was a free man again in 1976. He was 68 years old and living in Portland, Oregon, when the car in which he was riding struck a parked truck on Interstate 80N just west of The Dalles. The impact killed Watson.

And back in Soldotna, there was also no longer a Watson Motel. Victor Frolich had made sure of that.

In the spring of 1962, after paying $10 to the winner of his name-my-motel contest, Frolich changed his new establishment to the Wye Motel, largely because of its proximity to the Sterling-Spur Highway junction.

Many years later, the motel was sold again, and today—with the criminal connections to Arthur Vernon Watson a half-century in the past—it has been expanded and remodeled and is known as the Soldotna Inn, the companion to Mykel’s Restaurant.

 

"Hunting Whales to Attract Tourists"

From a special section of the Anchorage Daily Times in 1965.

HUNTING WHALES TO ATTRACT TOURISTS

AUGUST 2008

At a time when efforts are afoot to list the Cook Inlet beluga whale under the federal Endangered Species Act, it may seem strange to contemplate that in the early 1960s the Kenai Chamber of Commerce actually sponsored an organization called The Beluga Whale Hunt Club.

The chamber was “looking toward utilization of the beluga whale,” according to James Fisher, a retired Kenai lawyer and the president of the chamber from 1962 to 1964. Consequently, beluga hunting and the subsequent consumption of “beluga burgers” became a featured attraction of the annual Kenai Days celebration from 1963 to 1965.

The December 1963 issue of Alaska Sportsman reported that the whale hunt was “a great idea publicity-wise, but didn’t produce a lot of meat.”

According to the magazine, “Blustery weather kept amateur whale hunters pretty much on the beach, but a previous ‘practice’ hunt provided about 300 pounds of meat” for Kenai Days. Kenai pharmacist John Hulien, who had spearheaded the foundation of the club and referred to himself as the “Chief Whale Wrangler,” reported that “every pound” of the meat (as burgers or in cans) was sold.

The club, ultimately a short-lived attempt to spice up big-game-hunting opportunities and entice tourists to the Kenai area, was organized in the summer of 1963. Membership in the club cost three dollars, and, according to the magazine, new members received a small bottle of whale oil, a chance to participate in the hunt, and “the right to have their names burned into a six-by-six-foot whale hide on display at the city center.”

By May 1964, The Cheechako News reported that efforts were well under way to broaden the abilities and opportunities of the club. Al Munson, the paper said, had donated an “unused gear shack” on the beach below Kenai, area pilot Bud Lofstedt was going to be hired to spot pods of whales from the air, the first crew of Reed Kent and Denny Denbrock were ready to go out, and “practice with the Norwegian harpoon rifle recently acquired has been continuing with increased accuracy by club members.”

Meanwhile, according to the Cheechako, Helen Fisher, club member and wife of the chamber president, had made some experimental whale oil soap, and the club itself was hoping to supply whale oil for the Alaska exhibit at the World’s Fair in New York City. Five gallons of oil and certificates of membership in the club had already been sent, the paper said.

Nancy Lord, author of the 2004 nonfiction Beluga Days, interviewed former Kenai resident Lance Petersen, who had written an informational booklet for the club. A long-time peninsula teacher, Petersen remembered that the club had used his family’s winch truck to raise harvested belugas out of the water at Arness Dock and haul them into town.

Petersen, who still had his club membership certificate and souvenir bottle of oil, recalled the barbecue fondly and the meat as red and flavorful.

Lord also referred to a 1965 Cook Inlet Courier article, which said that Hulien and whale guide Ken Tapp took a couple of army men out for 10 hours of hunting over two days. “They fired 250 rounds of ammunition and ended up with zero belugas,” Lord wrote.

Tapp, whom Lord tracked down to his current home in Oklahoma, said that he had shot “maybe 25 to 30” belugas, but he was unconcerned about the numbers. “There were thousands of those doggone things,” he said.

Tapp’s assessment of the beluga population was in dispute even then, however, and in 1972 the Marine Mammal Protection Act banned all sport and commercial harvest of such animals. According to a 2000 Marine Fisheries Review article by Barbara A. Mahoney and Kim E.W. Shelden,  there were at least 1,300 belugas in Cook Inlet in the 1970s but the numbers have been falling ever since.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries department estimated the 2006 Cook Inlet population at 302 and said that a 50-percent decline occurred from 1994 to 1999.

Ultimately, despite much fanfare from Hulien—described by Fisher as “kind of outgoing and substantially involved in the Kenai community”—the club’s activities and its participation in Kenai Days disappeared after 1965.

Still, Hulien didn’t go down without a fight, as shown by an enthusiastic advertisement for guided beluga hunts published in an outdoor section of the Anchorage Daily Times on July 1, 1965.

The ad, entitled “Beluga Offer Top Big Game,” gushed that “several Alaskan guides have said that hunting the beluga whale is by far the most exciting big game hunting ever done.”

The hunt, the ad continued, “begins at sea in an open dory about 20 feet long.” The dory crew would maneuver into a pod of whales and attempt to separate one from the group. Then, “the dory rides herd on it and edges it toward shallow water.”

The actual kill was described this way: “After an hour or more of tracking, with more than 100 rounds of ammunition spent, the whale is usually fatigued enough to allow the dory to come within harpoon-throwing distance. Hardier hunters use the 10.15mm Norwegian harpoon rifle, as it really packs a punch.”

POSTSCRIPT FROM 2011

A blog of the American Cetacean Society added these thoughts in a posting entitled “Beluga Whales: Food for Thought”: “Helen Peters [was] reminded her of the years she spent in Kenai back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s when she worked as a public health nurse. She said that John Hulian, the local pharmacist, founded the Beluga Whale Hunt Club in 1962 as a means to raise funds for the Kenai Chamber of Commerce during the Kenai Days celebration. … The club was disbanded in 1965 but during the three years that it operated, the beluga-burgers, which sold for a dollar apiece, were the highlight of the event. Helen described how every year she would buy new garbage cans that she used to marinate the meat in vinegar and spices, then grilled the meat to perfection over an open fire and served it on a bun. She said that the biggest obstacle to getting people to buy them wasn’t the taste (which she described as similar to beef or buffalo); it was the color of the meat (which was almost black) that she remembered so vividly and found so off-putting.”