"Good Fortune or Bad"

Chell Bear (left) and Lawrence "Mac" McGuire pose with trout caught through the ice below Bob Mackey's cabin.

GOOD FORTUNE OR BAD

VARIOUS DATES: 2009-2011

Sometimes timing is everything

When Harold Daubenspeck, owner of the Kenai Packers cannery near the mouth of the Kenai River, walked into the Seattle-Tacoma airport on Oct. 6, 1959, he expected nothing out of the ordinary. He was there, as he had been so many times before, to pay for a ticket so he could make a routine flight to Anchorage on Pacific Northern Airlines.

But this transaction was not as simple as the rest had been. According to a December 1959 Alaska Sportsman account of the incident, Daubenspeck, who operated his Kenai cannery for more than 30 years, was greeted by PNA president Arthur Woodley, who presented the fisheries mogul with 10 shares of PNA stock and told him that his ticket that day was free of charge.

He also received a kiss from the stewardess.

It turns out that Daubenspeck had just become the airlines’ millionth passenger in 27 years of flying in and around, and to and from, Alaska.

The magazine quoted Daubenspeck, who died in 2008 at the age of 95: “I’ve made the trip so often I guess it’s the law of averages working. Back in 1937 I used to fly with Art Woodley and Dave Kellogg in Travel Airs. I never dreamed their little bush line would grow up and carry a million passengers!”

Good Luck, Bad Luck

August 1961 was a good hunting month for Bob Schmidt. He crept into the woods early on the opening day of moose season, located and shot a bull almost right away, and had his kill cleaned and hauled home well before the day was done.

Nine days later, on Aug. 10, Schmidt, a Kalifornsky Beach homesteader and commercial fisherman, was flown by guide Harold R. “Andy” Anderson into the Tustumena glacier flats for a Dall sheep hunt. Anderson, Schmidt, and the Rev. Paul Weimer, a Baptist minister from Soldotna, then hiked the difficult route into the mountains to establish a camp and search for full-curl rams.

Their search was successful. All three men made a kill, each at an elevation of approximately 4,000 feet, and they all returned safely.

A photograph in the Aug. 25, 1961, edition of The Cheechako News shows Anderson kneeling in front of three sets of ram horns displayed on a table. According to the information in the accompanying article, these were the horns from the Aug. 10 hunt, and the largest horns, flaring a prominent 1¼ curl, had come from Schmidt’s ram.

Anderson estimated that Schmidt’s ram had been nine years old, although Schmidt himself said recently he believed it had been 10. A rough estimate of the horn size—a computation involving numerous measurements of horn thickness and length, plus distance between the horns—provided a score of 170, which made the horns a contender for inclusion in the Boone & Crockett record book.

No specific details of the measurements were provided in the article, but ironically the still-standing world record for Dall sheep was also killed in 1961. Harry L. Swank shot his ram in the Wrangell Mountains, and its horns—the right more than 48 inches long, the left more than 47—scored a 189¾ with Boone & Crockett.

Unfortunately for Schmidt, he would never learn the official score for his set of horns. A fire in his home the following year destroyed his trophy, and a second fire sometime later destroyed his only photographs of the horns.

Nightmare problems haunt dream school

The page-one headline in the Tuesday, Jan. 13, 1970, edition of The Cheechako News exclaimed: “Seward’s Beautiful New Elementary School Dedicated.” The accompanying article went on to tout the $2.1 million facility’s “beautiful, modern” appearance, its exposed beams, plank interior siding, modernistic arches and light-colored plaster.

A modern view of Seward Elementary School--from the school's website.

“Nestled in the foothills” above the city, William H. Seward Elementary School boasted “spacious and colorful” rooms and the Benny Benson Library. In fact, present at the Jan. 11 dedication ceremonies was Benson himself—the former Jesse Lee Home resident who, at age 13 in 1927, had designed the blue-and-gold Territory of Alaska flag that eventually became the banner for the state.

At the ceremony, which included the Alaska commissioner of education, Kenai Peninsula Borough Chairman George Navarre termed the opening of the new school “the fulfillment of a dream.”

Less than two weeks later, however, the dream may have felt more akin to a nightmare.

The Cheechako, in its Thursday, Jan. 22, edition, announced: “Seward Elementary—Problems in Paradise.”

Two main problems were cited: First, the heating system was out of whack. One teacher claimed that the system was “creating an unbearable teaching situation”—with the heat in the classrooms climbing from 75 in the morning to as high as 90 in the afternoon.

Second, and much more critical, the roof was leaking in more than a hundred places. At a Borough Assembly meeting in Seward two days before this article appeared, Area Director Jim Martin said that there had been no leaking at all during the heavy rains in Seward in recent weeks, but that the leaks had appeared after the previous week’s deep freeze.

Fortunately for the borough and for the school’s staff and faculty, the building (which today continues to hold classes in the foothills) was still under guarantee from the contractor, whom Martin said would be contacted about making repairs.

Navarre, who had spoken of the “dream” only a few days earlier, expressed a sour note at the assembly meeting: “I hate to say I told you so, but I was against this roof design from the first.”

Betty Karsten chats with Ed Back (left) and Bill Gross as they make the Karsten family the state's first recipients of commercial natural gas.

Location, Location, Location

Sometimes location is everything. At least such was the case in 1961, when Emmett and Betty Karsten of Ridgeway became the first civilian consumers of natural gas in the State of Alaska.

A large natural gas field had been discovered west of Soldotna by Unocal and Marathon Oil Company in 1959, only two years after the discovery of oil in the Swanson River field. Soon, construction on a gas pipeline began, and the residents of Ridgeway and Soldotna were the earliest beneficiaries.

On Aug. 9, 1961, Ed Back of Ed’s Appliance Service in Soldotna and Bill Gross of the Anchorage Natural Gas Company completed the installation and hook-up at the Karsten home.

The Kalifornsky Beach gas field turned out to be the largest field ever discovered in the Cook Inlet area, and it was soon supplying customers all across the central Kenai Peninsula.

Wobbly reminiscence

Editor’s note: Many of the details and all of the quotes in this story come from an anonymous nostalgic remembrance printed in the Cheechako News in early January 1980. Although the account is uncredited, it appeared near some other history-flavored articles written by publisher Loren Stewart about early homesteading life on the Kenai Peninsula. Stewart, who came to live in Ridgeway in 1948 and founded the Cheechako in 1959, almost certainly penned the piece, which was entitled “Irish Whiskey & Fishing Trip.”

When the tracks in the fresh snow left the graveled Sterling Highway that late afternoon in mid-winter 1949, they formed a fresh clear path down the crude three-mile road Bob Mackey had cut to his home on the Mackey Lakes. So the late arrivals to Mackey’s social gathering—an ice-fishing party—followed those footprints, followed them easily … at first.

Soon, however, the tracks began to wander, and the two travelers later discovered a disturbance in the snow that indicated that the person ahead of them had fallen. Sometime afterward, they discovered evidence of another fall, and lying alongside that small snowy crater they spied an empty Irish whiskey bottle, which told them all they needed to know.

Lawrence McGuire poses outside his Soldotna homestead cabin.

“McGuire!” they said in unison.

They were trailing Lawrence “Mac” McGuire, a transplanted Irishman (from County Donegal) who became one of Soldotna’s first homesteaders in 1948. McGuire was a man who loved his cabin across the Kenai River bridge from Soldotna, loved to welcome company to his door, and loved a bottle of good Irish whiskey.

The two travelers continued their journey, and additional evidence began to present itself: More blemishes in the snow indicating more falls. A single glove. A wool hat. Another glove. And then McGuire himself.

They found the wiry Irishman “lying peacefully in the snow, with an opened, half-empty bottle of Irish whiskey in his bare, blue hand—and what is more, he hadn’t spilled a drop.”

Although McGuire may not have realized it, he needed to be rescued. The two travelers “half-carried, half-dragged” him to Mackey’s cabin, where they “poured some hot coffee in him and stuffed him into a sleeping bag.”

Then they left him alone in the cabin so they could join the ice-fishing festivities out on the lake, hoping in the meantime that McGuire survived the night and avoided pneumonia and the loss of any frostbitten fingers or toes.

The party on the lake went late into the night, and eventually everyone returned to the cabin to find the “indestructible” McGuire sleeping soundly and apparently comfortable. The other partiers crawled into sleeping bags arrayed on the cabin floor and sacked out, intending to snooze until about noon the next day.

However, the well-rested McGuire was up and energized before daybreak, shaking awake his friends to offer them the coffee he had brewed and the bacon he had fried.

Something else about the marshal

Many people with an eye for Kenai history know the name of former U.S. Deputy Marshal Allan Petersen, but there’s one thing—from nearly a century ago, when Anchorage was barely out of its Ship Creek swaddling clothes—that most folks probably don’t know at all: In his late 20s, Petersen was a championship wrestler.

His daughter, Peggy Arness, still has the coin-sized medal to prove it.

According to Once Upon the Kenai, Petersen, who was born in 1890, left a teaching job in California in 1914 to join his father in Alaska and look for a better job.  After working initially on an Alaska Railroad survey crew, he used his newfound railroading skills for the U.S. Army in France during World War I.

Upon his return to Alaska, he went briefly back into teaching, this time in Seldovia, where he met and married another teacher, Jetret “Jettie” Stryker, the sister of Enid (Stryker) McLane, for whom the first Kenai Peninsula Community College building was later named.

Allen Petersen outwrestles an opponent named Hegstrom
in a 1918 match held in Anchorage. (Photo from the
Anchorage Weekly Democrats--Feb. 16, 1918)

In Kasilof, on Kachemak Bay, in Seldovia, and later in Unga, Petersen worked in various jobs—as a fox farmer, herring fisherman, clerk in a general store, store owner, and U.S. commissioner—before being appointed deputy marshal in 1934. He was stationed as a marshal initially in Unga and then was transferred to Kenai in 1946.

Petersen retired from his post in 1953 and then was elected in 1959 to be a member of the first State Legislature. He died in May 1969 and was buried in Spruce Grove Memorial Park in Kasilof.

In his younger days, said Arness, her father enjoying using his “very large strong arms” in displays of strength. In the 1930s and ‘40s, she said, “(he) would often arm wrestle with guys in bars, just for fun, as he made his rounds as marshal. Alec Wik (Sr.) was bound and determined to crash him but never did.”

Prior to these arm-wrestling days, however, Petersen was an adept wrestler. In fact, a photo of him in action, and an article mentioning his prowess on the mat, graced the pages of the Anchorage Weekly Democrat newspaper on Feb. 16, 1918.

According to the brief article, Petersen had earlier been victorious in a wrestling competition at a smoker—a popular men’s-only social gathering common in the early to mid-1900s, typically held on the grounds of a private charitable club, and usually in a haze of tobacco smoke. At the smoker, Petersen had defeated an opponent named Hegstrom, and the paper said it also expected him to fare well against his next foe, a “Mr. Kincaid”:

“While Kincaid (is) giving away some weight, the match promises to be fast, as Petersen has demonstrated to the fans of Anchorage that he is there with the good, and the easy manner in which he handled Hegstrom, considered a good man and a hard one to beat, proves conclusively that he understands the game from all angles.”

The Petersen-Kincaid match was held during the second anniversary celebration of the organization of the Alaska Labor Union in Anchorage. The union, run in part by Socialist activist Lena Morrow Lewis and made up mainly of railroad workers, hosted the smoker on Feb. 25, and once again Petersen emerged victorious.

Arness still keeps her father’s small engraved medal on the end of a thin chain and wears it sometimes as a necklace. She also keeps an original copy of the newspaper clipping, which shows her bare-chested and muscular father, head down, with a leg-and-toe hold on an apparently overmatched opponent.

Boone & Crockett, unexpectedly

By moving in a circle around the body, the two sisters were able to twist the spine, winding it somewhat like the rubber band on a balsa-wood airplane, until the head popped neatly off and the prize was theirs. But the sisters, Marcia and Mary Grainge, had never intended for this day, during the winter of 1972, to be a head-hunting expedition. In fact, it had begun as volunteer work.

The Cheechako Ski Benders Club was preparing for a snowmachine race, and the Grainge girls were out helping to mark trail. From their family home on the north shore of Sports Lake, they had driven out on a pair of snowmachines, an Arctic Cat and an old 12-horse Ski-Do pulling an ahkio, a narrow, runnerless, low-riding sled convenient for trail use because of its shape.

The ahkio had been modified with tubular bars on the sides to allow it to hold a larger load, and on this particular day, as they traveled over deep snow in minus-15-degree weather, the sled held a number of trail signs. About eight miles from the house, they were roaring along Marathon Road, near Kenai, when they stopped to do a little trail marking.

As they worked, Marcia spotted something curiously smooth and spiky protruding from the snow a short distance away. In her one-piece zip-up blue snowsuit, white helmet and sorrels she ambled nearer, and when she got close enough, she realized that it was a piece of an antler. Curious, she began to dig with Mary’s help.

What Marcia had suspected was a dropped caribou antler turned out to be a very large dropped caribou antler, which also turned out to be attached to the skull of a very large dead caribou bull, and the skull itself was attached to the matching antler. Except for the single antler tine that had been poking out, the entire body of the animal had been buried beneath at least two feet of snow.

Marcia (left) and Mary Grainge pose with their trophy caribou antlers.

Once the upper carcass was exposed, the sisters could see that body was badly decomposed and had probably been lying there on the spruce-dotted tundra for quite some time before winter had gotten under way.

“There was no hide on the skull,” Marcia said. “It was totally bare and brownish-white.”

Determined to keep their prize, each sister grabbed an antler and began to move in a circle around the head. “Not a normal way to harvest antlers,” Marcia said.

After they had detached the antlers and skull from the rest of the body, they lugged their massive trophy over to their ahkio, wedged it into the sled, fastened it to the side rails with a piece of rope, and headed for home. “But we had to keep checking it because the trail was rough, up and down, bouncing, etc.,” said Marcia.

The antlers sat in their parents’ garage for a number of years before someone suggested having them measured. Eventually a representative from the Boone & Crockett Club traveled to the Kenai Peninsula and performed the official measurement. The representative determined that the antlers scored 440 2/8 with a double-shovel, enough to enter them into the “Found” section of the Barren Land Caribou record book with a ranking of 58^th largest in the world—a ranking they continue to hold.

Later, the antlers were mounted professionally and displayed in the home of Marcia (Grainge) and Rich King. Then, in 1990, Marcia and Rich relocated to Kauai and gave the antlers on a temporary loan to the Visitor Center in Soldotna.

 A few weeks ago the sisters told center officials to make the antlers a permanent part of their collection. The antlers are there now, with a somewhat shorter version of the story, for public viewing.

 

"Frozen in Time"

Larry Meyer leans against the 1953 Mercury that he drove to Alaska in 1962 to homestead in the Kasilof area.

FROZEN IN TIME

OCTOBER 2008

On his kitchen table Larry Meyer has an 8-by-10 color photograph that at first glance appears to be a man frozen in block of glacier ice. More scrutiny, however, reveals the name “MEYER” written in black ink on the trapped man’s left leather glove, and then behind the blue ice the distorted face of Meyer himself.

A grin breaks out behind his salt-and-pepper whiskers, and Meyer laughs as he explains the joke. But the image—however staged and silly—is still apropos. While at 70, Meyer himself is anything but “frozen in time,” his Kasilof homestead is a different story. Scattered across its grassy taiga are hundreds of relics from the area’s past.

A self-acknowledged dumpster-diving, junkyard-scrounging collector of anything useful or interesting—most intriguingly more than a dozen old buildings, most of them labeled and disassembled on their original sites, then carted to Meyer’s place and pieced back together like immense jigsaw puzzles—he has accumulated acres upon acres of other people’s past and given it all a new home.

In fact, Meyer frequently employs a common Alaska noun, “seagull,” as a verb to describe his tendency to swoop in and strip away the meaty good parts from whatever he happens to find.

Meyer rescues dilapidated structures, rusting hulks, abandoned machines, and rotting crafts. He plucks and saves old

The Lovdahl fox tower--one of many historically significant structures on Meyer's property.

fishing, hunting and trapping gear, old farming equipment, old homesteading apparatus—really, anything that has been around a while and in which he detects some inherent value.

Among the oddities a visitor to the Meyer homestead might find are a bedraggled goat-head mount with one eye missing, several rifles burned beyond usefulness but nailed like trophies above the lintels of doorways, two small bird nests tucked into the empty headlight sockets of an ancient Ford, and an entire wrecked station wagon packed with hubcaps.

Meyer also owns more than 60 cars and about 30 snowmobiles—most lying in various states of disrepair in an area he fondly refers to as his “junkyard,” basically an semi-open vehicular graveyard populated by triumphant trees, weeds and rust.

 A few of Meyer’s vehicles, though, are protected by shed roofs or barns. There are his 1931 Model A Ford, his 1963 Pontiac Bonneville, his 1968 Lincoln Continental, and several early model Polaris and Ski-Do snowmobiles.

Many of these vehicles Meyer had originally thought to restore or to use for parts. “Got a hell of a pile out there,” he said. “A little bit of it I used, but most of it I didn’t.”

Bird nests in the sockets of old Ford headlights.

Also on the grounds are half a dozen wooden boats, most of them in some stage of renovation. One—formerly filled with dirt and used as a flower garden—is slowly succumbing to the elements.

But the real prize here is the buildings. Meyer has sheds, barns, homes, a garage, a sauna, and even an outhouse rescued from the ravages of time.

A 1929 Alaska Road Commission map of the Kasilof River area displays numerous names—of local historical importance—connected to the buildings on Meyer’s property: H.P. Jensen, Archie McLane, Abram Erickson, J.A. Nylander, Slim Crocker.

Meyer, who came to the Kenai Peninsula in the fall of 1960 to work for big-game guide George Pollard, began collecting these buildings a few years later. He had left Alaska temporarily, but in 1962 he drove his 1953 Mercury (now part of the junkyard) back to Alaska and homesteaded in Kasilof.

With the dream in his head of becoming a guide like Pollard, Meyer rescued what he called “the Peacock Building” because he got it from Ernie Peacock. Essentially, it was a horse barn, in which Meyer planned to keep the horses he would need for guiding.

Lettering on an old building helped Meyer to
reconstruct it after dismantling and moving it.

He quickly realized, however, that he was “not a good carpenter” and could barely feed himself, let alone a horse. So for nearly the next 40 years, he worked on oil platforms, in commercial salmon fishing, and in various other jobs—and kept his seagull eyes peeled for new bargains.

Over the years he collected the McLane Schoolhouse, built in 1912 by Charlie West and used in the 1930s by Kasilof’s first teacher, Enid McLane; the Slim Crocker home, built in 1928 and purchased by Meyer in 1974 for $1,800 to use as his own home; and the Erickson-Lovdahl barn and fox kitchen, which includes several fox houses and a tower for observing the foxes raised on Ed Lovdahl’s farm.

There is also the home of Alex Lind (who had changed his name from J.A. Nylander); a barn that Meyer purchased from Mae Ciechanski; the Holden house, the origins of which are fuzzy but which was probably built in the late 1930s; and a garage formerly owned by Ray McNutt, husband to Sterling’s long-time postmaster, Gloria McNutt.

Perhaps the most peculiar history of all the structures, however, belongs to the outhouse because, according to Meyer, it was the site of a suicide. He said that Christian Jensen, brother of Kasilof’s Pete Jensen, became too ill to take care of himself, moved in with his brother, and then, despondent about his condition, shot himself one day in the outhouse.

Meyer keeps track of the histories of his structures (as well as many of his vehicles, boats and other assorted objects), but his methods are problematical. Although he has written down many facts and stories on a variety of scattered papers, he frequently finds himself saying, “I’ve got that written down somewhere,” without being completely sure where that is. And the facts and stories not yet committed to paper are written only in his head.

“When I was in school, when you had to write a 300-word report or somethin’, I just never did it,” he said. “I’m just not very good. I can tell the stories, but writin’ ‘em down, I just hate it. I hate it.”

The historical outhouse.

Many people, he said, have urged him to write anyway, or to dictate to someone, and also to organize his many photographs of original buildings and owners and his reconstruction processes, but he has resisted.

Standing over a pile of mainly historical photographs and a scrapbook full of blank pages, he said, “I dug these pictures out, and I was going to put ‘em in this book—about five years ago, and here they sit. If I kick the bucket, you’ll have a hard time finding all this shit.”

Another concern, as far as local historians are concerned, is what will happen to all of Meyer’s stuff after he dies. “As of now, it’s left to my one son,” he said, acknowledging that he doesn’t know what his son’s intentions will be.

He said, however, that he does plan to consider other options of preserving his treasures.

And in the meantime, he is content to look for more bargains and to give tours to the occasional visitors who follow the meandering gravel roads out to his property, where history is alive and well, if somewhat disorganized.

Meyer gestures to one of his many treasures in the old Holt house.

 

 

 

 

"Breakup Is Hard to Do"

James Arness hauls one of his sons and a 55-gallon barrel to their Nikiski home during spring breakup, about 1952.

BREAKUP IS HARD TO DO

APRIL 2011

Getting their teen-age daughter, Terri, to high school was a particular challenge for Stan and Donnis Thompson back in the early 1970s, after they sold their building supply business and stopped shuttling their family back and forth between Kenai and their Nikiski-area homestead on Timberlost Lake.

“The year we moved out here for good, after selling Kenai Korners, my daughter was a freshman in high school and trying to look beautiful and everything,” Donnis remembered. “And she would get herself all fixed up for school. We had a Coot (a four-wheel-drive all-terrain vehicle). It was open and it had four big, big, big tires on it. And it would go anywhere. And we would wrap her up in plastic until she looked like a cocoon, and Stan would pick her up in the Coot to make the school bus, and then she would unfold just like a chrysalis. And then she would be beautiful and ready to go to school.”

The Thompsons lived—and Stan and Donnis still live—down two miles of narrow twisting dirt road off the end of Halbouty Road. The name of their private drive, “Thompson Trail,” seemed especially appropriate each spring when, for about a month in the 1950s and ’60s, it was practically impassable.

Donnis Thompson, 1956.

In their back-and-forth days, Stan often walked those two miles out to the family Jeep, parked at the end of Halbouty, and then drive into work in Kenai. On his return trip, he would reverse the process. Meanwhile, Donnis, with young children to tend, often stayed home—with no telephone, no electricity, and no running water.

She says she smiles sometimes thinking about how rough some people think they have it today during spring break-up when they’ve got a few ruts in their roads or some big puddles to drive through.  Returning to the Thompson Trail each weekend back in those early springs, Donnis said, “It wasn’t, ‘Did you get stuck?’ It was, ‘How many times did you get stuck?’ We were driving a Jeep, and (the mud) would be clear up to the doors.”

Even these days, her own road creates challenges for her: “I missed church yesterday,” she said earlier this week. “Our road is terrible”—still covered with snow in many places—“and it’s going to get worse. I don’t think I’d’ve gotten stuck; the only thing is, if I do get stuck, I’ve got to walk back. I’ll leave that to younger people.”

*****

Not far south the North Road is Miller Loop, from which Bernice Lake Road can be reached. In 1952, the Alaska Road Commission punched in the route to Bernice Lake, and a small group of hardy families moved out there to set up homesteads. Among those families were the Seamans, whose driveway ended in the area’s worst mudhole.

Carl and Elsie Seaman set up their home down a road that for years, Elsie said, was “mostly just a ‘Cat path,” and was therefore particularly susceptible to the vagaries of freezing and thawing.

One day in the early ’50s, when her three children were all under the age of 10, Elsie and Carl decided to head into Kenai, 11 miles away, for Easter Sunday services, which were often held those days in Louis Miller’s ice cream parlor, where Father Thompson held a Catholic mass from behind the counter while the coffee was perking.

The drive out in their old army surplus truck was somewhat rough but uneventful because the temperature on Saturday night had dipped below freezing and firmed up the roadway. However, the sun was out and strong, and by the time the Seamans were on their road heading home, traveling smoothly was impossible.

“We were dressed in the best we had on the homestead, and that old gumbo was like a quagmire,” Elsie said. “Our truck did its best, but it couldn’t quite make it. It finally bogged down. We were within sight of the homestead, so the only thing we could do is get out and walk. And when I got out of the truck, I stepped down in the mud, and both of my shoes popped off. So I had to pick them up and walk home in my stocking feet.”

“Stocking feet” for Elsie was actually a good pair of nylons, which she promptly ruined as she tromped the 200 yards or so up to her front porch—while her neighbor, Wally Van Sky, stood at his front door “just laughing his head off”—where she and the rest of her family laid their shoes out to dry so the dirt could be banged off later.

Like the Thompsons, the Seamans had no running water. All cleaning and washing had to be with water hauled up from the lake. Elsie did laundry by heating water on the stove and then rubbing clothes briskly over a washboard before hanging them to dry.

*****

Also nearby in the Nikiski area were Peggy and Jim Arness, who had homesteaded by Lake Arness, and, like many of their neighbors, had to leave their Jeep on one end of their road during break-up, then walk around mud and water holes from house to vehicle and back.

The Arnesses built their first homestead cabin in 1952, and Peggy has a black-and-white photograph of Jim on foot on their very rough road. On Jim’s back he has used a thick piece of rope to tie a 55-gallon barrel, which he is hauling out to the homestead. Up on his shoulders is riding his younger son, Joe.

Such manual toting of heavy materials was commonplace back in those days. The Arnesses had an old oil heater in their cabin, and there were no tanker trucks out then making deliveries to personal homes. Along with fuel, they also hauled in groceries and anything else essential to survival, no matter how bad the roads became.

The road into the CAA complex in Kenai, 1948.

*****

In Soldotna, the roads could be awful at times, too. Dale Rorrison, who lived in town for nearly 60 years, had plenty of personal experience with roads, as he worked for the Alaska Road Commission, the Bureau of Public Roads, and state Department of Transportation for about 30 years.

When the road—mainly the Sterling Highway, in Rorrison’s experience—was first constructed, he said, it was “just a cow trail, more or less,” that was sometimes built up with gravel, if it was available at the time. As a result, the weather and the temperatures sometimes played havoc with the roads.

During break-up between Soldotna and Kenai, “we had ’Cats by the biggest holes.” The earth-moving machines were mostly large HD-14 bulldozers and D-8 Caterpillars, which had large bases that would “float” well on mud, and which would be parked and ready for constant use, Rorrison said.

When the roadway thawed, operators used the dozers to push out mud and water, scraping down to frozen ground so that vehicles could continue to pass through. When the removed material dried sufficiently, the operators would push it back onto the roadbed and grade it smooth.

If portions of the road were too bad to allow traffic, operators sometimes parked their dozers right in the road to block oncoming vehicles. Such deterrents worked most of the time, “but sometimes they tried it anyway,” Rorrison said.

In some places, water might stay trapped on the roads for weeks, so road crews would drive steam points into the ground to penetrate the frost and/or clay and give the water a chance to drain. “When you’re on flat land, there’s no place for the water to go,” he said.

But even the hillsides weren’t free of break-up hazards. Rorrison remembers getting stuck once on the hill just on the Sterling side of where Fred Meyer now sits. He said that he and his wife, Meryl, “sat there for several hours” before someone was finally able to help them out.

*****

Al Hershberger, who worked for a while with Rorrison on the Alaska Road Commission, said, “In the early days, mud and getting stuck in it were so commonplace that most people never gave mud a second thought.”

Hershberger’s own first break-up experience with mud occurred in 1948, when he was an ARC employee in the Kenai camp. “One evening after work, three of us decided to go to Soldotna as none of us had been there. One of the guys had a 1936 Studebaker, so we took it and headed towards Soldotna. We got stuck about halfway down Pickle Hill.

“The Road Commission had a D-8 ’Cat nearby, so we fired it up and pushed the car back up the hill, never making it to Soldotna.” Hershberger did eventually reach Soldotna, where he has been living for about 60 years.

“Even after the (highway) was improved, there were mud problems every year, as most of the homesteader roads were not improved,” he said. “There were always lots of vehicles parked along the main road, waiting for the side roads to dry out.”

 

*****

 

 Over in Kenai, Rodger Schmidt, who worked for years as a teacher and a principal, said he remembers the time he approached on foot the intersection of McCollum Drive and Aliak Avenue, near his home, to find a surprise in the mire that had formed in the roadway.

“Right in the middle of that corner, there was a cop car and another car buried right up to the frame,” Schmidt said. “I think the cop must’ve been driving down that road to see what was going on, and ended up right by that other one.”

No one was occupying either vehicle, and Schmidt found humor in the situation because every year water became trapped in the low-lying intersection, and most people understood that, until the water was gone, walking was going to be necessary. “You could have paddled a canoe down that street,” he said.

To extract the vehicles, he said, “I imagine they probably had to get a wrecker in there, the way they were buried.” When he returned the next day, the cars were gone.

*****

In the Longmere Lake area near Sterling, travel by car in the springtime was also no easy matter.  Dan and Mary France homesteaded nearby in the late 1950s, and the road to their home was at first little more than a dirt path, beginning along the shore of Longmere and winding through the mixed birch and spruce woods.



Dan France approaches his airstrip in his Super Cub, 1964.

In the early 1960s, Chas Foster would build Forest Lane, which connected the Frances more firmly to the highway, but until that new road construction occurred, they had to make many adjustments, particularly during break-up.

According to Mary, there was a definite progression to these adjustments. Before the road became impassable, Dan (and their neighbor, Dave Thomas) would park on the frozen lake. When warming temperature deteriorated the road, they would walk a section line to Longmere and drive the length of the lake over to the Sterling Highway.

When the lake ice became too rotten to drive on, they would park their vehicles on the other end of the lake, along the highway, and walk the length of lake. When the lake became too unsafe to walk across, they used a boat, with either Dave Thomas or Dan leaning out over the bow with an axe to chop a narrow channel from one end to the other.

If the lake refroze, or the ice was blown closed, while they were gone, they would re-chop the channel. When the ice finally went out of the lake, they could navigate with the boat in the usual manner. And then, when the roads finally firmed up again—after perhaps a month or more—normal vehicular traffic would resume.

Dan owned a Super Cub and was an avid pilot, and he and Thomas (also a pilot) shared a dirt airstrip that cut perpendicularly across their private road. According to Mary, “When the airstrip dried up enough, that was a highlight of our year. We could fly into town to go to work. We could fly in for groceries. We could fly out our dirty clothes. We could fly back with water or fuel.” Like many pilots at that time, they landed right on the Sterling Highway in the heart of Soldotna.

Odd methods of transportation were nothing new in those days, Mary said. In either 1959 or 1960, she said that Chas and Ruth Foster’s oldest son, Gary, was graduating from school in Kenai, so they fired up Chas’s D-8 and rode it out to the highway, where they climbed into their vehicle, drove to a friend’s house to clean up and change, and then traveled on to the commencement ceremony.

People did what they had to do, Mary said.

Jane Fair makes adjustments to old steel airstrip mats covering a soft spot on their Forest Lane driveway, 1965.

 

 

 

"Cast of Characters"



CAST OF CHARACTERS

FEBRUARY 2013

Author’s note: When histories are written, some individuals are inevitably remembered more readily than others; however, it is important to never lose sight of the many accomplishments of those who may be less widely known. Here is a selection of brief bios concerning people who once lived on the central Kenai Peninsula.

NINA ROBINSON

For several decades, it was almost impossible to vote in the Sterling Precinct without running into election volunteer Nina Robinson. She was a fixture at the sign-in table, and she could be seen opening the registration booklet to each individual’s name before he or she even fished out a voter’s card.



Nina Robinson, 1980.

Robinson seemed to know everyone in the community. And why not, since she was one of the first to actually live in the Sterling area. Additionally, she didn’t exactly keep to herself while her husband, Jesse, was out building roads. Nina was a founding member of the Sterling Homemakers Club, a part-time Sterling postmaster, the record keeper for the family dairy farm business, and a strong promoter of the foundation of the Sterling Community Club.

She also helped to raise five children and was active in area schools.

Born in New Mexico in 1925, Nina met and was wooed by Jesse Robinson in 1945, when the young Marine convinced her to join him in his dream of homesteading in Alaska. By March 1946, they were aboard the U.S.S. Columbia, steaming into the port of Seward. They lived briefly in a tent in the Palmer-Anchorage area before accepting the invitation of Pat Gwin, a man they had met on the ship, to make a home near Cooper Landing.

Gwin went on to establish an eponymous Cooper Landing restaurant, but the following year the Robinsons checked out land in the area known initially as Naptowne, and in 1948 they made a permanent move.

By 1949, they had their own hand-dug well and a windmill pump to extract the water. Nine years later, they had electricity in their home.

Jesse worked for the Alaska Road Commission early on and then later on the building of the Wildwood Army Station and Swanson River Road. Meanwhile, Nina kept the home fires burning and tended to their growing family.

When she died at the age of 80 in June 2005, Nina was considered a Sterling-area pioneer noted for her frugality and her civic-mindedness.

 

BILLY McCANN

Billy McCann could throw a punch as well as he could mix a drink, run a wire, or lend a hand. During several decades in Alaska, he exhibited all three skills during a lifetime of athletics, bartending, electrical work, and public service, mostly centered in Kenai.



Billy McCann.

In 1938, while in his early 20s, McCann came to Alaska to take a break from his professional boxing career in Washington. Instead, he boxed in Juneau while also working construction. The following year, he began tending bar, and in 1940 he traveled to Sitka and won the Alaska welterweight title. He won the Southeastern middleweight crown in 1941, but he also made an important career move when boxing referee Mac McGuern, a leader in the local electricians’ union, got McCann into the union as an apprentice.

McCann was in and out of Alaska for a while, but when he came to Ketchikan in 1944, he was a journeyman electrician and became the coach of the Coast Guard boxing team. When he returned to Alaska again in 1949, he came to stay.

He moved to Kenai in 1953 to work on the Wildwood Station project for Langlois Electric. Until he retired as an electrician in 1981, he also worked for the Kenai Native Association, for ARCO on the North Slope, and for City Electric on the Collier’s expansion.

Over the nearly five decades he spent on the peninsula, he bought stock in Food and Spirits, Inc., and managed its property—the Rainbow Bar; became the controlling owner of the Rig Bar and worked for Rob Mika at the Lamplight Bar; served on the Kenai City Council and the Borough Assembly; was a long-time member of the Lion’s Club, and became the first president of the Nikishka Chamber of Commerce.

After his death in 2001, the Borough Assembly honored McCann posthumously for his many civic accomplishments.

 

ED HOLLIER

Ralph Soberg, Ed Hollier’s predecessor as general foreman for the highway department, once called Hollier “one of the best dozer operators” he’d ever worked with. More than that, said Soberg, Hollier “was one hell of a good man.”

Many people on the central Kenai Peninsula agreed. Hollier served on the original Kenai school board and remained there after the Kenai Peninsula Borough was formed in 1964. He continued to serve on the school board until 1975.

Joanna and Ed Hollier.

“He was very vocal about keeping extra-curricular activities in the schools,” wrote his wife of 41 years, Joanna, in Hollier’s 1989 obituary. “In ’69 we had the same kind of economic crunch as we have now and there was the same talk of cutting out activity programs. He was concerned about keeping the activities in the schools.”

Hollier also promoted youth activities outside of the schools. He supported the Boy Scouts and Little League baseball programs and helped establish the Babe Ruth League in the Kenai area. He also aided in the construction of the first football field for Kenai Central High School, and the field was later named in his honor.

Hollier was born on July 5, 1917, in Borden, Saskatchewan, Canada, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1932. Before moving from Washington to Alaska in 1938 to work on road-building projects, he served for three years in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Once he moved to Alaska, he left only to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps for four years in the Pacific Theater during World War II. After his discharge as a sergeant, he returned to the state, where he met and married Joanna. They homesteaded off Beaver Loop Road and had three children.

In addition to his school board affiliation, Hollier was active in the Methodist Church in Kenai and spent more than 30 years building roads in Alaska. Named “Highway Man of the Year” in 1977, he retired from the Department of Transportation in 1984.

 

WILMA THOMPSON

Since former U.S. commissioner and borough mayor Stan Thompson had been a lawman and a lawmaker, he had to grow a thick skin and become accustomed to having people dislike him or disagree with his politics.

But no one had an unkind word to say about his mother.

When she died at age 92 in 1988, the beloved Wilma Thompson, who taught elementary school until she was 65, who was active for decades in her church, and who was renowned for all the cookies she dispersed to youngsters in Thompson Park, was known by kinfolk and non-kin alike as “Granny” or “Grandma.”

Born Wilma Freeland on Nov. 16, 1895, in Columbus Junction, Iowa, she married attorney Jasper “J.W.” Thompson on Thanksgiving Day in 1919. At the time, only Wilma had an Alaska connection—her grandfather had been in Nome during the gold-mining era—but after 25 more years in Iowa, both Thompsons were ready for a change and a shift northward.

In 1944, they packed their bags and moved to Nenana, where J.W. became the school superintendent and Wilma a teacher. A year later, they traveled by boat from Nenana to Unalakleet and then flew on to Nome, where they worked in the school for a year before moving again, this time to Seldovia. After three years there, J.W. was ready to return to the practice of law, so the Thompsons moved north to Fairbanks. Then in 1954, they made their final move—to Kenai.

They homesteaded in the area now known as Thompson Park near Beaver Creek, and Wilma returned to teaching—first as a substitute at the Kenai School, then as a regular teacher. When forced into retirement in 1961, she created a private kindergarten, which she operated for several years.

Meanwhile, as their four children grew up, graduated from college and started families and businesses of their own, Wilma and J.W. were subdividing and selling off chunks of their homestead and marveling at the changes being wrought around them by the discovery of oil near Swanson River.

J.W.’s heart problems led to his death in 1977, but Wilma continued to live in her Thompson Park home for many more years before moving to the Anchorage Pioneer Home, living near her long-time friend and former teaching colleague, Jetret “Jettie” Petersen.

 

VICTOR ANTONE JR.

It’s not all that unusual these days to find someone who was born in Kenai. A few decades back, that was more of a rarity. Victor Antone was born in Kenai in August 1922, and his mother was born in Kenai, too.

An Athabascan Native, Antone was born in a log cabin, and at a very young age he was venturing out with his father to work the traplines and learn the trapper’s trade. In interviews he gave in the 1970s and ’80s, he recalled catching fish in the Nikiski-area lakes to feed to his father’s dog team, and salmon from the ocean to help feed his family. He said they liked eating porcupine and grouse when they could get them, along with ducks and geese, beluga and bear and moose.

When Antone was a teenager—after three or four years of schooling in Kenai—he was sent away to Sheldon Jackson boarding school in Sitka, but he hated the strictness of the regimen there and so he ran away by hopping on the back of a garbage truck and slowly working his way back to Kenai.

He worked the cannery circuit for a while, and then during World War II he worked on the railroad until he went out to the Aleutians as a civilian employee of the military. He remembered the mud and the rain and the bombing raids out on Attu.

After the war, he returned to cannery work and continued to trap in the winters.

In an interview published in 1983, he explained his fondness for the outdoors: “I still like the wood a lot. I could live out there now. I’m still trapping. That’s what keeps me going. I set snares for wolves and mink and muskrats. If I lay around too much, my legs get stiff and I get restless. Sometime I walk around, cross the lake, or hunt for rabbits just to get out, for the fun of it. No matter how old I get, I’ll be doing the same thing, trapping and hunting. That’s the way my dad taught me, and I can’t change it. I tried to, but I can’t.”

Antone died at age 74 in September 1996.

 

RUTH POLLARD

It has been said that behind every successful man there stands a great woman, and that certainly seems to have been the case for George Pollard, a long-time and highly regarded Kasilof hunting guide who was married to his wife, Ruth, for 48 years.

Born in Germania, Pennsylvania, in 1923, she became a teacher in the mid-1940s and taught physical education at a private parochial school in her home state. Known as a strong disciplinarian and respected by students and staff, she moved to Alaska in 1957 and taught P.E. in Anchorage, the city in which George had been born.

Bound by a love of the outdoors and each other, Ruth and George married in 1959, and not long afterward they moved onto their new 160-acre homestead in Kasilof. Together they built a rustic 16x20 cabin and shared numerous outdoor adventures. With Ruth as his assistant, George began a guiding and outfitting service centered on the area surrounding Tustumena Lake.

Environmentalists at heart, the Pollards became members of the Kenai Peninsula Conservation Society, occasionally hosting functions at their home and leading group hikes into the local countryside.

When she died in November 2006 after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s, her obituary noted her membership in the Kasilof Community Church, the recent death of her sister, Mary Hawkins of Ninilchik, and her enjoyment of bird watching and outdoor recreation.

Laura Tyson wrote for this statewide publication.

 

LAURA TYSON

Born and raised in Minnesota, Laura Tyson moved to Alaska in 1945 with her first husband, Walt Keller, and a few years later became the second postmaster of the community of Naptowne, now known as Sterling. She remained as postmaster until 1958, when she resigned and recommended her successor, Gloria McNutt, for the job.

While married to her second husband, Walt Pedersen, she started a small grocery store and tackle shop, which she operated at first out of her home. She also acted as a barber and had clients come all the way from Kenai to get their hair cut.

For a while, she authored a column called “The Homesteader’s Wife” in The Alaskan Agriculturist, and she ran the Moose River Resort for many years.

 

LUCY CASEY

In the fall of 1964, Lucy Casey became interested in art and enrolled in classes at the fledgling Kenai (Peninsula) Community College. She said she struggled with her paintings for about three years but was continually encouraged by her instructors. Eventually, she won awards for her paintings and in 1970 had her work displayed in the Grant Hall gallery on the campus of Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage.

“People say you have talent, but you really have to study,” she said in Narratives on the Kenai-Soldotna Community. She said that she studied long hours every day and tried to paint a picture a week for constructive criticism.

Born as Chinitka “Lucy” Kawaglek in Akiak (near Bethel), she attended school in Eklutna and lived in Palmer before moving to Anchorage, where she married Alden Casey. She moved to Kenai in 1959 and homesteaded in the Nikiski area.

“Hardest part was packing supplies on my back and building my cabin,” she wrote in Once Upon the Kenai. “The windows were Visqueen and the shelves were Blazo boxes—lights were Coleman lantern. I trapped in the winter and fished commercially in summer.”

 

PAUL NESTOR

One of many individuals to purchase a chunk of Howard Binkley’s homestead land in Soldotna, Paul Nestor started Soldotna’s first sawmill and planing mill. In 1948, he created Nestor Concrete Products in Soldotna, operating at first out of a Quonset hut and supplying concrete blocks to Wildwood Station and many other buildings in the area until 1967.

The Soldotna Store, the community’s first grocery (owned and operated by Don and Verona Wilson), was erected by mason Jim Porter from blocks supplied by Nestor’s business.

A native New Yorker, Nestor moved to Alaska in 1940 and began working for the Alaska Road Commission in 1945. He was involved in some of the early work on the Sterling Highway before moving on to businesses of his own.

Nestor also owned Soldotna Sand & Gravel and the Soldotna Texaco station before he moved to Missouri in the late 1960s.

Paul Nestor and family in Soldotna, 1968.

 

ARTHUR “SWEDE” FOSS

Despite his nickname of “Swede,” Arthur Foss was not Swedish. Foss was actually one of 10 children of Norwegian immigrant parents, Peter and Anna Foss, who raised their large brood on a farm in rural North Dakota.

By the 1940s, after serving in the Army at Fort Richardson near Anchorage, the colorful Swede Foss was a commercial fisherman in the Kasilof area and may have been the owner and operator of the Porcupine fish trap. He sold his fishing site to Herman Hermansen and spent the remainder of his life involved in various jobs in the Kenai-Soldotna area.

He ferried passengers in his skiff around Cook Inlet and was known for not always picking them up when he had promised, sometimes forcing them to wait for hours or even days, or perhaps find other means altogether to get home.

Foss also owned a single-engine aircraft for a while, and his record for prompt pick-ups remained intact.

Acknowledged as a skilled builder with logs, he aided in numerous construction and restoration projects. He was praised by some for his ingenuity, and he once reportedly crafted a gasket from birch bark when he had trouble with his outboard engine while motoring up a remote stream.

Foss was also involved in at least two area bars, serving as both part-owner and bartender for each. And in Kenai in 1967 he and his accordion-playing wife, Dottie, took part in the notoriously drunken funeral for George Dudley.

 

PAUL WILSON

Born in Kenai in the early 1870s, Paul Wilson was an early mail carrier. On occasion, Wilson was accompanied by his son, Alex, who later became a carrier on his own peninsula route.

On Aug. 11, 1961, under the headline “Mail by Dog Team,” the Cheechako News published an article about Wilson’s work on the mail route. Here are a few excerpts:

“Every morning except Sunday Alexander W. ‘Alex’ Wilson picks up mail sacks at the Kenai Post Office for Soldatna, Sterling, Kasilof, Cohoe and Clam Gulch. Four hours and 20 minutes and 134 miles later he is back in Kenai. Alex uses an automobile and a big part of his route is over asphalt pavement.

“Thirty-eight years ago Paul Wilson Sr. Picked up mail at the Kenai Post Office for Cooper Landing and the railroad depot at Moose Pass. Two week and 196 miles later he was back in Kenai with the monthly mail.

“Transportation was by dog team during the period from December to April, and the trail was often unbroken snow. Many times Paul had to break trail both ways.

“Frequently in these first years the monthly mail for Kenai would weigh as much as 1,200 pounds and required double-tripping, since 600 pounds was about maximum load over the long and rough trail. When double-tripping was necessary, Paul needed all of the 14 days allowed, to relay up part of the load, unloaded it and go back and relay up the rest.

“The route followed reads like the history of the Kenai Peninsula. From Kenai the trail went to Philips Cabin, Moose River, Millers Cabin and then to Middle Cabin, from there to Jean Lake and then to Cooper Landing and Lawing. Last stop and turnaround point was the railroad depot.”

Paul Wilson was known for getting the mail where it was supposed to be and on time. He delivered the mail on this route for nine years, making his final trip in 1934.

Paul Wilson and his mail sled in front of the old Russian school in Kenai, 1930.

 

K. LEWIS FIELDS

K. Lewis “Lew” Fields was an ambitious man who wasn’t afraid to work hard. He was a construction worker, a homesteader, a farmer, and a strong contributor to civic affairs. He and his wife, Gladys, raised six children on their property in the Sterling area.

Lew Fields moved from Salt Lake City to Alaska in 1939 to work on the construction of the Whittier train tunnel. He became adept at operating heavy equipment and worked on the building of the Sterling Highway. During that time, he got a good look at the Sterling area that he would soon call home.

In 1955, with a family of only three kids at the time, Lew and Gladys homesteaded a patch of the 1947 Kenai Burn that Fields described this way in Once Upon the Kenai:  "Nothing but burned trees. No birds, no grass and no nothing except burned trees and a little shack.... In 1955, were going to cut out a farm on the Kenai Peninsula. The craziest idea we have had yet, but it was fun and a good place to raise our family."

The Fieldses cleared 200 acres of land. They raised barley, which grew well but lacked a substantial market to make it commercially profitable.

They also tried raising hogs. The January 1959 issue of The Alaska Sportsman featured a photograph of a smiling Fields standing at a butchering station. His right hand was placed on a bled-out, seven-month-old hog suspended from a meat hook. According to the paragraph accompanying the photo, "There's a profit in pork on the Kenai Peninsula."

 

Fields raised 60 hogs in 1958 on his homestead, feeding them only a cooked potato-barley mix in addition to the roots, grass and alfalfa that the hogs foraged for themselves. The pictured hog, Fields said, dressed out at 145 pounds. At the selling price of 45 cents a pound, Fields earned enough money to make plans to raise hogs again in 1959, but eventually he abandoned farming altogether and stuck mainly to construction work on a contract basis.

By 1972, Fields was also becoming active in local politics and ran successfully for the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly, where he served until defeated by Merrill Sikorski in a run-off election in 1979.

In his Once Upon the Kenai remembrance (published in 1984), Fields recounted struggling against the weather, battling a fire on his roof and plenty of pesky and sometimes unpredictable wildlife, and the joys of working as part of a family. He ended with this comment: “Homesteading is a hard life, and I am not sure I would want to go that route again…. This is home to our family of six children, and it was cut from a wilderness of old burned snags. It is all green now with new growth and quite pretty. Lots of birds and wildlife. We have comfortable living, and we do like it. It is home.”

 

AMANDA “MANDY” WALKER

Amanda “Mandy” Kellar was a registered nurse and hospital administrator in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when she met the man she was going to marry—Delta Calvin “Pappy” Walker. She just wasn’t aware of it at the time.

In an account written in 2006 by Mary Ford of the Kenai Historical Society, Mandy said that Pappy, whom she referred to as “an old fossil,” had “made eyes” at her and called her “honey” and “pet” for years, but she wasn’t interested in his flirtations. Besides, he was nine years older than she was, and he was already married.

Then, in 1942, he left his first wife and the state of Oklahoma and ventured to Alaska to help build an Army base at Nome. He grew fond of the Last Frontier and decided to stay, settling in Kenai but never forgetting about Mandy, despite marrying a second wife, Jessebelle.

When he became single again in 1949, he wrote to Mandy and attempted to entice her northward. “He told me he still loved me and all that blarney,” she wrote many years later.

In other words, she recognized a line when she heard it, so she once again ignored his advances.

But a year later, she received a new written message from Pappy that changed everything: “It’s a year since I wrote you,” he penned. “It seems to me you could write and tell me to go to hell or something—Walker.” Something about his directness appealed to her. She wrote back.

Pappy Walker (center) wooed Mandy Kellar north to Alaska.

He sent her a dozen roses.

And the romance on. Eventually, she succumbed and agreed in 1950 to move to Kenai to become Pappy’s third wife.

Pappy encouraged Mandy to ride the Alaska Steamship north, but she ignored his advice and insisted on driving. When she arrived in Anchorage, she learned that the Seward Highway was not yet complete, so she hurried to get her car and herself on the next train to Moose Pass, where she navigated the mostly finished Sterling Highway to Kenai.

She was dismayed at the sight of his small filthy cabin (littered with poker chips, cards, beer bottles and mud), irritated by his insistence that they get hitched right away because he needed to leave soon for four days of fish camp, and incensed by his shaggy appearance. She sent him on to fish camp without the nuptials and cleaned his place in his absence.

When he returned, she directed his renewal of personal hygiene and got him dressed in the suit she had cleaned.

Ford wrote this of the wedding itself: “The ceremony was to be conducted by U.S. Commissioner Paul Wise in his home. A woman in a bathrobe met them at the door and told them that her husband was at Kenai Joe’s (bar). Pappy went after him and also recruited Bob Castleberry, Kenai’s attorney, to be best man. Pauline Wise, in her bathrobe, was bridesmaid.”

The marriage, which was as full of character as the participants, lasted 11 years, ending with Pappy’s death in 1961. (The Totem Tracers’ book, Cemetery Inscriptions and Area Memorials in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula Borough, says only that Pappy died in 1961. No month is listed, and no birth date is mentioned. However, when Pappy and Jessebelle had a bear encounter in August 1948, the Anchorage Daily Times listed Pappy’s age then as 55. So he was likely about age 68 at his death.)

In her own version of her marriage, Mandy Walker ended with these words: “He was quite a character. God threw the mold away after he made Pappy.”

Mandy outlived Pappy by many years and remained in Kenai for the rest of her life. She claimed that her life in Alaska taught her, among other things, how to operate a bulldozer, pick fish, milk cows, start a gas-powered washing machine, clean clams, can moose meat on a stove, pilot a 45-foot fishing boat, and bake proper biscuits.

In her later years, she also volunteered at the Kenai public library.

Mandy Walker died in 1999 at the age of 96.