Almanac: Model restoration — Classic car has not-so-classic trip back to grade-A condition

Photos courtesy of the Fair family. Calvin Fair’s high schools senior picture, the age when he bought his two Model A Fords.

By Clark Fair

Redoubt Reporter

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

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

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

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

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

Almanac: Prominent Pomeroys — Distinguished peninsula pair leave large legacy

Editor’s note: This is the third part of a three-part story about the remarkable lives of Roxy and Harold Pomeroy. Two weeks ago, Part One introduced the Pomeroys, explaining how they met and came to live in Bear Cove near the head of Kachemak Bay. Last week, Part Two discussed their diverse early histories. This week, Part Three recounts their busy lives after they became married, including Harold’s service as the first chief administrator of the Kenai Peninsula Borough.

Photos courtesy of the Alaska Digital Archives. Roxy and Harold Pomeroy in 1955, the year they got married.

By Clark Fair

Redoubt Reporter

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

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

Harold Pomeroy as director of the Alaska Territorial Civil Defense in the mid-1950s.

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

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

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

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

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

Almanac: Long trip to life, love — Pomeroys settle into homestead history of Kenai Peninsula

Editor’s note: This is the second part of a three-part story about the remarkable lives of Roxy and Harold Pomeroy. Last week, Part One introduced the Pomeroys, explaining how they met and came to live in Bear Cove near the head of Kachemak Bay. This week discusses their diverse, early histories. Next week, Part Three will recount their busy lives after they became married, including Harold’s service as the first chief administrator of the Kenai Peninsula Borough.

Correction from Part One: According to Harold Pomeroy’s 1949 diary, Roxy was already living and working in Bear Cove by at least early July that year, not in 1950 as reported last week.

Photo courtesy of the Alaska Digital Archives. Harold Pomeroy during his political and public-service career in California, possibly when he was mayor of South Gate.

By Clark Fair

Redoubt Reporter

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

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

A handful of years later, Skobelska, a Ukrainian-born refugee, was living on the Kenai Peninsula, growing and selling tomatoes and cucumbers out of her greenhouse-home, and intensifying a relationship with Harold Pomeroy, a man 22 years her senior and the love of her life.

Photo from “The Heirloom Treasures of Roxolana Skobelska Pomeroy” exhibit in Chicago. Roxy Skobelska as a young girl, most likely taken in the mid- to late 1930s.

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

Before he even met Skobelska, Pomeroy had been married twice and had had two children with his first wife, Ruby. In 1932, he was elected city mayor of South Gate in his home state, and four years later he began a three-year stint as administrator for the California State Relief Administration.

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

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

Photo courtesy of Dolly Farnsworth. Harold Pomeroy in the 1940s, around the time that he met his eventual wife, Roxy Skobelska.

In fact, when Pomeroy met the slender, dark-haired refugee, he was in post-war Vienna and in the company of his second wife, Floretta, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney also serving in the interests of the Allies. Pomeroy had received a presidential appointment as an executive officer of the Austrian Planning Unit during the Allied occupation of Austria. Skobelska, who was fluent in five languages, became the interpreter for both Harold and Floretta.

Although the Pomeroys had worked hard and traveled far to serve their country, it was Skobelska who had endured the more arduous journey.

Born, according to Havelock, “in the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains” on Aug. 17, 1924, Roxolana Eurydice Skobelska was the daughter and granddaughter of prominent pastors in the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Eastern Rite.

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

Photo courtesy of Dolly Farnsworth. Roxy Skobelska in her 1948 passport photo.

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

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

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

Almanac: Coveting refuge in Bear Cove

Editor’s note: This is the first part of a three-part story about the remarkable lives of Roxy and Harold Pomeroy. Part One, this week, introduces the Pomeroys and explains how they met and came to live in Bear Cove near the head of Kachemak Bay. Next week’s story will discuss their diverse early histories. A week later, Part Three will recount their busy lives after they became married, including Harold’s service as the first chief administrator of the Kenai Peninsula Borough.

Photo courtesy of Dolly Farnsworth.
In November 1948, just before she left Vienna for the United States, Roxy Skobelska enjoyed a sunny afternoon with Harold Pomeroy and his large, friendly dog.

By Clark Fair

Redoubt Reporter

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

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

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

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

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

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

Almanac: Slopping out a homestead no easy task

Editor’s note: When histories are written, some individuals are inevitably remembered more readily than others. It is important to not lose sight of the many accomplishments of those who may be less widely known. Here are two more brief bios of people who once lived on the central Kenai Peninsula.

By Clark Fair

Redoubt Reporter

K. Lewis “Lew” Fields was an ambitious man who wasn’t afraid to work hard. He was a construction worker, homesteader, 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. In “Once Upon the Kenai,” Fields described the plot of land this way: “Nothing but burned trees. No birds, no grass and no nothing except burned trees and a little shack. … In 1955, we 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, 7-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 runoff 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.”

Almanac: Harken back to Hollier times

Editor’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 are three more brief bios of people who once lived on the central Kenai Peninsula.

By Clark Fair

For the Redoubt Reporter

Photo courtesy of Peggy Arness. A photo of Joanna and Ed Hollier, likely taken in the1970s.

Ed Hollier’s predecessor as general foreman for the highway department, Ralph Soberg, once called Hollier “one of the best dozer operators” he’d ever worked with. More than that, Soberg said, 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 on the board after the Kenai Peninsula Borough was formed in 1964. He continued to serve on the school board until 1975.

“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.

Almanac: Famed names — Early peninsula residents left their marks

Editor’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 are three more brief bios of people who once lived on the central Kenai Peninsula and figured prominently in its growth.

By Clark Fair

Redoubt Reporter

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.

In 1938, 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 came 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, ARCO on the North Slope and 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. He served on the Kenai City Council and Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly, was a longtime member of the Lion’s Club and became the first president of the Nikishka Chamber of Commerce.

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

Photos courtesy of the Robinson family. Nina and Jesse Robinson pose in the 1990s.

Almanac: Survey says: Johnson was first … mostly

Photos courtesy of Brent Johnson. Henning Johnson (in white hat, center) poses with a survey crew in the middle 1980s. At left, standing, is Henning’s son, Jerry. His other son, Brent, is kneeling in front of Jerry. At right are Scott McLane (standing) and Sam McLane.

By Clark Fair

Redoubt Reporter

Some debate exists over who was the first registered surveyor on the Kenai Peninsula, and the honor generally goes to Henning Johnson, who moved to Homer in 1953 and then lived in the Clam Gulch area for about 40 years, starting in the late 1950s.

But there are some caveats to the claim, according to Johnson’s son, Borough Assemblyman Brent Johnson, of Kasilof.
To begin with, said Brent, state surveying licenses were issued numerically, and Henning’s license does not have as low a number as a few other individuals who also worked as surveyors on the peninsula.

For instance, there’s Charlie Parker, who was surveying in Anchorage before moving to Soldotna. Parker surveyed Soldotna’s second subdivision in 1952, but he didn’t become a peninsula-based surveyor until 1961.

Then there’s Dave Bear, who also has a lower number than Henning Johnson, but, according to Brent, Bear “only visited the peninsula, living in various places while working.”

And there’s Stan McLane, who came to the central peninsula around the same time as Henning Johnson but had a much higher registration number, indicating that he became official later than Johnson. McLane probably began his surveying career in Anchorage before moving south to live.

Therefore, said Brent, “Dad was the first resident surveyor on the peninsula, so long as we don’t count Featherstone Williamson.”

Featherstone W. (“Billy”) Williamson, a native of Pennsylvania, participated in a survey of the United States-Mexico border in the early 1900s, before moving to Juneau in 1906 to become a surveyor for the U.S. General Land Office. In 1920, he and his wife, Harriet (“Mickey”) built a home and fox ranch at Coal Creek in the Kasilof area, and, according to a historical note by the Society of Professional Land Surveyors, he was “in charge of most work extending the Rectangular System of Surveying in the Cook Inlet Basin from 1917 to 1924.”

The Williamsons later moved to Lawing on the upper end of Kenai Lake, and then on to California sometime after the market for fox furs declined.

And therefore, said Brent, “I think it is true that Dad was the only licensed surveyor on the peninsula in 1953 and for a while.”

Almanac: Famed names — Pioneers may have left, but impacts remain

By Clark Fair

Redoubt Reporter

Editor’s note: Time is a great shuffler of faces and names. Over time, some individuals, through their own actions or the vibrant memories of friends and relatives, rise to the top when histories are penned, while others fade like old photographs. Here are some brief bios of a few of the people who once lived on the central Kenai Peninsula but may have dropped from view.

• 

  Image courtesy of the Sterling Community Club. Cover of the winter 1953 Alaskan Agriculturist magazine.

  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 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.”

Wiley worker — Clam Gulch man contributed much to community

By Joseph Robertia

Photo by Joseph Robertia, Redoubt Reporter. Mike Wiley, left, helps install a guardrail fence to protect beach grass and sand dunes at the mouth of the Kasilof River last summer. Wiley, who died Dec. 7, was active in many community service projects.

Redoubt Reporter

Clam Gulch is a small community, which makes the loss of any neighbor noticeable. But with the passing, on Dec. 7, of such a longtime resident and active community member as Mike Wiley, the loss isn’t just perceptible, it’s palpable.

Wiley, 71, formerly of Vermont, came to Alaska in 1966 with his wife, Bertha. The two settled in Skagway, where Wiley taught fifth grade for two years. Two years later he was offered a teaching position at Tustumena Elementary School, in Kasilof, but before the family could move together tragedy struck and his wife, and their 1- and 2-year-old sons, were killed when their car went off the road and into the freezing Chilkat River.

Wiley came up and settled in the former homestead of Clam Gulch residents Bill and Ruth Reeder, located on a little lake at Mile 116 of the Sterling Highway. Not long after, Wiley married his next-door neighbor, Linda Hatten, and they had three daughters during the marriage, which lasted until 1980.

After three years at Tustumena Elementary, and eventually achieving the position of principal, Wiley began teaching in even smaller communities — Nanwalek, Tyonek, Port Heiden and numerous other places.

Wiley began commercial fishing in 1970, set netting at Tuxedni Bay with Don Thrapp, who was a homesteader on Crooked Creek Road. The next year, Wiley fished near Corea Creek with Everett Bice, who, in 1977, formed a partnership with Brent and Judy Johnson. The Johnsons eventually inherited the site in 1990. Wiley bought a site himself in Clam Gulch in 1975.

“Mike was one of those guys who always fished to the end of the season each year,” Brent Johnson said.

Soldotna: Real good, then — Cheechako reporter covered community with love

By Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter

Edward R. Murrow, Woodward and Bernstein, Helen Thomas, Walter Cronkite, Hunter S. Thompson, Barbara Walters, Jim Lehrer — journalism comes with an extensive pantheon of notable figures, as inescapable for idealistic cub reporters as the inevitable realization that you will likely never make that list, and the eventuality that you will, someday, accidentally print “asses” when you mean “assess.”

Having such an ingrained roster of professional idols is helpful in an aspirational sense, but they’re distant, mythic role models, at best.

How much use is that? Ted Koppel isn’t going to copyedit my page proofs. I can’t call Tim Russert to help me phrase a question to which a political candidate will actually give a straight answer. And some of the pantheon’s most legendary exploits — eliciting tears during interviews, reporting under the influence of hallucinogens, using porn titles as nicknames for sources — don’t exactly constitute a practical how-to guide.

Lucky for me I got to know Katherine Parker, a real, live model of how to be a member of this profession in this particular corner of the universe. Her most prominent traits — moderate, humble, trusting and kind — aren’t conjured by the names above. And her reporting career was conducted in a time and place so far from anywhere considered notable in the mythos of capital-j Journalism as to barely qualify as a suburb of the middle of nowhere.

But she’s meant more to me than any of the inherited roster of reporters I’m supposed to idolize, and my life here has been indelibly enhanced by Katherine, just as Soldotna, her home, has been.

Katherine and Charlie Parker moved to Soldotna in 1961 to homestead on 40 acres atop a hill overlooking the still-infant community. Charlie worked as a surveyor and owner of the Map Shop, and in 1972 Katherine hired on as reporter for the Cheechako News. She became a fixture at public meetings, taking copious notes for her reporting, and chronicled all manner of happenings around town.

Almanac: Cooper Landing pioneers didn’t skimp on cozy craftsmanship

By Clark Fair

Photos courtesy of the Cooper Landing Historical Society. A Forest Service construction crew takes a break in their temporary cook shack along Upper Russian Lake in 1951.

Redoubt Reporter

The three 60-something Cooper Landing men posed for a photograph in the temporary cook shack they had erected along the shore of the northern end of Upper Russian Lake. The roughly rectangular structure was open in front, enclosed with canvas and aluminum on the other three sides, and roofed with log rafters and wooden planks.

Hanging from the log supports were two trout, their bellies slit and guts removed. Behind the men were shelves of mainly canned food and dry goods, cooking supplies, and a calendar for June 1951.

The men — Jack Lean (holding a rifle), Frank Towle (holding two metal plates) and Bill Parchins (holding a coffee cup) — were taking a break from the construction of a Forest Service cabin near the lake. They were building it from native spruce logs, and although it has undergone some renovations over the years, it is the same reservation-only cabin that greets hikers at Mile 12 of the Russian Lakes Trail today.

But it was not the first cabin on this backcountry lake.

Jack Lean (standing) assists Bill Parchins and Frank Towle in the construction of the Forest Service cabin on the Upper Russian Lake in 1951.

Upper Russian Lake, which is split from end to end by the boundaries of the Chugach National Forest to the east and the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge to the west, was already occupied when construction of the recreational cabin began.

In fact, one of the residents of an earlier cabin on the lake made this notation in her journal on June 30, 1951: “This is our 36th wedding anniversary. Cooked a chicken for the Forestry Crew … and they ordered a case of beer from town.”

In 1939, Luke and Mamie Elwell homesteaded a 40-acre parcel across the lake from where the Forest Service would build 12 years later. There they built their home, which doubled as a hunting and fishing lodge. Visitors came to the Elwells’ lodge from around the world to fish for trophy rainbow trout or to be guided by Luke after big game.

The Elwells, in the their late 40s when they arrived at the lake, hailed from Ohio, where they had met

The Forest Service cabin on Upper Russian Lake gets some visitors in the winter of 1972, showing its ongoing popularity for recreational use.

and eloped at the age of 20, according to Mamie’s great-niece, Abby Everett Tignor, in a fall 2005 Women in the Outdoors article. They shared a love for outdoor adventures, Tignor said, and by the early 1920s they had departed the Midwest for Alaska. Near Fairbanks, they purchased a 160-acre gold-mining claim, which they worked for several years before making sojourns in other remote parts of the territory.

By the time they moved to Upper Russian Lake, they were seasoned veterans of outdoor living. For their first cabin, they used native spruce for the walls and had most of the rest of their building supplies flown in. According to Tignor, Mamie laid the wooden floors, built and hung the doors, and made carvings of local scenes around the ceiling.