I wrote this 7 JULY 1989, while I was in Pryor, OK
1952 - I was 7 years old when we moved to Alaska.
We departed John Day, Oregon the first day of September 1955. I turned 8 the 5th of October that year. It took most of the month the drive up the Alaska Canadian (ALCAN) highway as it was called then. My sister Scharlotte kept a journal of the trip. Perhaps I can add it at a later date.
We stopped in Anchorage so dad could visit the State Employment Office. They told him of a job in Homer and we left for Homer immediately. All the time we were in Anchorage it was raining hard. Coming up the highway we had camped out. When we arrived at Homer we camped on the airport. It kept raining and all of our stuff was getting wet. Dad's boss found out that we were camping out and told us of a place. We moved in that day.
The apartment was an old restaurant that had been converted into a house. The kitchen had large sinks like a restaurant would have. I can remember taking bathes in the sinks. It did not have an indoor bathroom. I remember walking past the coal pile to get to the outhouse. We would go down on the beach and pickup coal and take it home to replenish our coal supply.
I remember going to school. It was a nice large modern one. One day I got in a fight with someone. My brother Floyd broke us up. While I was fighting I did not know what was going on around me. When Floyd broke us up I saw this circle of people standing around us. They had been enjoying the fight. They thought Floyd should have let us continue to fight. They booed him. Must have been the most exciting thing they saw all day.
We had not been in Homer very long when dad felt he had to quit his job. Which he did. He went to Anchorage to the Employment Office and was told of a job in Kodiak. Bob Hall the owner of Kodiak Airways was there looking for a mechanic. Bob Hall flew to Homer so dad could get his toolbox and took him to Kodiak.
Mother and the rest of the family stayed in Homer for some time. Before Christmas dad had enough money for airplane tickets for mother and I. So over to Kodiak we went.
We lived in a little one-room apartment for the rest of that school year, perhaps longer. Before the school year was out Scharlotte and Floyd came over. Five of us in that little one room apartment were cramped. As you entered the apartment you entered the kitchen area, then the main part or room of the apartment. A long side the kitchen was the bathroom. They placed boards on top of the shower and stored boxes of things there. The main room had a hid-a-bed on which mother and dad slept. Scharlotte would take the pads from the couch and close the door of the kitchen and would have the privacy she needed. She slept on the floor with the pads. We had a mattress from a cot, which fit between the foot of the hid-a-bed and the wall. Floyd and I slept head to foot on the mattress, which was on the floor. In the day the mattress with the bedding would be rolled up and placed on a closet, which stood in the corner. This closet was like a schrunk that are common in Germany today.
1953 - 56
This picture was take Easter Sunday 5 Apr 1953
We spent the remainder of the school year in this one room apartment. In the summer of 1953 (I think) we moved to a house on Mill Bay. As I remember it was about five miles from town. The REA had not brought power to the house.
The only running water was from a spring on the hill to a toilet inside the back of the house. In the summer we could turn on the water which ran in to a bucket while we went to the bathroom. When we were finished we would dump the bucket of water into the commode to flush it. I suppose the commode was hooked to a cesspool, as we never had any problem with it.
Christmas at the home on Mill Bay - note the flat head Ford engine block! I
love it!
Other water was carried from a creek, which was 30 or 40 feet down a small hill from the house. Mother had a ringer washer which had a 1/4 horse gas engine for power. Many times I was assigned to carry water from the creek for wash water. I don't know why we did not use the spring water which ran into the bathroom. Maybe the spring water was not fit for human consumption, and this was probably why it was not used for wash. I used to haul enough to fill a wash tub, which was set on the stove to heat. When the water was hot it was transferred to the washer with a bucket. One or two buckets of cold were added. Then I had to hall enough for the rinse water. I was always glad mother did not want as much as she did for the wash. When the wash was finished I would haul one or two more buckets to rinse the washer out. It would have 1/8 to 1/4 inch of sand in the bottom.
While in this house Ted and Floyd built a 25-foot fishing boat in the back of the house. When it was finished they sawed the wall out of the house so he could get the boat out of the house. The house was divided about in the middle with a wall that ran the full length. The front of the house was all one big room. The back had two walls that created two large rooms with a hall that led to the bathroom that was on the back of the house. The two inside walls were taken out and two trees were cut down and laid on the floor for a base on which to build the boat. They were either passed in through a window or small holes were cut in the wall to get them in. Dad financed the project. Ted was about 17 and Floyd was about 16. Mother had built a 12-foot skiff in the front room of the house. She had rolled the carpet back and nailed the formers to the floor and just built it there. Ted had taken a boat design correspondence course. He used the knowledge he had gained from that course to expand the boat that mother had made by doubling the hull pattern. Then he built the boat. We did not have any electricity so no power tools were available except a home made table saw. They took the 1/4 horse motor from the washer and rigged a small table saw. This was used to cut the plywood in strips. All the rest of the tools were strictly hand tools.
This page last modified: Thursday, 26 February, 2009
