My First Year in Alaska

The day after I arrived in Anchorage I started hunting for a room and a job, mainly a room. June is one of the few months when sunny days should not be surprising, but it was raining the day I arrived, and I don’t remember being exposed to sunlight for some while after. There was one cloudy day after another in June of 1967. I did not feel like camping any longer, didn’t like the idea of crawling out of a soggy tent each morning, and I wanted to be able to clean up and hunt for a job.

I settled in the Mid-town area though the reason escapes me; perhaps it was because the Moose Lodge happened to be located there on Arctic Blvd. I was a member of the Kokomo lodge, knew fellow Moose would have ideas as to employment and housing, so I frequented the lodge several times over the succeeding months.


The local newspaper provided a couple leads on housing. The first was at the Fireweed Hotel off Arctic. It lay between Fireweed Street and Northernlights Boulevard and seemed more of a rooming house than hotel. The tenants were really young. I was only twenty-seven, but felt like the old man of the place. The room must have been a closet in its former life. The door jammed against the bed upon opening; there were no windows, and one’s legs brushed the bed and wall while edging around its perimeters. The place was a prescription for claustrophobia.

My First home in Alaska

1037 W 26th Avenue, Anchorage, Alaska

The second offering, only a couple blocks away, on 26th Avenue, was near perfect in comparison. My new abode was in the basement of a three story stucco house. The main floor housed the owner/landlady and her teenage daughter. The top floor and basement had been converted to room rentals. I had a spacious room adjoining a small living room that lead into the kitchen. The house sat a block east of Spenard road, close to a grocery, several restaurants, and a couple bars - everything a single guy needed. I was in the “Heart of Spenard”.

Bill Peasal and Bill Smith

Two fellows occupied a room off the kitchen. They were both named Bill and both came from South Dakota, though the similarity ended there. Bill Smith was tall and slim like a bean pole. He stood six foot six, and weighed no more than a hundred-fifty pounds, wore plad cowboy shirts, slim fitting jeans and cowboy boots. Smith was confident, sure of himself, and spoke of things in a knowing manner. Bill Peasal reached a medium height and weight, but was a quiet, mild-mannered fellow, almost bashful. Both were married with wives back in South Dakota. Smith worked at an auto parts store; Peasal labored for a construction company. Both had been in the state for less than a year.

Bill Smith

Anchorage numbered about fifty thousand, and the military bases counted for that many again. Much about the town was frontier, many side streets were gravel, sidewalks were rare, and more than one parking lot lacked pavement. There wasn’t much happening in town that year, the economy was kind of slow, and not many good jobs were available. I took one as a custodian with the school district within the week, figuring something better might come along, but continued to work through the winter. Crews were involved in giving each school a thorough cleaning. During the summer I moved from one location to another as the season progressed and was assigned a position at the new Dimond High School that fall.

Landlady Louise Machievski

I was a bit short of money through the summer. Mom and Dad sent me a check for a couple hundred. I had to open a checking account and wait several weeks before the money was available so I didn't adventure out of town other than a one day trip to Portage Glacier in July. Mainly I stayed in town working and passing time reading books, many about Alaska and the North.

Bill Peasal

Several things happened in August. Bill Peasal and another fellow were taking building materials to Valdez, Alaska when the truck’s breaks went out going down Thompson Pass into Valdez. The driver could not navigate the final curve at the bottom and they crashed. Both survived, but only by luck. It so happened the only doctor in town was being visited by his three sons, who also happened to be doctors. The four worked on the two injured men for several hours. That coincident saved their life, but Bill was in the hospital for a month. The other thing that happened in August was I met Wes Warner.
GO TO: Meeting Wes Warner

The Life of Della Jacobs - Part 3f, Bert Frank

When Prohibition was enacted in 1919 it did not stop Bert Frank from drinking, it only redirected the way he went about it. He made his own corn whiskey, and as he produced more then he could consume, he naturally fell into the entrepreneurial spirit of the country and began marketing it.

He set up his still in the basement of their house in Hooven. He made five or six batches a month and that produced three gallons of White Lightening. Mom didn't remember much about the still or its operation, but recalled he used lightening rods off barns for something. One time he got drunk and went to sleep so Mom’s brother Charlie finished distilling the whiskey. Grandma (below) delivered quart bottles of the stuff to a dentist or doctor in Cincinnati. She took the train and was usually accompanied by a neighbor lady.
The drinking got worse, his mental state steadily deteriorated. The violent spells became more frequent, and the family lived in constant fear. Mom said she came to hate him. He beat Grandma, sometimes brutally, and one time he made the three kids sit in chairs while he sharpened his straight razor. He was drunk, and repeatedly threatened to cut their throats, one by one. Mom remembered being so frightened that her mouth went dry. She sat there afraid to move, afraid to draw attention to herself. All she could think about was how thirsty and scared she was.

The family moved to Connersville, Indiana in July 1922. Bert got a good job as the fireman at the electric plant. He worked there for a couple of years and quit. He mostly roamed around, and Mom didn't think he had any kind of a permanent job after that. She knew that Grandma didn’t get any support as she had to take in boarders and do laundry to make ends meet.

His mental condition kept getting worse, eventually degenerating to the point where he won't eat anything Grandma cooked. On one occasion he tore up most of the furniture in the house. The most violent episode occurred in 1924. He threw the dinner out into the yard and beat Grandma and his oldest son, Charlie. Later he woke thinking he had killed Grandma.

Mom’s half-brother, Art Lancaster, got the family back together. The following Sunday while the rest were at the grocery, Art confronted Grandpa about his drinking. Bert threw an iron at him. It bounced off the wall and stuck in the floor. Art hit him over the head with a glass bowl. They wrestled to the floor and Art ended on top and choked Pop into submission. Grandpa laid on a cot in the basement for a day or two and then his son, Joe, drove him to his brother’s home in Whitewater, OH. The family didn't see much of him after that.

He may have come back to Connersville one more time. One night during an electrical storm with lots of lightening and thunder, they a saw man that resembled my Grandfather standing on the street corner. He stood there in the rain a long time looking at the house, and finally moved on. Pieces of news came their way. Someone said he was hanging out at rough beer joints along the Ohio River, places called “Speak Easies” during Prohibition.

He probably drank anything with alcohol in it, and eventually got hold of some bad stuff. A popular drink during Prohibition was made from an extract of Jamaica Ginger. In the U.S. the concoction was called “Jake”. Some bootleggers laced it with a substance meant to fool import regulators at the Treasury Department. The additive was thought to be harmless, but many unlucky consumers discovered it to be toxic. It caused a paralysis known as "Jake Leg", a condition in which the afflicted walked with a odd gait in which the toe touched the ground before the heel. He never recovered. Bert Frank died at the University of Cincinnati Hospital on June 24, 1935. He was 54 years old.
GO TO: Part 4a, The Move to Kokomo, Indiana

Buckingham Palace, 1953 - The Finale

Buckingham Palace also offered a course in vicarious sex education. Many young men had magazines whose graphic photos came close to popping my fourteen year-old eyes out. Wow!

One guy had a framed photo of his German girlfriend prominently displayed on his dresser. She was standing by a country lane with both hands on the handlebars of her bicycle, and the bike was not sufficient to hide her immodesty. Another fellow had a desk full of post cards - French postcards.

Sometimes I’d go by a room and hear giggling or heavy breathing coming from behind the door. Once I walked into a room thinking it was empty only to back our with mumbled apologies. Curiosity got the better of me a couple times and I shamefully took to key-hole peeping, but those endeavors resulted in little reward because of the limited field of view. I took early retirement after that brief career of spying.

The Moose Lodge burned in the spring of 1960 and Don and I went off to college that fall. The Lodge built a modern structure on the south end of town so the Palace was no longer easily managed, and gradually went into decline. The city block emptied over the next fifteen years. The Courtland Hotel burned, a church next to it on Main went shortly thereafter, followed by the Detzen’s Bread building that faced Jackson Street.

Our old building was the lone survivor for a time. Mom and Dad sold it in the early seventies and the place was demolished a few years later. Google’s “satellite view” shows the city block is now one big parking lot.

Buckingham Palace, 1953 - More Renters

A heavy set women in her fifties rented room five for a short time. She was sick and produced a body odor that was powerfully offensive. Room five was in the back corner of the building next to a bathroom. Neither of us liked to go beyond room four as the noxious smell penetrated the whole area. No one else cared to go there either. I believe she went back to the hospital shortly thereafter, and I never heard anything more. We felt a guilty relief at her departure.

Many of the short timers were single men, itinerate drifters, who stayed a few weeks looking for work, catching their breath, or settling business. One was a young man of Mexican descent. He was in his early twenties, gregarious, always smiling, and outwardly friendly. He stayed for a month or two. I don’t know where he came from. He never mentioned family or friends, and seemed to have magically materialized into the flatlands of Indiana.

The guy was the first native Mexican we ever met. Mexican farm workers showed up in August every year. They came to pick tomatoes - one stop in their itinerate circuit through the states harvesting crops. We had seen them in other years working fields during the day, and sitting outside camps in evenings. They had always been nameless shadows until he came along. He was the first to have a human face

Don and I stopped to visit nearly every Saturday. We noticed he had a book on English grammar, another on math, and a notebook filled with his self-study. His effort seemed futile - maybe because he had such a distance to go, or maybe because he was alone, and had neither guidance nor support. His claim to fame was a broad smile that showcased a mouth-full of large white teeth. He bragged of being able to snap the caps off two beer bottles at the same time. - one at each side of his mouth. He demonstrated his prowess by opening a coke bottle one day, but I never saw his double play.
GO TO: Part 7, The Finale

Buckingham Palace, 1953 - Our Renters

There were several middle-age men, single, either recently divorced or widowed, who lived a suspended life for a few months before setting a new course.

Don came to me one Saturday and said he though the guy, Ike, in room number twelve, was dead. He had went in to change sheets that morning and quietly closed the door when he saw him lying in bed. He was still there in late afternoon in the same position, an arm hanging extended over the edge of the bed. Don went in to take a closer look and noticed an odor of decay. Ike had been dead for several days. No one missed the man, and it had been left to us to find him.

Most of the names have escaped me. There were two women, friends, that rented adjoining rooms on the third floor overlooking the street. Each carried a small suitcase, the apparent entirety of their possessions, and they stayed only a few weeks. Neither seemed to work. I would guess they were in their late forties. I only remember what one looked like because of a photo that set on her dresser. It was of her as a young woman, pretty, and sitting on the rail of a ship with a sailor standing beside. Maybe it was during World War II, maybe earlier.

That was then. Now she was broken, and had difficulty speaking, as if she had a mouth full of marbles. After they moved we found her dresser drawers full of empty booze bottles. I’ve always wondered what paths she followed to end up on our doorstep. I felt a great sympathy for this woman I hardly knew, and could barely understand. She was a human wreckage, a lost soul, that had landed on our shore for a brief time and then drifted back to sea.

Don was convinced the fellow in room number one was a cat-burglar. He took frequent trips out of town, and had a small bag of tools that he kept at the foot of his bed. They were the type a burglar would use - a least according to Don. The guy added suspicion one Saturday. He was drinking, a bit tipsy, happy, and wanted to talk. He kept starting to tell us something, a secret, but each time he would back off at the last minute, giggling to himself that he had better keep his mouth shut. I never heard whether he ever got caught, assuming that burglary was, indeed, his sideline.
GO TO: Part 6, More Renters

Buckingham Palace, 1953 - House Maid Service

We received fifty cents an hour over the summer, but were put on salary in the fall - ten dollars a week. On Saturday, our nine to five work day commenced with a stop at the laundry to pick up a tall stack of sheets before continuing on to “Buckingham Palace“. The informal name was bestowed by fellow Moose members shortly after we opened and it was thereafter referred to as “Buckingham Palace“. We had no sign advertisings the regal name, only a small note on the door directing potential renters to the Moose.

Every Saturday we changed sheets and towels, cleaned the bath rooms, vacuumed the carpets, and emptied the trash cans. The memory of those many Saturdays, the routine, has blurred to a singular image - any one would fit all. It is the memory of the people living there that sticks with me. Many tenants passed through in the seven years we were involved . Some stayed for many years, a few for several months, and many for only a few days.

Three or four were retirees, living the remainder of their lives on scant pensions in single rooms. Elmer Cox and his next door neighbor, Roy, come to mind.. They had the two smallest rooms, no more than ten foot square. Roy’s room never changed. The articles on his dresser: a comb and hair brush, a framed photo of his wife, and other sundry items, were always exactly positioned. It was spooky, like no one really lived there. Elmer and Roy were frugal, husbanded their money through the month, and then had a party with any leftovers - usually enough for a pint of whiskey each.
GO TO: Part 5, Our Renters

Buckingham Palace, 1953 - More Child Labor

Loose plaster sometimes hid behind the old wallpaper. Sagging sections often telegraphed their intent. This was especially characteristic of ceilings where large portions came down with the paper. The building was erected long before anyone thought of drywall, so the newly cleaned rooms possessed a “haunted house” aura with wood slats exposed.

Nearly every room needed some plastering, and since Don and I lacked experience in that particular craft the task defaulted to Dad. He was a jack-of-all-trades, and did the plumbing, electrical, and rewiring in the building. The only thing we didn’t do was to lay the carpets.

So Dad troweled plaster over the slats, and the putty-like material oozed into the spaces, anchoring the hardened end-product. He did a good job but the edges of the mended sections were still apparent. Painting helped. A professional might have crafted a perfect mend, but I expect plastering was becoming a lost art even then.

I cannot remember the paint colors, or if we used one throughout. A single hue would have been economical, but the truth of the matter escaped me sometime over the last fifty years. I do sort of remember a neutral pastel, maybe yellow. We learned to paint that summer, and Don and I paid a portion of our college expenses with paint brushes and rollers. But that’s another story.

The carpets were laid by a guy from Indianapolis and his college age son. Dad had previously measured each room, and the carpet man commended him on his accuracy. The Courtland Hotel was replacing some of its old furniture, so we acquired their discarded beds, dressers and writing desks. None of the rooms had built-in closets so we purchased sixteen new brown metal ones. By the end of summer we had the rooms set up and ready to rent. Don and I were transformed into chambermaids, and thus began the next stage of our education, an informal introduction to sociology, psychology, and the humanities.
GO TO: Part 4, House Maid Service

Buckingham Palace, 1953 - Child Labor

The basement, accessed from the rear of the Trustee’s, was lit by a single naked bulb that hung from above. The room, about twenty foot square, lay in the back corner. The ceiling rose to an height that was sufficient for Don and I, but compelled Dad, who stood six foot-three, to crouch in a perpetual stoop.

The place emitted an earthy redolence. The outer walls were part of the foundation, but inner walls rose to only four feet. A dirt crawl-space that ran throughout the building’s underbelly was accessable above the inner walls. Don and I, enticed by its dark reaches, tried to deflect light from our single source into that void only to have it swallowed by an eternal night.

We were there to work and never got a chance to crawl into that particular adventure. The two of us consoled ourselves with jokes of what might be found out there - rats, skeletons, buried treasure?

The boiler sat on a concrete platform raised above the floor in case of flooding. It was original equipment, old enough to be retired, but circumstance demanded that we coax a few more years out of it. Dad came down that first day to show us what to do. We removed the outer metal cover exposing the entrails of the rusty thing. There were eight or ten heavy cast-iron sections, each measuring about 3 feet by 2 by half a foot.

We took the sections apart, cleaned out the rust and reassemble them with new fittings. Dad dropped in a couple times each day to bring parts, check our progress, and show us the next stage. It seems that it took about a week, maybe a bit longer to finish the project Dad fired the boiler that fall, and there was much hissing and clanking as steam surged through the system to the radiators.

Wallpaper covered the upstairs rooms and halls, many layers, one pasted on top of another, decade after decade, till the rooms were smaller for it. Our next job was to remove the wallpaper from all sixteen rooms, three long halls, and four bathrooms.

Summer was coming into full heat, and Dad rented a piece of equipment, a wallpaper steamer, that made things even hotter and stickier. The commercial steamer delivered volumes of bellowing steam through a hose to a flat plate with a handle on one side and many holes on the other. We were to hold the plate against the wall, and until the steam penetrated the layers of paper.

In theory it worked fine, in practice, not so well. One of us would stand several minutes pressing the steamer against the wall, but when we shifted position hot gas bellowed from under the tool scalding our forearm. We donned long sleeve shirts when we would have preferred to work in bathing suits. And when it finished cooking we had one small patch of limp paper to peal off.

It wasn’t working, so we tried closing the room, firing the steamer, and doing something else for an hour or two. The room filled with hot vapors that soaked into the wallpaper. When the room cooled enough to get back in the paper peeled off in long wide strips.

Our goal was to see how long of a piece we could strip off before it broke. The ceiling was the best arena for this contest as gravity helped peel the strips, sometimes from wall to wall - that was equivalent to a “home run“. Some rooms had vinyl wallpaper within the layers. We figured those rooms might have functioned as kitchens at onetime. Those took more steaming.

We got so efficient that we could strip a room in a day, wash the paste off the plaster, and clean up the debris by the 5:00 PM quitting hour. We were usually cleaning up one room while steaming another.

GO TO: Part 3, More Child Labor

Buckingham Palace, 1953 - The Purchase

My parents purchased a building in downtown Kokomo, Indiana in 1953 - the biggest investment of their life. The place was on Taylor Street, sandwiched between the Moose Lodge and the Courtland Hotel. It’s unlikely they would have been interested had Dad not been the manager and secretary of the Moose. Mom worked as his assistant in the office. Both spent six days a week on the job, so it was an opportunity to have an investment that would be easy to manage.

They paid $16,000, which seems modest these days, and by late spring the family took possession of commercial property. Don and I learned that it was to be a family affair, signaling that we were to be involved. Thus began our passage into the world of child labor, informal instruction in various skilled-worker professions, and general education concerning the larger world of life.

I was thirteen years old in 1953 - Don, fifteen. When school let out that June we discovered our halcyon days of wandering leisurely through summers were forever curtailed. We found ourselves in the cramped, dungeon-like basement of our new property. The building was run-down and in significant need of repair. Don and I were to start at the bottom, and with Dad’s guidance, work our way up.

The property appeared to be two separate buildings when viewed from across the street. My impression yet is of two entities grown together like Siamese twins. They were probably constructed at the same time - somewhere around 1890. The one next to the Moose was two stories, while its taller sibling stood three.

They seemed large. I never heard any dimensions, but would guess the buildings’ footprint covered two to three thousand square feet of downtown, with all floors totaling around six thousand. Red brick facades, typical for the era, gave the two a nondescript acceptance. If I had not spent so much time in them, I wouldn’t remember they were ever there.

The bottom floor was occupied by the Howard County Trustee. Its drab interior had high ceilings, and offices looking out onto the street through big plate glass windows. Commodities for the poor were kept in its cavernous back reaches. I rarely went in, and have only vague memories of it.

The office was managed for years by a thin little man, who seemed shriveled and ancient. His name was Elmer Cox, and I remember him wearing black baggy suits, with matching vest, a broad tie, and a black fedora. He retired shortly thereafter and became our first tenet when we finished the upstairs into boarding rooms. He rented number three till he was moved to a nursing home or the mortuary - I don’t remember which.

The door leading to the upper floors was in front-center of the building. It opened to a long stairway that had a level section about half way up. A hall at the top lead straight to a restroom at the back of the building. If you turned right at the top of the stairs, you would pass under a broad archway into the “other” building. Another turn to the right led to the third floor stairway.

There were three bathrooms, each at the end of a long hall. Only one room had a private bath. It looked onto Taylor street, and rented for ten dollars a week. Four other rooms had street views. Most rooms were rather small, going for seven dollars. Three or four had sinks, so they cost eight. We had sixteen rooms, and they brought in about a hundred and twenty dollars each week when all were occupied.

The Courtland Hotel had once used the upstairs rooms, probably during WWII, but the place had remained vacant and neglected for years. The first inspection opened the families eyes to the amount of work necessary in repairing and redecorating the place. That is where Don and I came into the picture. We started in the basement rebuilding the old boiler, the heart of the heating system.
GO TO: Part 2 - Child Labor