Here Beginneth the Album

This is something that everyone has seen at one time or another---some joker's picture album from "when he wuz 'n th' Army."

It is nothing more or less than pictorial egoism. The big hero is me. More grammatically, it is I. If the pictures are not of me, they are of people I have known, things I have done, or places I have been. The only possibly new thing that I have tried to do is put in a story line, so that the chance reader will not be bored by the author's rambling accounts concerning the unknown people in each picture. If I am leaning over your shoulder now, murmuring these golden phrases in your ear, please kick me in the shins and send me packing.

By way of prelude, here is a shot of me at home, probably in December 1956---I am looking pretty trim after basic training in Ft. Hood, Texas, and learning how to shinny up telephone poles at Ft. Gordon, Georgia. I was to leave for Anchorage January 7, 1957.

The whole thing starts in February, 1957, when I, a new telephone lineman in the 505th Signal Company (the construction half of the Alaskan Communication System--the other half mostly worked indoors) am sent up the highway from Anchorage to Fairbanks on my first job.

All of the telephone and telegraph in Alaska with the few exceptions of local service in the largest towns was operated by the U.S. Army. The Army wanted to sell the system, but weather conditions were so severe that no private company would think of buying the long lines: only the low-paid labor of enlisted men could keep it running. This assessment I find confirmed by no less an authority than Brigadier General Adolphus W. Greeley, called by Billy Mitchell, "one of the ablest soldiers the United States ever possessed," who wrote in 1905 that the system should be gradually turned over to private industry, "as the future development of Alaska and the coincident extension of private enterprises may render possible. At present, no private corporation could efficiently maintain and operate the land lines. They are maintained now by men receiving from $13 to $54 a month, with rations, in a country where day laborers earn from $4.50 to $15 per day. Only loyalty to his oath of enlistment keeps the American soldier on this arduous, dangerous, and monotonous duty¹." Billy Mitchell is the same person who was played by Gary Cooper in the 1955 film The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell. He can be considered the father of the ACS, for he took charge in 1901 and revolutionized the pace of construction by having the men haul poles, wire, and insulators during the winter when digging was impossible, but snow made transport easier. Formerly, the men had been holing up in camp and staying warm; given a 2-month "digging season" each year, they hadn't progressed very much.

The ACS is now a thing of the past, with microwave towers, then satellites having taken over for copper wire, but it was a wonderful way to serve. If you were in the ACS, you were treated like a hometown person wherever you went in Alaska (back then, be it noted, still a Territory). If you were any other sort of soldier, the trust level was markedly lower.

Here is a rare (outside of here) photo of private e-2 Donald L. Martin along the highway on the trip up to Fairbanks. The crew consisted of Jim Heffler, Dan Hagedorn, Jim Hensley, and Barry Phifer. We had been using the pistol to shoot off insulators, a favorite fun game of a line crew. Yes, it was cold out.

As things turned out, we didn't actually go to Fairbanks, but we stopped instead at a place called the Aurora Lodge, forty miles out of town. Here we see our boy half potted in mind and belly in his room at this establishment. Actually, it is only his half of the room, but I can't remember who had the other half. We were all pretty much interchangeable. As can be seen, the room was not elegant. The walls were acoustic tile, stained at the joints, and the floors were covered with a thin paper felt in lieu of rugs. The bathroom was at the end of the hall. It was rather chill, most of the time, making the well-heated bar downstairs all the more attractive. The girl in the picture is Bonnie Florence of Palo Alto California, with whom I supposed myself hopelessly--or at least ineffectively--in love. She still has my high school ring. The bottle of Seagrams Seven is a sure sign of an undeveloped palette.

At the Aurora Lodge we were very close to where the line to Fairbanks, the last link in the ACS, was completed back in 1903. Billy Mitchell, laying wire from the south, he writes (rather floridly) about meeting Gibbs, laying it from the north:

At last my wire crossed the Saljacket [as the Salcha was called then--DM] River. Due to lack of transportation, Gibbs had fallen a little behind in his work and I had to extend on beyond, but at length we reached the end of his wire. I made the last connection of the [land lines of the] Alaska system myself [on June 27, 1903].

Then from St. Michael and Nome on the Bering Sea, clear through to New York and Washington, the electric current transmitted our messages with the speed of light. Alaska was open to civilization. No longer was it the land of the unknown, sealed tight by the God of Everlasting Snow and Frost. We had broken the portal with which he shut out the white man from the north. We had worked straight through his coldest winters, over his highest ridges, down his broadest rivers, both in winter and summer. His mosquito scourge had failed to stop us, and we not only had surmounted all the difficulties, but had grown intensely fond of this wonderful country. America's last frontier had been roped and hog-tied².

Obviously, I was onto something big here.

The Lodge was just around the bend from the bridge the Richardson Highway used to cross the Salcha River. During the salmon runs, the bridge was well populated by people catching the rusty spawning salmon by "jigging," dangling 3-barbed hooks into the water and attempting to snag fish by whatever part was hooked. I had always thought spawning salmon were not fit to eat, but the Athabascan Indians had fed themselves and their dogs on them for milennia.

More interesting to me than fish were sled dogs, of which I met my first pair at the Lodge. They belonged to an old prospector who lived a couple of miles up the Salcha and were his main transportation to the watering hole. The dogs were not as large as I had expected, perhaps about 60-70 pounds, and there were only two of them. I was offered a ride on the sled by Dave Elder, who was on good terms with the old man. The dogs were roused from their spots in the snow, sleeping in harness. The shook themselves off, and trotted happily down to the road where I was to get my ride. The road, like all roads in Alaska, was not cleared during the winter but only shaved, so there was about a foot-thick snow pack, nicely smoothed, on it; driving is actually better up there during the winter because the surfaces are then as smooth as any in the big cities outside. There were only two dogs, but the sled was small, just big enough to carry supplies for a single guy. I figured they could pull me, but only just. I sat on a box in the sled; Dave drove from behind. I don't remember him say "mush"; more likely he said something more mundane, like "let's go," and off we went--almost literally. I nearly fell off out of the back of the sled: those two dogs had four-wheel drive and went from 0 to 20 in about a second. The dogs seemed to be enjoying themselves, and so did I, once my fanny had caught up with the sled.

At this time, the crew was working on a reroute job at "The Dikes." This was around the first of March. In order to put in new poles, we had to dig holes, and in order to dig holes, we had to find the dirt to put them in. To do either we had to get the Caterpillar tractors (cats) started. The D-6 was easier to get going, so it was fired up first and allowed to warm a bit before towing the smaller D-4 with the auger to get it started. This picture was taken at the Dikes, and shows (L to R) Sgts Lorenz, Jones, and Hollyfield carrying out this task. The rest of us were someplace warm; it generally took an hour to get both cats up and running.

Looking at this picture of Aurora Lodge, I was surprised to see a television antenna, and, thinking about it, do remember seeing some TV in the bar--I think only one channel was broadcasting from Fairbanks then. The antenna is on the end where the bar was located. Out of sight behind the building are some outbuildings, a trailer, and a couple of quonset huts belonging to the Alaska National Guard. It was here that I first lived with the pulse of the North, the constant "thung, thung, thung, thung" of a single-cylinder diesel engine driving the electric generator.

We were living on "contract", which means the government pays the lodge owner $10 per day per man as long as we live in any one place. We got no extra money, but at least we lived as civilians. We stayed at the Lodge until the first of April, at which time we were moved to Eielson Air Force Base. (This move was not popular with lodge owner Tom Phillips, who had stocked up to deal with a crew of hungry guys for 3 months or so; he was on the phone to his territorial representative even before we left. Apparently, he prevailed, as we came back later.

After Eielson, we moved to Ladd AFB, right next to town. And with all this shifting around, we were still working at the same place (The Dikes, where we were building a new pole line across the road from the existing one to eliminate two road crossings where the wires are vulnerable to oversized loads. The new section was perhaps half a mile long; after we cut over to it, we got to remove the old section, wires, insulators, crossarms, poles, and all.)

The unkindest cut of all though, was the fact that the living status of the rest of the company away from Anchorage had been changed to TDy (temporary duty), in which the government pays the individual $15 per day, from which he has to buy his own food and lodging. It is possible to realize quite a profit on this money, and we were the only crew out that wasn't getting any (since we were living on a military base).

Now we jump to the middle of June---we finally got on TDy, got back to Aurora, and most important, I got my camera.

The Aurora Lodge--beautiful locale, good food, expensive drinks, and genial clientele (us). The one of us at the right is me, with hair (a rare sight). The Lodge itself has ceased to be a sight at all. Kathy Morgan of Tok writes, "The Aurora Lodge burned down some years ago, so it is no more, but the concrete pad on which it was built still stands there. It's amazing how small it was. I don't remember it as being big, but my memory tricks me into remembering it as larger than it was until I look at that pad."

Uncle Dan'l Hagedorn. The rug he's wearing is an Eskimo mitten. I have often thought that the ACS was populated by various sorts of clowns; one of the things I remember best about Dan was his walking out to the middle of a span on the cable messenger in an area where the copper on the open wires had verdigree'd to a nice match for the spruce boughs behind them. He would then lie down on a pair and would appear to passing tourists as if he were levitating 20 feet off the ground. Had there been any traffic over one car per minute, he would have caused wrecks.

Waitress Dorothy Izzard, a really great gal. She would kid around with all of us, and was kind enough to do laundry and other favors for us. Note the Olympia beer sign over the door, with its eternal motto, "It's the water." They could only make the stuff at Tumwater, Washington, they claimed, for only at Tumwater was the perfect brewing water available. Sadly, the company has gone out of business, but the brand continues to be made--in Minnesota. If they continue to use the motto, have they run a pipeline to Washington?

"Big Jim" Heffler, Virginia's contribution to the ACS: he was "rotund one" and I was "rotund two", a dynamite combination. Since only people from Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho could enlist into the ACS, guys from other states were fairly rare. I got in touch with Jim in the 80s, when he was back in Bowling Green, Virginia, and I was in Richmond. When I moved to Maryland, we lost touch, only to get back in touch in my process of doing this webpage: I got the roster of old ACS guys from that website, and there was Jim and his phone number. We spoke 6/12/2006 and look forward to getting together for lunch in DC.

Dave Elder, a local lad, and Uncle Dan'l, giving our camera man the well-known sign of good will. Dave lived with his Father, an alcoholic, I suspect, in a tiny log cabin a couple miles south of Aurora Lodge. Father somehow got the cabin logs (preformed for building cabins: peeled for veneer, probably, so they were the same thickness from end to end, and squared off on three sides to make a log wall on the outside and a flat one on the inside quite easily) to build a second tiny cabin right next to the first. For some reason, he didn't notice that he was building it in the wrong place, so the doors between the two buildings did not meet. As our crew worked its way through his neighborhood, we helped him out by putting a cable around the new cabin and towing it with our D-4 auger cat about 3 feet closer to the road to make the doors match.

Barry Phifer, on his way to the PX. We made a trip in about twice a month. Most of our needs, food and drink, were met at the lodge; it was only the humble necessities like new jockey shorts or occasional luxuries, like my camera, that got us up the road to Eielson.

The female count was pretty low aroud here. Jacky Ray, a poised thirteen, was about the only unattached girl. Judging by the look on Heff's face, it was just as well he left the area soon after. The urchin in the background is the daughter of the lodge owner. The urchin's name was Jackie Phillips; she is the elder of two sad children. We thought them brats, but I feel rather sorry for them now--they were probably bored out of their tiny little minds. It turns out that Miss Ray was probably safe enough; the dashing Mr. Heffler had other interests. According to Jim Hensley, "Jim Hefler almost got me shot. He was going out with a Homesteader's wife. The guy only got home every other weekend. I didn't know much about the sitution. Hefler rotated to the States for discharge and introduced me to the woman and we started going out. Hefler got back to Virginia and wrote her a romantic letter, and said something like: 'I hope Hensley is servicing you properly.' The husband got home early on a Friday, grabbed the mail out of the mail box while she was in Fairbanks. He pulled out his .357 magnum and came looking for me at the Aurora Lodge. The owner told him I'd shipped out for Anchorage. Spud Holyfield called Anchorage that next morning, and they shipped me down on a crew to either Delta Junction or Tok." Sadly, no pictures of the Homesteader's Wife are available. Or do they? When I spoke to Heffler recently, I told him this story. He couldn't remember the name of the lady (so much for vaunted Southern chivalry), but did recall that she was blonde and that she did laundry for us. Does that ring any bells, I wonder?

"But the melody lingers on" the mandolin plays so quietly this way we wished that he'd thought of it sooner. The instrument was found by us along the highway and was seized upon by Lynch in the Anchorage barracks. Lynch worked in the motor pool and was by all accounts a good mechanic. He had one of the most severe stutters I have ever heard; it may have been Tourette's Syndrome--pretty much unknown back then when a stutter was still a socially acceptable comic device--his bridge phrase of "aw fuck now" was not something that much endeared him to officers. While Lynch could not speak, he could sing, and with a mandolin for accompanyment, he sang constantly. The poor bastard finally had an outlet for self-expression. Unfortunately, while his singing was free of interruptions, it was also pretty much free of music, too, and his mandolin playing was not as good as his vocal work. Unable to stomach any more music, Hagedorn took the mandolin back and smashed it against a pillar.

For some reason, no one ever worried much about forest fires around Fairbanks. The trees were mostly scrubby, and the smoke held the mosquitoes at bay for a while. I learned later on that the Indians often set fires in hopes of getting employment trying to put them out, and I have learned recently that Indians routinely set forest fires all across the North American continent to clear the woods of undergrowth and increase grass and brouse for prey species (see Mann, Charles C., 1491). The fire at the right was quite a small one and unlikely to generate either many jobs or much fresh grass.

The Tanana River--countless sloughs running for miles in all directions. The interior being quite flat, there seems to be a profusion of water everywhere, but never quite enough to keep the dust down. I found out after leaving that the interior gets only about 10-15 inches of water a year: it would be a desert if it were not so flat and so thoroughly sealed by permafrost, a perennially frozen layer of clay the prevented the percolation of surface water into the subsoils, leaving it on the surface to provide moisture for grasses and breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Much of country looks as though covered by vast, lush lawns; it is only when you see moose heads vanish into the grass that you realize that these are natural paddies, anywhere from a few inches to a couple of feet deep. The mosquitoes are so numerous that a person 30-40 feet away often appears to be surrounded by a hazy cloud. We found that the best way to work in the summer was shirtless; we would baste each other in mosquito repellant--then an oily goop that came in a bottle--before starting the day. Barry Phifer claimed that they were maliciously capable of cooperation: if you weren't careful, they'd gang up on you from one side and push you into a river to wash the repellant off. Getting up a pole helped: most of their food occurred lower than 8 feet off the ground, so they didn't bother looking for you at crossarm height.

           ⇐Upstream      The Tanana River      Downstream⇒

The crew worked for MSgt George Soloman Sabolsice, known as Sol, who was in charge of the lines from the border to Fairbanks and from Tok south 60 miles or so. We were "Sol's Boys" and that was a good thing to be. Our first job was rerouting about a half mile of line from one side of the highway to the other at The Dikes; after that was finished, we did line maintenance: straightening poles and clearing the right of way with machetes. 1957 being a particularly bad year for ground-nesting yellowjackets who seemed to prefer right of ways above all other terrains, we took turns being in front to spread the stings equally. We were averaging around five per day each.

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¹ Mitchell, Brig. Gen. William L: The Opening of Alaska 1901-1903: Missoula, MT: Pictorial Histories Publishing Company: 1988: p x.

² ibid. p 100.

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