Angoon

It rained a little the day we came. The day we left it was the same. We liked what we could see as our ship approached the community of Angoon, the second largest native village in Alaska.  The schoolhouse was easily spotted, and there was the teacher’s house situated next to the school building. It was a two-story building with a daylight basement. We could also see a board walk leading from the school grounds to the right, back into the central part of town with small houses on both sides. The houses on the beach side of the boardwalk extended out over the sand of the beach, providing storage for small boats.   

Our hand luggage and bags were unloaded from the ship’s shore boat onto the dry sand in front of our own front door.  From experience we guessed the keys were left with one of the stores. There were two stores in town.

We walked down the well-constructed boardwalk, the width of a standard cement sidewalk found in cities.  At each house a matching but narrow walkway gave access to the house.  Treated pilings supported the houses, bringing them up to street level.  About one block down the plank walk we came to a cross street, constructed the same way.  There were several large houses on this street.  The entrances to these larger houses were decorated with paintings of tribal totem poles. We later learned more about these totem poles.

The branch of the street we had selected ended at the original store established many years ago when the Russians were here.  Mr. Soboloff, the owner, was born in Sitka.  His father was a Russian priest, in charge of the Russian Orthodox Church in Sitka.  His store and docks faced the river outlet of a large island known as Admiralty Island.  We made friends with Mr. and Mrs. Soboloff on our first visit to his store.  He had the keys to the teacher’s house and the school building.  We made many return trips to his store to learn more history of South Eastern Alaska.

Upon our return from our first history lesson on southeastern Alaska, we found our bags and baggage up on the porch of our new house.  We were to occupy the main floor and basement only. The third teacher lived on the top floor.  She had her own back door and stairway.   She was not home when we arrived and we did not meet her until a week before school opened.

  Our new home was nice and roomy with a large front room and bedroom overlooking Chatham Straits.  Across the back of the house was the kitchen and another bedroom.  A stairway leading up to the upper apartment cut off some of our space. There was also a stairway leading down to the basement.  A coal-burning furnace supplied heat for the entire house while the kitchen range burned oil.

We arrived right in the middle of fishing season. Most of the people were working at the three salmon canneries. Those who were not working in one or the other of the canneries were trolling for salmon in the waters near home.

As soon as we had our house put in order we had time to look around the town and neighborhood.   We thought about our mail first.  Where was the post office?  We had noticed Mr. Soboloff didn’t mention the postal service while we were there.  Returning down the board street to the corner we saw a small American flag displayed on a short staff.  There was a building on the dock and a fair sized boat tied up along side.  That looked like it must be the place so we went down the bank.  Sure enough there was the US Post Office, combined with a store. 

The store was not very large but there was a large warehouse building in connection with the store so there must have been a lot of stock on hand. The postmaster’s name was Barnes.  Mrs. Barnes came in from a house just to the right of the store and post office building.  She was very friendly, saying that she was overjoyed to have another white woman in the community.  There was no mail for us yet.  This had been a long day and we were glad to hit the hay early when we reached home.

We hadn’t taken time to look the schoolhouse over. It was only a short distance from our house, built with a full basement.  Because of the height of the foundation there were a number of steps to climb to the entrance door.  There was a room just to the right as one entered with a sign on the door labeled ‘PRINCIPAL’.  This was the first time I had a place assigned to me to work and keep my records.   I remarked to Dorothy that I would have to sit in that official looking chair soon to get the feeling of being a principal.

The two story main building was divided into four classrooms.  The first floor classrooms had a portable divider that could be folded back to form a larger auditorium on special occasions.   On the backside of the building the ground had been bulldozed off to make a playground.  I saw the marks of a baseball field and some indications of a backboard for shooting basketballs. Evidence showed that the kids had time for recess and not supervised exercise periods.

In the full size basement were sacks and sacks of coal.  In fact, one fourth of the basement was used to store coal.  The large furnace occupied the other quarter of the space.  One half of this large basement was not used.  I would have to give some thought as to how we could use that good area on rainy days.

I returned to the office to try out the area for the principal. I found there were two four-drawer cabinets.  Each drawer was filled with orderly files.  There was a typewriter too, with a nice cover that said ‘Underwood’.  This was before the days when every desk boasted a computer.  In one corner of the office was a small stand on which rested a large US flag all properly folded, ready for display.  I had not seen a flagpole outside and made a mental note to look around for one.

Dorothy came into the principal’s office.   She reported finding the women’s craft room up stairs.  In Wainwright we had started the Women’s Sewing Crafts.  It was a room where the women skilled in sewing local craft items could meet and work together. Women who would like to learn skin sewing could meet with the group under an experienced instructor and learn some of the arts. We both were glad that the craft program had been introduced here in Angoon.  It had been our idea to introduce the program back in the Wainwright school.

Our third teacher, Ada, came in on Thursday’s mail boat the week before school was scheduled to open.  She had been down in Washington State attending summer school. She came back all excited with new ideas she was planning to use in the kindergarten department.  Dorothy was glad to meet her, and I was glad to have an enthusiastic member on the staff. 

I rang the bell hanging in the office on the first Monday morning of the new school year.  We had the portable partitions opened up on the first floor so we all met in the general assembly room.  Following a few introductions and some remarks from the principal we broke up to go to classrooms.  Some of the 8th grade boys helped with returning the partitions to their proper place in the room.              

The afternoon was more like a scheduled school day.  There was one little item that I missed on the morning shift.  As I finished ringing the bell a small dog came trotting along behind the last student. He came up the steps and stopped just short of going in the entry room.  He stepped aside and curled up on one side of the line of traffic and went to sleep.  I asked some of the students in my room who had brought their dog to school.  One of the 8th grade students said, “Oh, he has been coming to school as long as I have.”

When the kids went home our canine student woke up and followed the students down the boardwalk.  This was the routine every morning.  The next time I was at the Soboloff’s store I asked Mrs. Soboloff about the dog.  She said the dog belonged to a man named Smith who had done the janitor work at the school for years and years.   She said Smith had moved away and left the dog.  She did not know who was feeding the dog or where the dog lived when school was not in session.   I did not want to become involved with feeding the dog.  He came to school regularly every day.  His attendance record was much better than many of the students.  I told the 8th grade students I was going to give him a diploma for coming to school for eight years

Things went smoothly, and I enjoyed teaching the upper grades. There was a Sheldon Jackson boarding school in Sitka, not far away.  Most of the 8th grade graduates went to Sitka for their high school work.  It was an incentive to keep up their grades.  It was the first time in my teaching experience that there was a goal for the students after the 8th grade.  

Our craft lady was on the job shortly after school started.  She and her co-workers met two or three times a week.  She would submit orders for supplies or materials that I forwarded to our Juneau office.  The Juneau office maintained a craft department and a sales room that was open to the public.  Our local craft ladies specialized in making moccasins.  Their beadwork was outstanding. The craft salesroom gave an opportunity to the people living in the remote areas of Alaska to market their products.

Going through some of the filing cabinets, I found that the community had a well-established system of government loans, financing many of the fishing boats seen in the harbor. It was fortunate I found this information because within a few days a representative from the central office came by to have a meeting with the boat owners.  I was prepared for the meeting due to my homework with the files.  I was not prepared to meet the man who came—no other than my former friend, first from Kotzebue, second from Nome, and now from the central office. Welcome to Angoon, Harvey Starling!  Dorothy was almost as surprised as I was at meeting him, and wondered where they were now living.

From the files I also learned of another organization active in the community, “The Alaska Native Brotherhood.” They were more active in southeastern Alaska than farther north.  They held annual meetings in the larger communities.  The first year we were in Angoon they met evenings in the school, using the two lower rooms as an auditorium. During the first of January, the Governor of Alaska was one of the scheduled speakers.  On the evening he was scheduled to speak, he came out from Juneau on a nice yacht. The barometer had been falling all afternoon and the wind was not the best for navigating Chatham Straits.  They came ashore at Kilisnooh, a sheltered bay three miles south of Angoon.  There was a good trail back to Angoon, but it was a three-mile hike for the Governor’s party.  We offered them a shelter out of the wind and rain and a chance to warm up before their program began, for which they were very grateful.  

We invited the Governor to stop by after this speech.  The rain had stopped but the temperature was somewhere below freezing.  I brought out my muskrat fur cap that I had used in the Arctic.  He tried it on, tied the earflap’s strings beneath his chin and handed his hat to his secretary saying, “I’ll see that you get this cap back the first thing in the morning.”  He thanked Dorothy for being such a nice hostess and to me for offering him and his party a shelter out of the weather.  They all marched off in the dark for a three-mile hike back to their yacht.  On the first mail boat after the party I received a neat little package containing an old muskrat fur cap and a very nice letter from the Governor of Alaska.

Soon after we moved to Angoon, one of the storekeepers told us about an unoccupied little house up at the head of the bay.  It was accessible by boat only at high tide or by foot over a badly overgrown trail.  Mrs. Watkins, the owner, had been a teacher in the Angoon school.  Her husband, serving with the U.S. Forest Service had died unexpectedly, so she returned to the States leaving the house just as they had lived in it.  Mr. Soboloff who had been left in charge had the key which he loaned to us to go up and check on things for him.  We hiked down the trail through the woods to find the house at the beach.  It was a nice little well-built house painted white.  Everything was dry and looked as if it were ready for someone to move in.  Of all things, we discovered that there was a piano in the living room.  Dorothy made a run for it the first thing.  Imagine our surprise when we discovered that it was an Everett baby grand!  While I lounged in an easy chair made from scrap lumber, Dorothy gave a good performance on the keys.  She just had to have that piano even if I had to build a wagon to move it back to our home.  After a little thinking I promised that I would buy it for her.

On a return visit to care for some business, I met Mrs. Watkins at Mr. Soboloff's home.  I made an offer to buy her piano, which she gladly accepted.  Dorothy told me later that she didn't have the least idea how I was going to get that piano out of the woods.  I admitted that I didn't know how to move it either.  On the way home I had an idea, but I didn't tell her.

It so happened that there were a number of wartime evacuees from one of the Aleutian Islands camped in abandoned cannery housing nearby.  I went down the next Saturday to ask if there were twelve men who would like to help me on a short job.  With not much else to do, the twelve agreed to join me the next week. 

Saturday came on schedule, and we hiked back to the house carrying a good supply of rope.  We cut two long poles, and with the quarter inch rope made a sling in which to stand the piano after we removed the legs.  With three men on each end of the poles, we carried the heavy piano out of the woods to our house in less than an hour.  I gave the men two dollars each, and they went away happy. 

After we had torn off four or five sheets from the monthly wall calendar, the weather began to warm up and look like spring with wild flowers everywhere that the sun could reach the ground.   There were more days of sunshine than there were days of light rain.   One bright sunny Saturday morning a little boy brought a note from Mr. Soboloff, asking if we would like to go for a boat ride and do a little fishing with him and his wife.  He said the tide would be just right to go up inside about eight thirty or nine o’clock and not to bring any fishing gear as they had plenty in the boat.  We did not quite understand the term he used, ‘go up inside’.  But since he was an old timer born and raised in this area, we trusted him and were on the dock promptly at eight dressed for a ride in an open boat.

Since Angoon is located where the fresh water enters the salt water there is a difference in elevations; the river falls down very rapidly among several large rocks.  As the saltwater rises with the incoming tide this swift stretch of water and rocks is flooded.  Once above swift water there are several channels to choose from.  Mr. Soboloff had a definite goal in mind.       

We were in an area that was flooded only at high tide, but he seemed to know where the deep channels were. Finally all the deep-water channels come together and form one small river. We had not gone far up this main stream when I saw an enormous rock right in front of our boat. 

I overheard Mr. Soboloff say, “Well, here we are.”  He beached the boat on a little strip of sand along the side of the big rock, and ran a line out to tie to a small tree. The small river on which we had been boating came from under the big rock.

Mr. Soboloff asked, “Shall we eat first, or catch a fish first?” 

Mrs. Soboloff replied, “Oh, go catch a fish first.” She was taking a small wooden keg out of the boat and placing it up on the sand.  I was curious all along about how they were going to use the small keg.  It was marked “Butter-60 lbs.”  We bought our butter when up north in similar kegs. 

Mr. Soboloff selected two fishing poles.  Handing one to Dorothy as we walked around behind the big rock, he said, “The first thing about trout fishing is you have to know where the trout are hiding.  An old Tlingit Indian had told me years ago that most of the trout on this side of Admiralty Island were hiding under this rock.  It is a secret I have kept all of these years.” 

He unwound a short amount of line with some type of metal spinner on the end and cast out about the middle of the stream flowing under the big rock.  The current immediately carried his spinner and line under the rock.  We closely watched every movement he made. The rock did not rest on this bank of the stream.  There was a small space that we did not notice at first. The line was carried completely under the rock and when Mr. Soboloff wound in his line, there was a nice big trout flopping at the end of his pole.  He did not remove the fish but took the pole, line and fish to show to Mrs. Soboloff.  She took it off the hook and dropped it into the wooden keg.  He gave us poles and we all fished.  Never did a line and hook come out from under the big rock without a flopping big trout.  Mrs. Soboloff was kept busy taking them off the hook and putting them into the wooden keg.   Dorothy and I had so much fun fishing.  It did not last long enough. 

Soon Mrs. Soboloff called, “Enough, the keg is full.”  We reeled in our lines and returned them to the boat. 

Mr. Soboloff consulted his big old-fashioned watch.  I had seen the rapids from the shore at low tide, and I knew what was coming.   I knew he had lived almost a lifetime on this inlet and knew what he was doing.  He was going to give us the thrill of shooting the rapids.  He did just that, and Wow!!   I noticed he turned and went up a short distance before crossing over to the south side of the swift water.  As he turned to face down stream I could sense the current grip the boat and with a swift thrust we were down and out onto the still water of the bay before we could scream again. 

It was a short ride, but a wild one.  I thought of the man that went over Niagara Falls in a barrel many years ago, only he was in the barrel.  I had to hold onto the keg of fish to keep them from spilling, and with the other hand I gripped the gunnels of the boat to keep us both from being thrown overboard.  Again like Niagara Falls it was rough but it didn’t last long. 

Mr. Soboloff had a big grin on his face as he said, “It is just like trout fishing. You have to know where the rocks are.”  As I became better acquainted with Mr. Soboloff, I believed he deliberately timed that return trip so as to be in the right spot to catch the falls at the right time and give us a thrilling but safe ride through the rapids.  It was a thriller, but I never tried it later when we had our own boat.                                  

During the summer months when school was not in session I made several trips into Juneau with Mr. Soboloff on his larger boat the “Woodrow,” a forty-foot cannery tender.  He would often leave me at the wheel, saying he should go down to see how the engine was doing.  I often thought he went below deck to have a little nap. On one occasion as we were going north in Chatham Straits I was alone at the wheel.  He had given me a compass reading with instructions to hold the course. Before long I spotted what I thought was a very large drift log floating across in front of me.  Just as I reached the point where I should do something to avoid a mishap, the ‘log’ raised its tail, blew a stream of water from its spout and made an arched dive into deeper water.  It was a whale that had been resting on the surface.  Mr. Soboloff, sleeping below deck, never knew how close I had come to running down a whale that was larger than his boat.                                           

While walking along the small boat harbor the next morning, I saw a small powerboat tied up at the float with a ‘For Sale’ sign.  I looked the boat over.  It had a Model A Ford motor and a cabin large enough to be comfortable.  On top of the cabin was a plywood skiff, about twelve feet long.   The skiff was just right to be used as a shore boat.

I met with Mr. Soboloff for lunch and told him about the boat.  He went with me back to the small boat harbor for a look at the boat.  He said it looked like a nice boat for around Angoon, and that he would tow it back to Angoon in the morning if I could make a deal.  I made an appointment with the owner to meet at the First National Bank of Juneau.  He brought the papers required for the sale of the boat and I had my checkbook.  I haven’t forgotten the numbers I wrote on the check: 4/4/44 and $ 400.00. 

Mr. Soboloff brought the Woodrow into the small boat harbor.  I took a line from my new boat and made it fast to the cleat on the back of the Woodrow and we were off for Angoon.  We anchored the Vagabond, the official name of our new boat, out in front of the house.  Using the plywood skiff that came with the boat, I rowed ashore and ran up the steps into the front door.

“I’m home,” I called to Dorothy in the kitchen. “Come see our new yacht!” 

Wiping her hands, she came and looked out at the new boat. “Is that it?” she said pointing at the boat. “I don’t like the name Vagabond.”

Once again after five very happy years at Angoon, a letter arrived from the Office of Indian Affairs in Juneau requesting us to make a transfer to Sitka.  A large army base no longer in use had been turned over to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  My knowledge of Industrial Arts and Dorothy’s ability to teach English were in demand.  Very reluctantly we packed up to move again!  Mr. Soboloff, kindly loaded our possessions into his large boat.  With the Vagabond in tow we headed southwest across the Chatham Straits toward Sitka