Growing up in Nome Alaska - part two

Donna Lyle [Morgan] is a good friend and still lives in Nome; and we have been corresponding over the years. In fact, I sent her some questions and she was kind enough to answer them. I’m grateful to her for helping me recall names and distances. I can remember going to her house and her mother had new cake pans that would make a checkerboard cake. We baked a cake in the new pans and it was fun to cut the cake and see the chocolate and white pieces of cake that looked like a checker board. Donna also had a canary. Mother would give me the center of a green pepper with the seeds and I would take it to Donna for her bird. I think it was one New Year’s Eve that I stayed overnight with Donna. She and her sister had twin beds in their bedroom and I don’t know where her sister was but we slept in the two beds. We giggled and had a great time. Donna’s mother Ellen Lyle was very talented. She was an artist and painted scenes from Alaska. We have four of her paintings that my mother won at Bridge Club. We have two paintings of ducks, one of a polar bear and one of an Eskimo building where they dried fish. Mrs. Lyle also had a green house and would make corsages with her flowers. The Lyles also took me to their summer cabin at Dexter and Donna’s mother showed us how to paint. We used cartoon characters with drawing lines on the pictures and then drawing lines on the canvas. I can remember doing two cartoon characters and the experience was very helpful in other school projects over the years.

The Federal Building was on the only building with a cement sidewalk and we would roller skate around the building. In the summer time, prisoners would yell out the windows at us. Wonder why I was never afraid of them.

We did not have flush toilets because the ground was frozen. Houses had their bathrooms on an outside wall of the house with a little door behind the toilet that could be opened on the outside of the house so that the bucket could be emptied once a week. It was sooooo smelly!! We called the man that collected the stuff in the bucket the “honey man” and it smelled terrible if you passed him on the street. There was only one horse in town and he pulled the “honey wagon.”

The Methodist church was on 2nd Avenue same as the Fagerstroms about a block west of our home. Suzie Galloway lived on that street also.

One Christmas, my dad and Paul Galloway decorated our landlord’s house with Christmas lights. Our landlord Rube Kramer was an old gold miner and his little house did not have electricity. Paul was an electrician and he received permission from the power company to put lights on Rube’s house. Rube was very surprised!

Christmas traditions in Alaska—There are no trees growing in Nome but we had a real Christmas tree. I don’t know how my parents were able to get a Christmas tree. Our family celebrated Christmas with my Aunt Florence, Uncle Frank, Ralph and Gary [Bingham]. We would eat Christmas dinner at their house. Christmas presents were opened on Christmas Eve and Santa presents on Christmas Day. We baked Christmas cookies of Russian Teacakes, Birdnest cookies and my Aunt Florence would make a Black-bottom pie.

Our grade school always had a large Christmas program and everyone in Nome was invited. Santa Claus came and gave candy and nuts to the children. The Eskimos would perform a dance with the men playing drums and the women dancing.

When I was in the 6th grade I had the chicken pox and couldn’t go to school. We drew names at school to give presents for Christmas and Robert Dunbar drew my name. He bought me a charm bracelet and brought it to my house because I couldn’t go to school. Well, sorry to say I gave him the chicken pox.

Some names I remember of school friends… Donna Lyle, Kay Coulthard. Helen Glavinovich, Ruth Fagerstrom, Suzanne Galloway, Sigrid Olsen, Bunny and Chuck Fagerstrom, Robert Dunbar, Jacqualine Rigg, Edith Morton, Anna Ailak, Elizabeth Fricke, Margaret Jane Willoya, Starlette Jo Hunt, Sylvia Olson, Dianne Boucher… There was also Carolyn, Ruthie and Paul Glavinovich; the Swanberg family of Diane, Buzzy, Mary Jo and Lois. I remember one day when Suzy Galloway, Robert Dunbar, Toney Fults and I were just walking around the town. I think we just explored and enjoyed one another.

This is a picture of me and Suzy sitting on Gunnar Kaasen’s knee… his house was around the corner from us [same street as Suzy Galloway and Fagerstroms’s lived on]. Gunnar Kaasen (1882-1960) was a Norwegian musher who delivered a cylinder containing 300,000 units of diphtheria antitoxin to Nome in 1925, as the last leg of a dog sled relay that saved Nome from an epidemic. Kaasen was born in Burfjord, Norway and went to the United States to mine for gold in 1903, in the wake of the discovery of gold-bearing sands on Cape Nome in 1898, which triggered one of several gold rushes in the state between 1891 and 1898. His dog was named Balto and Disney made a movie about it.

Growing up in Nome Alaska - part one

When snow falls gently from the heavens and the temperatures are cold outside, I recall a wondrous childhood filled with sparkling snow, ice, a loving family, good friends and warm experiences. Our oldest son Michael has encouraged me to share with my family what it was like growing up in Nome Alaska. So I’m delighted to have that challenge and invite you to experience with me my feelings and memories of that period in my life from 1944 to 1950.

We will start in Seattle when I was in kindergarten. My father had gone to Alaska in June of 1944 to work in the sheet metal shop at the Marks Air Force Base. Mother and I followed six months later. On December 1, 1944 mother and I sailed on a ship from Seattle to Seward Alaska. It took three days going up the “Inside Passage.” I can remember singing to the service men on the ship. Mother said I sang, “Don’t sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me.” The ship stopped at Ketchikan and Juneau. When we crossed the open water of the Gulf of Alaska it was very stormy and I do remember that I got very seasick. I can remember lying on the bunk and throwing “straight up” in the air like a fountain. Mother said it was so rough that waves were washing across the deck. Mother told us she was the only woman down for breakfast one morning because so many were sick.

It was very dark on the ship because it was war time and they didn’t want enemy submarines or planes to see us. It was very cold when we finally docked at Seward. I remember that one of the soldiers gave me a cake in a big box as we left the ship. We took a small, old looking steam powered train from Seward to Anchorage. There was a pot-bellied stove but it was still cold. The seats were straight backed and hard.

Mother said we stayed at the Westward Hotel for three days because we were waiting for the weather to break so we could fly to Nome. We were on our way to Nome on December 7, 1944. We left early in the morning and it was dark outside. Mother and I were the only passengers on the small plane. We landed at Nome and took a taxi to my Aunt Florence’s house. I remember seeing the tall snow banks on the sides of the road.

Nome is located on the south coast of the Seward Peninsula facing Norton Sound, part of the Bering Sea. Cape Nome was about 12 miles east from Nome and I remember driving there to pick cranberries. They started building a bulkhead of rocks in 1948 along the beach to protect the business section and it was completed in the early 1950’s. The rock came from Cape Nome and is now a regular Rock Quarry and is owned by a Native Corporation in Nome.

Rube Kramer who we rented from had a cabin between Nome and Cape Nome about 8 miles on the Cape Nome Road. We had a lot of fun visiting Rube’s cabin. We would picnic there and even go swimming in a pool of warmer water by the ocean front. Rube made his own root beer and we thought it was delicious. His cabin was covered on the inside with newspaper print on the walls.

The Marks Air Force Base was about a mile west of Nome and I think that the commercial planes would land at that airfield. There was a little hill about a mile north of Nome called Chicken Hill and not sure how it got the name Chicken Hill. We liked to pick wild flowers there in the summer and I remember sledding down the hill in the winter.

Wild flowers were beautiful on the tundra and we loved to pick them and make bouquets. I have listed a few of them: Iris [or Flags], For-get-me-nots [the Alaska state flower], Bluebells, Buttercups, Shooting Stars, Monkshood, Poppies, Wild Yellow Roses, Cow Parsnips, Wild Flax, Pasqual, Anemone, Daisy, Lady Fingers, Richardson’s Saxifrage [bears like them and they smell like pepper], Mount White Avens, Wild Marigold, Wild Rhododendron [very pretty and low to the ground], Fireweed, Primrose and many more; plus cranberries and blueberries.

We used to go swimming in a small creek north of Nome called Dry Creek under a little bridge called Red Bridge which was across the road from Chicken Hill and behind the mining company. Some discharge water from the mining company power plant used to run into it, which made the water warm under the bridge, and we would play in it. We didn’t think there were any contaminates in that run-off from the power plant.

The name of the river on the east side of Nome was the Nome River and the bridge the Nome River Bridge by the mouth of the river. I can remember fishing there and watching the salmon spawning. Trout and Grayling were also found in the Nome River.

We lived on “B” Street which I considered the center of town. Our home had a bay window and we could look down the street and see the Bering Sea. We were a block from the main street which ran parallel to the coastline.

The school was on “B” Street too and if I remember right about two blocks north of our house. Here is a picture of our home.

My dad opened his own sheet metal shop across the street from our home on “B” Street; it was called Arctic Sheet Metal Shop. He was a general contractor for furnaces, stoves, plumbing and sheet metal. Everyone called my dad “Ben” and he was very tall [6 foot 4], dark, and handsome.

My Aunt Florence and Uncle Frank (Bingham’s) and cousins Ralph and Gary lived on 1^st Avenue which was directly behind the federal building. We always had our holiday dinners at their home. Also, my Aunt Florence let me practice the piano there before we got a little piano. Helen Dunbar was my piano teacher. There was a small wrecked plane on the property behind their house. My cousin Gary remembered playing in the fuselage too.

I asked my grade school friend Robert Dunbar who lived a couple doors down from the Bingham’s and he sent me the following by email in 2009:

“Now you're talking about something with which I am VERY familiar! I used to imagine myself as a WWII pilot in that fuselage! There were some old military cooking utensils in it, too, that I took home and actually used--like a couple of aluminum canteens and a couple of aluminum plates. It WAS the fuselage of a WWII fighter plane, although I don't know which one/type. It was more behind the Silverman house (which my sis, Bonnie, owned and rented out until recently). And as you remember, the Dunbar home was two houses East of the Silverman house, 2nd from the corner. I remember I used to wear an old Air Force pilot's hat, with a short brim and sheep's wool inside with leather outside during those years. “