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.