Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
could see the project we were responsible for. I lived at the local Kodiak Hotel, which had 11
rooms, 3 with baths--I had one of those.
I would get missions from the district like, "We are now designing the new moorings,
floating moorings. Go out and survey the harbor." Now, how am I going to survey the
harbor? Well, you heard what happened in Vietnam--piece of cake once you've been over
advising Vietnamese and trying to make things happen. So, I went to the contractor and
borrowed the level and rigged up a sounding weight. By this time the Corps had sent two
civilian inspectors out to work for me, so we had two shift inspectors. We set up a weigh
station down the main road to weigh the rock when it came in because we were paying by
weight. So, we borrowed a small boat and set out and sounded and surveyed that harbor. We
then sent the survey back in to the district so they could design the harbor.
This was really a tremendous cultural experience as well because we really were on the
fringe of frontier America. The people that were there on Kodiak Island had once been in the
West and then migrated up to Portland and Seattle. Then when that became too civilized for
them, they moved on up to Anchorage. That became too civilized so they moved on out to
Kodiak. It was like reading characters out of Bret Harte's stories of the Old West. I mean,
they were salt-of-the-earth kind of people. The people who ran the Red Cross operation in the
immediate aftermath of the tsunami, with its loss of life--the blankets, the donuts, the coffee,
the blood--I mean, they did this stuff, and were common, ordinary folks. The volunteer head
of the Red Cross drove a truck for the construction company. They picked him up as a truck
driver after things calmed. Really neat people. I really liked talking to them.
I would go down to the main bar on Saturday night, which is where the whole town went for
their Saturday evening entertainment. Everybody would be in there dancing and sitting at the
bar and cutting up, but it was not ventilated. I mean, the smoke, cigarette smoke, was so thick
you could cut it. Today, half of our folks couldn't tolerate it. It was not even tolerable then,
and I was a smoker then. Everybody in town was there and you'd see all these people. Then
you would walk out of this club at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning and it'd be light because it
was summer and the midnight sun.
I'd take my meals at various different restaurants. One of them was called the B and B, for
Booze and Beer. Another one was across the street. I don't remember the name of it, but I
remember it had a sawdust floor. On the one side there was a counter and stools and a few
booths, and on the other side there was the bar. Out front on benches would be men who
were out of work. During the right season they worked the crab boats--king crab was big on
the island. They'd get paid, come in at night and buy everyone a round at the bar. For the
other several months of the year they'd sit out there hoping somebody would come by and
remember and buy them a drink at the bar. They had great fish to eat there so that's where I'd
have my evening meal, and then I'd walk back to the hotel two blocks away.
It really was like I was living in the Old West. I remember a discussion one night. This one
group of folks that I was talking to were so irate because the town had just passed a city
ordinance that you could no longer abandon your refrigerator or stove in your front yard. This
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