Dorothy Roth Loftus, a Fairbanks pioneer

My biggest writing project over the past year has been a bio-memoir of my grandmother, Dorothy Roth Loftus. She was a year old when her father dragged the family from Visalia, in the San Joaquin Valley of California, to Fairbanks, Alaska -- a gold-rush boomtown that was barely three years old.

Rinehart Roth (he hated his name, and always went by “R.F.”) was a lawyer who would serve as district attorney in Fairbanks from 1916 to 1921 -- during the Woodrow Wilson administration -- but he sank everything he earned into worthless gold and coal mines. (That’s him, to the right.) Dorothy would grow up in Fairbanks, attend the brand-new local college starting on the day it opened its doors in 1922, and marry and raise her family before coming “Outside,” as Alaskans put it, in 1947 for retirement in Oregon: first in the upper Willamette Valley, and eventually Coos Bay. My family lived next door to her and grandfather when I was in my teens.

I refer to the book as a bio-“memoir” because the bulk of it is based on at least 13 hours of interviews I conducted with Dorothy next to a cassette tape recorder in 1984. The past year, I fashioned the transcripts of those tapes into a narrative that comes to about 140 pages in first draft.

The next step is to do the research necessary to incorporate supporting information from other sources that will fill out the narrative: newspaper reports, books about frontier Fairbanks and Alaska, tapes of interviews with other people who knew my grandparents, and so on.

But here are some of the tales that surfaced in the course of the writing last year….

April 23: This morning I am retyping letters written in 1908 and 1909 by my great-grandparents and their oldest daughter: my great-aunt Irma, who died later in 1909 of TB at the age of 17.

It’s a strange feeling to hold these people’s handwritten words in my fingers, more than a century old, and especially my great-aunt’s sketches of women’s heads and a little girl in a hood (at right, in 98-year-old ink and paper), knowing so much that is in the future for her parents, and that the artist will be gone in less than a year.

May 19: Just got a copy of an editorial from the Alaska Citizen newspaper, dated April 17, 1916, in which the paper calls the district attorney in Fairbanks “that unworthy official,” declares he told a lie “deliberately and maliciously” in court, and urges him to “resign for the good of the service and the safety of those who do not think the same way he does.” It concludes: “Make room for good men.”

That DA was my great-grandfather, Rinehart F. Roth.

June 11: This morning I’m transcribing a series of letters written 93 years ago by my grandmother Dorothy (a senior in high school in 1922) and great-grandmother Ada in Fairbanks. Poignant passage from my great-grandmother, Dec. 6, 1922:

“There is one thing sure, I am not going to stay here and work as hard as I do and get nothing for it. I will go where I can do something. I literally abhor this winter climate. … I think this the coming country too, but I can’t stay here to grow up with the country -- twenty years more and where will I be -- I want to live a little before I die.”

Sadly, though only 56 when she wrote the above, Ada would die less than five months later.

June 21: As she was preparing to enter the brand-new college that fall, Dorothy was also getting to know a fellow who had just arrived in Fairbanks. The timing, for both of them, could not have been more perfect. “I had just finished high school, and it was the first dance after high school. It was at the Masonic Temple. Of course we all had party dresses, long dresses, and I was 17.”

In those days, the girls always had a program for the dance. Which is to say, they carried either a printed program or a piece of paper and a little pencil on a string that they hung around their neck or wrist. “And you had all your dances spoken for ahead of time; if they were programmed, you knew it was going to be a waltz, or if it was a foxtrot. Once in a while they’d put in a three-step, which was sort of the sweetheart dance, ’cause it was kind of slow, you know.”

At the dance, Dorothy ran into Edby Davis, an older man who had a terrible stammer. Dorothy admitted much later that whenever Edby came along and insisted on getting a dance or two on her card, by the end of the evening “I would always manage, if I could, say, ‘Well, Edby, I couldn’t read your writing. So I thought it was somebody else’—’cause I hated to dance with him, he was a terrible dancer. Looking back, it was sad, because he was a bit of an object of ridicule….”

For decades thereafter, Dorothy would reproduce Edby Davis’s verbal clumsiness on that night in the early summer of 1922: “He came up to me at the dance, and he says, ‘D-D-D-D-D-Dorothy, I have a fr-fr-fr-friend. Now he’s a p-p-poor dancer, but a nn-n-nice fellow.’ And I thought, ‘Ohhh, dear God, what a recommendation, coming from [she laughs], coming from Edby Davis!”

But the minute she saw Art Loftus, she liked him. He wasn’t that young (Art would be 25 that July) and he was not a good dancer. But she liked him and he liked to dance. “He was a very quick learner, and he liked to be taught, and not many years after that, we won the prize waltz; and from then on we won many prizes dancing together. And you know, the two of us danced very beautifully together for well over 50 years.” (That’s a photo of Art Loftus below, in his U.S. Navy uniform a few years before he headed to Alaska.)

June 27: I’m transcribing a letter written by my great-grandmother on what would have been my birthday back in 1923. Among other things, she talks about her teenage daughters’ recent dating habits, and one fellow in particular:

“We like this young man very much. He has good principles -- the girls think he is just about right. He comes over and studies with them. He is not at all foolish, just a dignified, sensible young man that I am not afraid to have the girls go out with. … I am just as pleased as I can be to have this young man come into our home as one of the family. He is making his own way in the world and has no money to squander foolishly, so I think it just fine for him to stand on the footing that he does here.”

That was my future grandfather Art Loftus, age 25, and grandmother Dorothy, 18. Unfortunately, when she penned it, the author of this letter had barely one month to live.

July 1: My great-grandfather on my grandfather’s side, John Tom Loftus, was born in 1869 just after his parents and siblings moved to the US from southern Norway. He became a farmer in Tomahawk, north-central Wisconsin, and served as chief of police there around 1908.

My grandmother Dorothy Roth Loftus joked: “That was a bitter blow because it kind of hampered the poor Loftus boys in their efforts at Halloween and other things. But it left no permanent scars, because they had a lot of criminal tendencies that were very lovely to hear about.”

July 4: One of my grandmother’s favorite Fairbanks stories, when she was 18 and her sister Florence 16:

In 1923, the girls were getting ready for a dance to which Florence would be going with Walter “Mac” McDevitt, who worked on the railroad and would be coming to pick her up. Florence took her washtub bath first. “So I said to Florence, who was considerably a flibbertigibbet as far as remembering things that she should, I said: ‘Now, look. You’ve had your bath. When Mac comes, you keep him out of the kitchen.’ Oh yes, she’d do that.” Then Florence went upstairs to primp a little further.

A bath involved heating water on the wood stove, then pouring it into a big round tub in front of the open oven door so a person wouldn’t freeze to death while bathing in the winter. “You’d freeze on one side, but you could kind of rotate around,” Dorothy explained. “I had just gotten into this bathtub, and my gosh, I heard plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk, and I thought, ohhhh: Mac. There wasn’t anything for me to do but waft myself out the door and into the cache, which was cold storage we used to keep the meat frozen.” McDevitt stepped into the kitchen and saw the water sloshing in the empty tub “like a gold pan, and I heard a horrified Mac say, ‘Oh, no!’ So he wafted himself back out, and I got out of the deep freeze and came back, madder than (I was so mad that I didn’t freeze to death), finished my bath, and we went to the dance.”

[Above right is one of my favorite photos of my grandparents. It’s completely out of character: in reality, Art Loftus was a small businessman -- a trucker, contractor, small landlord; I think of him as “upper working class” -- but here, Art and Dorothy are dressed up as a banker from the early days, Luther Hess, and his wife, for a “Golden Days” historic celebration in Fairbanks, probably in the mid 1960s. It’s another bit of irony that the real Mrs. Hess, a member of the board of regents for the college my grandparents attended, was a political enemy of Dorothy’s father, the district attorney -- my great-grandfather, Rinehart Roth.]

July 12: Tonight I wrote and raced past the hundredth page of the first draft of my book about my grandmother and her family and times. It’s 1926, and her father has chased his pipe dreams out of state “for just three months” (but never to be seen again, though he will write his daughters over the next ten years to thank them for the money they send him while they’re struggling through college and starting their families; I have a few of those letters).

Very shortly, my grandmother will graduate from the college of mining and agriculture and marry. Then I believe I will pause to start doing heavy research -- books and microfilm newspapers -- and fill in some of the holes in the narrative up to this point (1927-28).

It’s like working on a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Very rewarding.