Moving Forward with My Grandmother, Dorothy Roth Loftus

As I reported here, I made a pledge to myself to cut way back on my pleasure reading in 2015 to concentrate on writing my next book, about my grandmother. It took until March 2016 to pound out a 140-page first draft. Over the subsequent six months I read a lot of secondary research to try to fill the gaps (both in my knowledge and for the reader’s benefit) about the history of Alaska Territory and the city of Fairbanks.

I ran into some unanticipated roadblocks in each of the past two autumns, however. In the fall of 2015, my wife Carole suffered an accident that put her in the hospital and made the local news. In the fall of 2016, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and has been undergoing chemotherapy ever since. Both events knocked a bit of the stuffing out of both of us, and my book project was one of the things I mostly put aside.

Now I feel ready to get back to it. You can go back and read my first post about this project for the basic background. Here’s a collection of some of the best short excerpts I posted on my Facebook page last year for friends and family:

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The log cabin at 57 Second Avenue in Fairbanks would be Dorothy’s home for the next two decades, until after her marriage in 1928. In her judgment, “It was worse than sleeping in a tent.” Ice filled the corners, and long lines of frost “like railroad tracks’ could be seen along the dining room and sitting room walls where the logs met. Nearly all the nail heads in the walls looked “like a white Russian fur cap” because they were tipped with frost. “We were forbidden to pull at the ice because Mother said the oatmeal from the wallpaper would come off, too. Oatmeal paper was very stylish then.”

Dorothy often liked to place a cup of water on the stand next to her bed so she wouldn’t have to get up for a drink. It usually froze overnight. Known as a granite cup or enamel cup, it was made of iron coated with enamel, as were many cooking ware items then. The freezing and expanding water popped bits of the enamel off the surface of the mug. “I didn’t know we were cold, because that’s all I knew. But Mother really suffered. And we lived in that house from 1909 until she died.”

The two Roth girls had a “very bad habit” that later drew frowns from their sister-in-law Audrey Stanfield, who would marry Art’s little brother Ted. “There were a lot of candies that we didn’t like as well as the others, so we would just carefully poke in the bottom of ’em to see if we liked ’em. I didn’t like anything that was flavored with maple, I didn't like anything that was flavored with coconut, and so we had to take a little peek, you know. Finally, of course, as the candy supply ran shorter and shorter and shorter, you had to eat those that we’d punched and discarded because there wasn’t anything else to do, you see.”

According to a 1969 retrospective in Frontier Times magazine, standard-gauge railroad tracks for the Alaska Railroad arrived in Fairbanks on the east side of the freight shed near the depot. Goods and equipment that came up from the coast at Cordova or Anchorage would either be unloaded at the shed or transferred to trains on a set of narrow-gauge tracks that led off from the west side to the woods and mines.

Heavy freight that belonged to the FE Company would have to be moved from boxcars and flat cars on the standard-gauge tracks to smaller gondolas on the narrow gauge in order to transport it to the worksites. Similarly, four-feet wood planks cut at Mile 451 would have to be moved in loads of eighteen cords on the standard-gauge flatcars to narrow-gauge cars “by muscle men who made a specialty of this work. The greatest of them all was Art Loftus, whose record of transferring wood was never equaled by any other one man, and not by some crews of four men.” Since he was attending the college during the day in the early 1920s, Art “did this work at night after class hours,” McPhee noted.

Coal headed for the lower 48 from the Healy River beyond Nenana, about 60 miles from Fairbanks, came in on the narrow-gauge railroad in “gondolas, which is a lovely name for a coal car,” Dorothy remembered with a laugh. In Fairbanks, the gondolas would be pulled up next to the standard-gauge cars and the coal transferred by hand. It’s a difficult task to shovel coal from one vehicle to another, Dorothy recalled, because “there’s great big rocks, then small, and then dust.” Sometimes a bit of an incline between the narrow-gauge gondolas and the standard-gauge rail cars made the work a little easier, but “mostly it was heaving.”

According to Dorothy, Art’s record was 72 tons of coal in a single day, which was more than four men employed by the freight office typically moved before he took on the job, and certainly more than any other single man. “He said it was more than 72 tons, because the cars were heaped up so high. And he did it, I think, for 35 cents a ton.”

“I used to haul ore on Ester Dome [west of Fairbanks, Alaska, in the 1920s]. There was a lot of little gold, quartz properties; there was five mills on Ester Dome. I had green wagons with a box that would carry a good four tons, four to five; and the miner would load it, and I’d haul it. Well, it was 300 tons on the Ester side of the hill. I hauled it over the ridge to Henderson’s mill on St. Patrick, for two dollars a ton. And my helper didn’t come along to take the night shift, so I worked a double shift for six days, twenty-two hours a day. I just slept from two to four in the morning, and jumped up and went to work again, without any help.”

-- Art Loftus, July 1981 interview

In the 1920s and 1930s, the NC Company would lay pipes on the ground along the streets of Fairbanks to supply homes with water during the nicer months of the year. “We used the NC water in our house for washing dishes, for flushing toilets, for taking baths. Now, we didn’t drink it, because it wasn’t safe, came from the river.”

Art displayed his ingenuity one fall when Dorothy was making mincemeat and the pipes froze. “Here I was, in the midst of this sticky mincemeat, and I said, ‘What am I going to do?’ He got a great big can with a spout on it, and went to the larger line on Cushman Street that hadn’t frozen. I don’t know whether it was three hundred or four hundred feet to Cushman, but he dribbled gasoline all along that pipe and then he lit a match to it!”

That thawed out the water pipe to their home, and Dorothy could finish making her mincemeat. “Who but your grandfather would have thought of anything so simple and so basic?”

In the summer of 1929, my grandmother moved into the new house at 10th and Cushman that her husband of 16 months had built for her and their newborn son (my father Don):

With appropriately dramatic pauses, Dorothy related: “… We Had … an Indoor Toilet. We had a BATHroom. I was able to indulge in that greatest of pleasures: reading in the bathroom” -- by which she meant specifically, in the tub. The first existing structure that Art purchased in his program to become a landlord was one of the earliest cabins in town, owned by Mrs. Stewart, that also contained one of the first bathtubs to be hauled into the interior of Alaska, possibly in 1906 or 1907. “Somebody mining had had enough money to have it brought up the river -- that long, long weary trip, five weeks from Seattle -- and that’s what he put in our house.”

Dorothy now enjoyed the luxury of a long tub in which even a fairly tall person could lie flat; “and of course, I like to read in the bathtub, which Art thought was reprehensible. And once in a while I’d lose a book. When I lost a library book, I gave up reading library books in the bathtub,” she recalled with laughter.

Admittedly, the water was still horrible: “You took a bath in water that was the color of strong tea, or you put a water softener in it that cut the color a little bit, but, unless you got it dissolved real, real well, when you sat down in the tub, why, the crystals were still there and the chemicals were prone to burn your bottom quite a lot. So bathing was something that took a lot of effort.”

Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, widely recognized as a curmudgeon, got the bright idea in the mid 1930s of funding the government railroad by placing a toll on freight that traveled the highway and had to cross the Tanana River by ferry. “There was no other way to get across the river,” Dorothy recalled, “so they had you right there.”

The Wikipedia page devoted to the Rika’s Landing Roadhouse -- the inn, store, and post office on the south side of the Tanana -- states that the toll at the ferry crossing climbed to almost ten dollars a ton.

The truckers were outraged, because in effect, the government was taxing them to support their competition (in fact, the Alaska Road Commission openly admitted the purpose of the toll was to pressure shippers to switch to the railroad), but nobody could figure out what to do about it.

Art Loftus chose to act. When he was hauling a load home from the port of Valdez and arrived on the south side of the Tanana, he hijacked the ferry and pulled it across the river with his truck over the protests of the ferry operator. To “compound the felony,” as Dorothy put it, a trucker named Gene Rogge who was on the highway just behind Art, pulled down the telephone line that could have gotten immediate word out that Art Loftus had stolen the ferry.

“It set the whole town on its ears, I’ll tell you. For months there was a threat of Art’s being hailed into court. I was sure he was going to be behind bars, and I would be left with children to raise. But somehow or other, by Jove, nothing came of it. Art got away with a lot of things that I just couldn’t believe.”

Me: Grandfather always nursed a great hatred of Franklin Roosevelt. Why was that?

Dorothy: Well, because he upset the apple cart. Art was a conservative Republican, and he disapproved of all the things that Roosevelt did to save the country. He felt that the country didn’t need saving; every human being could get together and save it themselves. So he just hated him. And hated her, too. We had a lot of arguments on that.

Me: You being a lifelong Democrat, how did you square that with your husband?

Dorothy: Well, I finally became a Republican ’cause he just fussed and fussed, and of course I’m a peaceful person and I just couldn’t take that, so I went to the Republican meetings and did all these things, and I voted just as I darn pleased.

Me: Do you remember when you changed your registration? When you capitulated? Superficially?

Dorothy: Yes. Sometime in the late ’20s, early ’30s; not too long after we were married.

Me: Did he ever check up on you, how you were voting after that?

Dorothy: Oh no, and I wasn’t above fibbing.

Me: So did you vote for Roosevelt in all those elections? All four times?

Dorothy: Oh yes, yes, I always voted. I never missed an election, ’cause I wanted to be able to complain, and moan and groan, if it didn’t go to suit me, you know.

[from an interview in March 1992, when my grandmother was 87]

When I was a child in the 1960s and a teen in the 1970s, I was accustomed to seeing the skullcap of a prehistoric bison with its full, curving set of horns hanging on the wall above my grandparents’ television set. The petrified thigh bone of a wooly mammoth, some four or five feet long, lay on the floor, and I often handled mammoth teeth—each as big as a melon and weighing something like five or seven pounds—at her home.

The prehistoric remains had come mostly by way of Art’s brother Ted, who worked many years in stripping and thawing for the FE (Fairbanks Exploration) Company. His teams had to thaw out the frozen ground to get down to the gold-bearing veins, and they often dug through strata that included the bones of prehistoric creatures.

“Everybody that mined had piles of fossils,” Dorothy recalled. Ted “didn’t care a thing about it. He asked me if I wanted some of it, and of course I always said yes to everything, and so we did cart it outside.” I asked if her husband ever complained about all the stuff Dorothy collected. “I didn’t think Art would be that tolerant, but he was. I think he was tickled to death that I had the foresight to have acquired it, you see.”