Meyered in history — Past is ever-present around Kasilof collector’s property

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

On his kitchen table, Larry Meyer has an 8-by-10 color photograph that, at first glance, appears to be a man frozen in a block of glacier ice. Upon more scrutiny, however, the careful observer will note the name “MEYER” written in black ink on the trapped man’s left leather glove, and then quickly realize that the distorted face behind the blue ice is that of Meyer himself.

A grin breaks out behind his salt-and-pepper whiskers, and Meyer laughs as he explains the joke. But the image — however staged and silly — is still apropos.

At 70, Meyer is anything but “frozen in time.” His Kasilof homestead is a different story.

Scattered across its grassy taiga are hundreds of relics from the past.

A self- acknowl- edged Dumpster-diving, junkyard-scrounging collector of anything useful or interesting — most intriguingly more than a dozen old buildings, most of them labeled and disassembled on their original sites, then carted to Meyer’s place and pieced back together like immense jigsaw puzzles — he has accumulated acres upon acres of other people’s past and given it all a new home.

Meyer frequently employs a common Alaska noun, “seagull,” as a verb to describe his tendency to swoop in and strip away the meaty good parts from whatever he happens to find.

Meyer rescues dilapidated structures, rusting hulks, abandoned machines and rotting crafts. He plucks and saves old fishing gear, old hunting and trapping gear, old farming gear, old homesteading gear— really, anything that has been around awhile and in which he detects some inherent value.

Among the oddities a visitor to the Meyer homestead might find are a bedraggled goat-head mount with one eye missing, several rifles burned beyond usefulness but nailed like trophies above the lintels of doorways, two small birds nests tucked into the empty headlight sockets of an ancient Ford, and an entire wrecked station wagon packed with hubcaps.

Meyer also has more than 60 cars and about 30 snowmachines — most lying in various states of disrepair in an area he fondly refers to as his “junkyard,” basically a semiopen vehicular graveyard in which the trees, weeds and rust are winning.

Some of Meyer’s vehicles are protected by shed roofs or barns. There is his 1931 Model A Ford, his 1963 Pontiac Bonneville, his 1968 Lincoln Continental and several early model Polaris and Ski-Do snowmachines.

Many of these vehicles Meyer had originally meant to restore or to use for parts.

“Got a hell of a pile out there,” he said. “A little bit of it I used, but most of it I didn’t.”

Also on the grounds are half a dozen wooden boats, most of them in some stage of renovation. One — formerly filled with dirt and used as a flower garden — is slowly succumbing to the elements.

But the real prize here is the buildings. Meyer has sheds, barns, homes, a garage, a sauna and even an outhouse rescued from the ravages of time.

A 1929 Alaska Road Commission map of the Kasilof River area displays numerous names — of local historical importance — connected to the buildings on Meyer’s property: H.P. Jensen, Archie McLane, Abram Erickson, J.A. Nylander, Slim Crocker.

Meyer, who came to the Kenai Peninsula in the fall of 1960 to work for big-game guide George Pollard, began collecting these buildings a few years later. He had left Alaska temporarily, but in 1962 he drove his 1953 Mercury (now part of the junkyard) back to Alaska and homesteaded in Kasilof.
With the dream in his head of becoming a guide like Pollard, Meyer rescued what he called “the Peacock Building,” because he got it from Ernie Peacock. Essentially, it was a horse barn, in which Meyer planned to keep the horses he would need for guiding.

He quickly realized, however, that he was “not a good carpenter” and could barely feed himself, let alone a horse. So for nearly the next 40 years, he worked on oil platforms, in commercial salmon fishing and in various other jobs — and kept his seagull eyes peeled for new bargains.

Over the years he collected the McLane Schoolhouse, built in 1912 by Charlie West and used in the 1930s by Kasilof’s first teacher, Enid McLane; the Slim Crocker home, built in 1928 and purchased by Meyer in 1974 for $1,800 to use as his own home; and the Erickson-Lovdahl barn and fox kitchen, which includes several fox houses and a tower for observing the foxes raised on Ed Lovdahl’s farm.

There is also the home of Alex Lind (who had changed his name from J.A. Nylander); a barn that Meyer purchased from Mae Ciechanski; the Holden house, the origins of which are fuzzy but which was probably built in the late 1930s; and a garage formerly owned by Ray McNutt, husband to Sterling’s longtime postmaster, Gloria McNutt.

Perhaps the most peculiar history of all the structures is the outhouse, because it was the site of a suicide, according to Meyer. He said that Christian Jensen, brother of Kasilof’s Pete Jensen, became too ill to take care of himself, moved in with his brother, and then, despondent about his condition, shot himself one day in the outhouse.

Meyer keeps track of the histories of his structures (as well as many of his vehicles, boats and other assorted objects), but his methods are problematical. Although he has written down many facts and stories on a variety of scattered papers, he frequently finds himself saying, “I’ve got that written down somewhere,” without being completely sure where that is. And the facts and stories not yet committed to paper are “written” only in his head.

“When I was in school, when you had to write a 300-word report or somethin’, I just never did it,” he said. “I’m just not very good. I can tell the stories, but writin’ ’em down, I just hate it. I hate it.”

Many people, he said, have urged him to write anyway, or to dictate to someone, and also to organize his many photographs of original buildings and owners and his reconstruction processes, but he has resisted.

Standing over a pile of mainly historical photographs and a scrapbook full of blank pages, he said, “I dug these pictures out, and I was going to put ’em in this book — about five years ago, and here they sit.

“If I kick the bucket, you’ll have a hard time finding all this (stuff).”

Another concern, as far as local historians are concerned, is what will happen to all of Meyer’s stuff after he dies.

“As of now, it’s left to my one son,” he said, acknowledging that he doesn’t know what his son’s intentions will be.

He said, however, that he does plan to consider other options of preserving his treasures.

In the meantime, he is content to look for more bargains and to give tours to the occasional visitors who follow the meandering gravel roads out to his property, where history is alive and well.

Special delivery — Rural nurse takes life lessons as they come

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

In 1939, actress Butterfly McQueen, as the character Prissy, said famously, “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies” in “Gone With the Wind.”

That story was a work of fiction.

Ten years later, however, when itinerant public health nurse Shirley Denison had thoughts similar to Prissy’s, the situation was real, which could have been unfortunate for the pregnant women of Seldovia, where Denison was stationed.

Denison, now Shirley Henley of Kenai, had just arrived on the Kenai Peninsula in February 1949, following two years of field-nurse work in Birmingham, Ala., near where she was born and raised. Her work in the field had been preceded by studies at Maryville College and then a master’s degree in nursing at Yale.

Her plan, after Yale, had been to go to Alaska as soon as possible. However, to complete her agreement with the Cadet Nurse Corps, which had subsidized her degree, she owed two years’ work. On the day her two years were up, she headed north.

Henley said that she wanted to go to Alaska because it was “as far away as I could get from Alabama.” She said she wanted to escape the crowds and all of the rules and regulations, and she figured the Territory of Alaska offered her the most freedom.

“Up here, the closest any supervision you had was Anchorage, and I only saw my supervisor from Anchorage once a year,” she said.

Talk about autonomy: The Alaska Territorial Department of Nursing hired Henley and stationed her in Seldovia, where an absence of doctors had forced the city’s hospital to close its doors. When Henley arrived, she was the only medical show in town.

With the closest doctors in Seward and Anchorage, she said, “You had to do whatever you had to do.”
One definite drawback to doing it all was Henley’s lack of obstetrics training.

“When I was in Yale, one of the things I very carefully avoided was obstetrics,” said Henley, now 85. “And the first thing I knew I was having to deliver babies.” Three or four women in Seldovia were in the family way.
One of her first pregnant patients was Nelda Calhoun, who was not a first-time mother. Nelda and her husband, Red, had had a poor fishing season, Henley said, and they couldn’t afford to go to Anchorage for the birth. They also refused offers of financial aid because they saw them as charity.

“(Nelda) had had some problems with previous pregnancies, so I wrote to (the supervisor in) Anchorage and said, ‘I will go anywhere and do anything if you’ll just send a midwife down here,’” said Henley, who was only 25 at the time. “And they did have public health nursing midwives available, so I asked to swap places with them until they got these people delivered.

“What they did was send me a huge box of obstetrics books. And the more I read, the more frantic I became because, you know, these obstetrics books told of all these awful things that could go wrong, and I thought, ‘Oh, God!’

“I did some heavy praying.”

And she did the best she could.

“I had done all the prenatal work,” she said. “That was part of my responsibilities, you know — take your blood pressure and make sure your diet’s good and everything. So here Nelda’s in labor, and she says, ‘Well, aren’t you going to do a pelvic exam?’ And I said, ‘Nelda, I’d just as soon stick my finger in my mouth for what I know, so why make you more uncomfortable?”

Soon, though, the spring of 1950 arrived, and with it the inevitable delivery of the Calhoun baby. Henley said she dreaded the thought that any day Red Calhoun would arrive at her door and announce that the time had come.

“I’d lie awake at night and listen to people walk down the boardwalk (below her apartment),” she said. “And I’d think, ‘Oh, God, please don’t let it be Red. Don’t let it be Red Calhoun. I’m not ready for this.’”
Then one night it was Red Calhoun. Full of anxiety, Henley packed her bag and followed him to the Calhoun home.

In the end, everything turned out well — the baby, an 8-pound boy they named Dan, was delivered successfully — but there was one moment of special trepidation.

“When (Nelda) was in the process of delivering, she says, ‘Am I bleeding very much?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And she says, ‘Well, thank God. The last time I hemorrhaged.’ I didn’t want to hear that,” Henley said.

Throughout her short time as an itinerant public health nurse, she had many other adventures — when Yule Kilcher’s dog bit her on the butt the day she came to vaccinate his children, for example — and when she went into public education in Kenai in 1958 she had plenty more.

Henley, who continued as a nurse until her first child, Ruth, was born in 1952, said she never did get comfortable delivering other people’s babies.

“I’d read all those books, and I knew what could happen,” she said.

Art Seen: Water works

Pam Mersch discovered her love for art as an adolescent, painting horse portraits for her father. She had two aunts who were longtime active artists, and another who tried her hand at it but then focused all of her energy on her job helping the developmentally disabled.

Mersch’s mother, Gwen Thomas, was always an oil painter. That is until Mersch coerced her into taking a watercolor workshop in Oregon. Now Thomas is an avid watercolorist almost exclusively, much like her daughter. Mersch has done some “smoke paintings,” where she’s utilized the smoke from a burning fatwood stick to “paint” on paper. The effect is quite dreamy and intriguing. She has also done the occasional collage, sometimes utilizing her watercolor pieces in them.

Mersch received an associate’s degree in art from the University of Alaska Anchorage in 1975, and married Steve Mersch in 1978. He is a veterinarian, and Mersch spent many years working for his practice, as well as doing numerous other jobs, including volunteering for local arts groups like the Kenai Art Guild (aka Peninsula Art Guild) and Triumvirate Theatre. Throughout it all, she has continued to explore her artwork, delighting especially in the almost magical nature of watercolor.

Her work will be on display at the Funky Monkey in Kenai for October, with a First Thursday reception from 6 to 9 p.m. The lively piece “Trade” incorporates a new technique she recently picked up at a workshop in Homer. It involves thoroughly wetting both sides of a 140-pound weight piece of watercolor paper, then laying it flat on a gator board. The paper stays flat because of the water saturation, avoiding the pesky curling many watercolorists often contend with. The colors are also more lush and remain more saturated upon drying, and the brushstrokes are especially yummy.

Mersch has traveled to Italy for a workshop and recently lived awhile in Sherborn, a town in Dorset County, England. Steve had a stint as a resident veterinarian and Mersch used this opportunity to sketch and paint her new surroundings. Every Tuesday she walked into Sherborn to paint with a watercolor group. Tea was served promptly at 3 p.m., without fail. The watercolor group that meets here locally at the Kenai Fine Arts Center every second and third Saturday is a great source of camaraderie and inspiration for her, as well. (Call 262-7040 for information on that.)

I asked Mersch what her advice to aspiring artists would be, and she quickly responded, “Live it, breathe it; even more than I do. Experience as many mediums as you possibly can and be brave.”

And then she laughed, because sometimes we teach best what we most need to learn. Mersch’s work is certainly lively and curious, and any new direction she may choose to go is likely to yield inviting results.

Zirrus VanDevere is a local mixed-media artist and owns Art Works gallery in Soldotna. She has bachelor’s degrees in fine arts and education.