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Prologue: The Alaska Contact

There is an odd connection between our South African adventure and my first serious traveling. It began several days after graduating from high school. During prior summer vacations I had obtained reasonably well paying construction jobs, but this June of 1948 the market was not encouraging. I had a card in the local construction union, but after a week’s worth of hitting the hiring hall at 7 am I was still unemployed. It was pure chance that on that Friday morning I came across a friend, Jim Tribe, who had worked the prior summer on a mining barge out of Fairbanks and had landed another summer’s work and planned to leave for Alaska the following Monday. As it happened another classmate, Roger Doolittle, was scheduled to deliver a new GMC pickup to his brother who lived in Anchorage and Jim had arranged to ride with him and share the cost of fuel. This would involve a detour up to Fairbanks prior to dropping down to Anchorage.

I can’t recall why particularly, but after conferring with Roger, the two suggested that I might go with them. Roger was relatively certain that employment would be available in Anchorage if not Fairbanks and assured me that I could arrange for temporary housing with his brother and his wife in Anchorage. Sounded like a plan to me.


That evening I presented what I probably naively thought of as a plan to my parents. Mom was much less than enthusiastic; but Dad, who had been orphaned early and more or less on his own since he was 15, was supportive. So they advanced me $50 and we were on our way Monday morning to the Canadian border crossing at Kingsgate, Idaho.

We got along surprisingly well. I had the most driving experience and Roger the least, so Jim and I did most of the driving. We drove 12 or 14 hour days and slept on the ground off the main road, or so we thought. On morning we woke up to discover that we had in fact spread our sleeping bags on a side road. Wonder that someone had not run over us.

It was quite a trip. The Alcan Highway in those days was not paved and in many spots was still under construction. The one way mileage from Eugene to Fairbanks is 2522 miles and given the road conditions I reckon it took us 9 to 10 days, perhaps fewer, but do recall at times the highway was muck, torn up and even hardly there. There was little time devoted to sight seeing side trips.


The northern part of the route was completed, more or less, in 1942. The war gave it a boost and by 1948 it was well traveled, if bumpy. I recall once we were mired down on a particularly rough section and a huge dirt mover came up behind our pick up, slowed to a gentle pace, and then shoved us several hundred yards to gravel where we could regain traction.

Roger and I dropped Jim off in Fairbanks and then back trailed via Highway 3 to Anchorage. His brother and sister in-law lived in a canvas and shiplap tent several miles out of town at Lake Spenard. They were kind enough to set us up in a lean-to pup tent that attached to the back of their tent. The four of us and their large shaggy dog shared the main tent for meals.


Construction jobs were available but required relocating out along the rail road. Given the need for cash and availability of job openings at the Alaska Rail Road Warehouse, I put in an application for a floorman’s job. Each floorman had a fork lift and was assigned a section of the warehouse. The main responsibility was to unload pallets from box cars and set them in piles in the warehouse where they remained until local trucks would come to fetch the goods, at which time a floor man would locate the pallet(s) and move them onto the customer’s truck. No big deal, something an alert high school graduate could handle. The shortage of high school graduates and the competition of better paid construction work combined made for a short waiting list of openings. My time frame being short, I opted for the Alaska Railroad option.

There was a cluster of college students from Los Angeles who had settled in for the summer in Anchorage and in a short time I became friends with one who was living with his brother and sister in law. (There seemed to be a lot of that going on.) They offered to rent me bed and board and I gladly accepted. I lost track of Roger, but we met up again in Eugene in the fall and remained good friends as did Jim and I.

Life was okay, if not exciting in Anchorage. I recall we read paperback novels and weekly magazines. I considered renting a set of drums but soon came to my senses. Instead I made a washtub base fiddle out of a galvanized tub, a wooden broom handle and a leather strip. One LA guy played guitar, another cornet and sometimes we found a piano player. It all worked itself into a garage band of sorts.


After a week or two I became acquainted with Dick a Railroad customer who had developed a laundry route that ran on the Alaska Railroad from Anchorage to Fairbanks and return. Dick was in his late twenties, from the east coast and was more or less trying to escape from a demanding ,and according to him, overprotective family. He once had thespian aspirations, but apparently received no encouragement and much flack from his parents about not going into the family business or at least doing something worthwhile with his life! For some reason, he relocated for a time in Durban, South Africa, and while there discovered that he could live well on a modest income. His daily living expenses, adequate housing and a personal servant could be had for about $100 per month in Durban, a cosmopolitan coastal city, he informed me.(This upon reflection is getting very Somerset Maughamish, but please bear with me.)

The lack of a steady income flow for Dick was the catch, of course, and he decided a wiser plan would be to develop his economic base somewhere else and then return to South Africa because it would be difficult for him to earn that much regularly as a foreigner in South Africa. After evaluating various options, he decided to take advantage of the booming financial opportunities in Alaska. Thus, after relocating in Anchorage, looked into several options and hit upon laundry route scheme. It was then that he purchased a new 1946 Pakcard station wagon which was the only significant investment required.

Dick contacted several laundries in Anchorage and worked out logistical and financial arrangements with them. He advertised his service and establish contacts in labor camps and villages along the railroad. The railroad was the only reliable means of transportation available. There were no navigable roads in those days. He had laundry bags collected and put on the train on a regular schedule and then transferred them to laundries in Anchorage. A week later he would transfer the laundered clothes to the train and then dropped off to his contacts along the route and then pick up the new bags to be delivered to the laundries. Essentially, that is how Dick’s operation worked.

This scheme seemed successful and his Packard station attracted considerable attention in town.

As the summer progressed Dick and I came to know one another reasonably well. He was an interesting fellow and I thought it would have been enjoyable to spend more time together. However, I soon learned that he had other interests in the person of a young woman who had been left with 2 young daughters. Whether there had been a husband (or 2) in the mix I never learned. It did seem from what he revealed that she and her two children were living with him and he was providing some financial support. I met her only once and briefly when he gave me a lift into town and she and her girls were in the Packard. This was long ago and my memory is fuzzy but I recall her being attractive and personable. Or, perhaps I was working my own fantasy overtime.

Dick told me from time to time about life in multi-racial Durban which was totally strange to me. In 1948 there were only two or three black families residing in Eugene. During the war a small population of blacks developed in Portland working in and around the Kaiser Ship Building Works but there was no reason for any of them to visit Eugene. A couple of my high school friends and I would hitchhike to Portland 3 or 4 times a year where we would see blacks on the street, but that was the extent of my multi-racial experience. Thus, Dick’s tales about being a white minority among a black majority were difficult to comprehend for me. I had read some about apartheid which was being institutionalized in 1948 and except for being amazed at its very existence, was very naive and informed about its implications.

In early September it seemed appropriate that my Alaska adventure come to an end and that I return for the beginning of school. I bought passage on a non-scheduled airline from Anchorage to Seattle. The non-scheds would place a sign in the window of a downtown store announcing a predicted dates of flights to Seattle. You had to check daily as the date approached because actual departure dates were a function of all seats being sold. Thus, the initial departure dates were variable and unknown until the day the last seat had been sold. Each flight left the following morning.

A high point of that return trip return in 1948 was when the captain invited me to sit in the copilot’s seat of the DC-3 while the latter served sandwiches to the passengers. As had many youths of the day, the thought of becoming an airline pilot had crossed my mind, but the brief experience in the co-pilots seat staring at the accumulated dials and navigation devices forced me to come to grips with my totally inadequate math skills. Back to the band room, for then at least.

Nevertheless, Dick’s tales of South Africa had a permanent spot in my memory, and so I was naturally drawn to news over the years to the fate of apartheid and the people of South Africa.

The years rolled by and 31 years later in 1979 I was a tenured university professor and author and had enjoyed a variety of international experiences. Thus the day when I received a letter from Barry Beck, a psychologist and faculty member in Durban, inquiring about visiting the career counseling program at the University of Oregon I responded with considerable interest and enthusiasm.

Barry completed a program of doctoral studies at the university and following his graduation he, Theresa and I continued to explore assisting with the development of career counseling in South Africa. That led to our educational tour of 8 South Africa education sites which is described in the remainder of this section.

Jack Loughary 10/08/07



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