Jim Susky: Bill Susky's Estate

“God Damn IT, WOMAN” said Dad as he raised his hand and started toward Mom. She lifted a chair at the lion she married. Dad stopped, turned to me, and with his West Virginia drawl said, “Come on, boy. Get your shoes on”… then stormed out the door.

Early evening in July, sun still high, I scrambled to join him in his rusty Willys. He stomped the pedal, the ancient truck lurched, heading south down Lois Drive toward Spenard Road. That Willys never got the faithful attention its faithful performance deserved; I could see the road through the floorboards. Soon, we bumped along the rough quarter-mile driveway leading to the emerging Susky Estate. Through the window the parcel seemed a vast expanse marked only by a sunken concrete slab and low cinder block walls. I looked south and saw, for the first time, the garden that would enlarge until Dad passed in his fifty-third year: an acre of potato rows sidled up beside another of strawberries.

By then, Dad had regained his normally unflappable composure. He was almost jovial as he stepped out and stretched his 6six-foot frame.

“All right, boy, lets pull some weeds.”

His door slammed. I creaked mine open and set off behind his forced march to the garden. My youthful estimate was of countless endless rows of plants. Much later I discovered that chickweed is excellent chicken feed. Dad raised no livestock, so for years

chickweed was nothing more than a chore. For him, cutting strawberry runners was purposeful ease—off he went hoe in hand. He was an Equal Opportunity Employer—in later summers I learned to hold my own with that same hoe.

In 1964, Wilhelm (known as “Bill”) and Vieno (known as Vi) Susky bought twenty acres as a parcel that was once part of the Evenson homestead. Evenson was locally known as a potato farmer, a reputation that surely got Bill’s attention, as he was himself an avid gardener with a double lot in Spenard.

Vi Kauppila was the eldest of four born to Finnish parents in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She first lived on a homestead adjoining the Escanba River. For centuries, the Finnish custom has been to first build a serviceable sauna and only then build the house.

Wilhelm was the eldest of five born to Poles who had emigrated to Lochgelly, West Virginia. In 1930, at the tender age of fourteen, he started work as a coal miner and was continuously employed as such until the Japanese invaded Hawaii.

The Kelm family lived at the end of Victor Road, which then stretched a mere half-mile south of two-lane Dimond Blvd. He worked with Dad in the Building and Grounds Department of the Greater Anchorage Area Borough School District. I remember him as a modest man who let his hammer do the talking. After Mom passed, I discovered Dad’s ledger showing that he’d paid Mr. Kelm to help frame in and weather in the bottom floor of the house.

One weekend morning I accompanied Dad to the site. As we piled out of his Willys, I noticed a special spring in his step. He poured a steaming cup from his battered steel thermos and said, “This is a big day, son.” Like Kelm, Dad let his tools speak, so no explanation was offered—nor was it necessary.

A half hour later a crane showed up, soon followed by a huge flatbed and crew. The setup went smoothly. Within another half hour the fifty-foot, north-facing part of our house was lifted and anchored into place. When your second floor is prefabricated in Oregon it goes up fast in Alaska. By noon the house doubled in size.

Dad hired Kent Woodard to wire the house. I only saw him once, yet he impressed me as a strapping, rakishly handsome man. My Mother’s impression was different: “My God, that MAN is ARROGANT.”

Many years later I read with interest Kent Lee Woodard’s monthly epistles on policy to the Anchorage Daily News. I may have to go to microfilm to see if his pen spoke as arrogantly as his tongue. I regret that I never showed Mom any of his 250-word perorations.

As Bill Susky’s house grew, so did his garden. By move-in, August 1966, the garden had expanded to include a 300-ft. three-row hedge of raspberry canes, cabbages, carrots, kohlrabi, lettuce, radishes, and newfangled snow peas (then called "edible pod"). Tomatoes and cucumbers flourished in the cinderblock greenhouse abutting the house's southwest corner.

In sub-arctic South Central Alaska we have three seasons: summer, winter, and breakup. At our house, breakup featured weekend morning transplanting strawberries (with ice still intact) and Jiffy-7 peat pots in trays indoors with tomato and cucumber starts gracing every south-facing window.

Our coffee table had the usual mass-circulation magazines: Time, Newsweek, Family Circle, National Geographic; along with Rodale's Prevention and Organic Gardening and Farming and the Seattle-produced Alaska Magazine. As a youngster I thought everyone separated cans, paper, and plastic from compostable items—the latter going into a bucket with a foot-operated tightly-fitting lid. When we finally got a lawn, grass clippings were combined with coffee grounds, fish bones, and banana peels—all of it making a glorious odiferous mass on the path back to the garden. Those coffee grounds came from three-pound cans labeled Hills Bros., Folgers, Maxwell House, and MJB. Those cans were duly saved for berry picking and for watering the greenhouse.

My regular chore was to water the greenhouse. Our 170-ft-deep well yielded water of almost glacial temperature, so we would temper it. I dispensed water from rubber garbage cans that had warmed in the greenhouse for a day and fill them for the following day.

Many was the Saturday morning when I ventured out to the garden to find my dad picking strawberries with as many as fifteen cans full of color. Bill and Vi both worked for the school district. Mom taught and had summers off. Dad worked year round so it fell to Mom to greet the berry-pickers when they came.

For two summers we sold strawberries. I remember a cardboard pint container of sad-looking in-season mostly unripe strawberries cost $0.69 at Piggly Wiggly. If you picked the berries, they were a buck a gallon. If we picked them, it was a buck-and-a-quarter. The next year we raised our prices to $1.25 and $1.50.

Our "gallon" was that three-pound coffee can. A woman once objected that those cans were not quite a full gallon, to which my mother (who made a living facing 150 seventh and eighth graders each school day) retorted "around here, that's a gallon."

I saw my father smoke only once—a cigar to celebrate my brother's arrival from Old Providence Hospital. Both the folks recalled their own fathers' alcohol problems—no doubt that was the reason we only saw Schlitz and Cold Duck when company came over. I never saw a drop of anything stronger until our neighbors moved in a few years later with their ubiquitous highballs.

It was a Saturday morning in early September when I first saw a cooler full of beer. Folks arrived about nine o’clock in the morning for a potato picking party. Frost had hit and the potatoes were ready. I'd seen Dad fool around with his tractor that morning. It started and was plenty warm in time for one of the men to hold the plow on each row. Dad had salvaged dozens of five-gallon cans from work, which had originally contained floor cleaner, paint, thinner, and myriad other hazardous chemicals. Perhaps a dozen adults followed behind with those cans. Dad said three cans made one hundred pounds. Sure enough, three would fill a 100-pound burlap sack.

Once all the potatoes were picked (covering about one acre), everyone sat down for a picnic lunch of potato salad, sandwiches, such rarities as potato chips and Fritos, all washed down with equally rare Schlitz, Coke, and 7-Up. Soft drinks were not a staple in our house, so I made sure to get more than my share of 7-Up. After lunch, everyone went home with a 100-pound sack and full bellies. We were left with a mound of potatoes that dominated half of our double-car garage for the rest of the winter.