“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.
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ReplyDeleteFantastic story! My grandma was Sophia; Bills Sister. My brother and I were lucky to have had so much time with them (our Grandparents) during our childhood in the Summer months in Scientists Cliffs MD. There was never a dull moment having a Grandma like Sophia.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, it's nice to read about distance family like this. Thanks for sharing!
Stephen Cusimano
cusimanow@yahoo.com