Katy Westfall Neher: Pint-Sized Potato Thieves

Occasionally, I enjoy a bite or two of raw potato and remember when I was a preschooler living in the basement across the street from Colonel “Muktuk” Marston’s potato patch in the late 1950s. I have no memories of my father living with us back then, but I know he did because he built the basement after our family moved from the Knik homestead to Turnagain-by-the-Sea, a ritzy new subdivision in Anchorage.

Our basement had no formal door. Instead, a cellar door at the bottom of a half-flight of stairs led into our one great room that housed a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. I was the fourth of my parents’ five children. With our huge, saucer-sized blue eyes, everyone knew we were the Westfalls. No lawn grew outside our basement, only the wild grass and flowers that sprung up between rocks and gravel. Like most little kids, I thought dandelions were beautiful.

Colonel Marston, known for his service in World War II and in organizing the Alaska Army National Guard, was in the potato business back then. One of his projects involved teaching Alaskan villagers how to grow potatoes to supplement their subsistence diet. Looking back, I think the lot across from our basement might have been his test patch.

Colonel Marston planted potatoes, and we watched the plants grow. My mother, single with five kids, had a tough time feeding us. So when we got hungry in the afternoons, we visited the potato patch, dug up a potato or two, wiped the dust off with our hands, and ate them raw. We were potato thieves. We weren’t just potato thieves; we were successful potato thieves because we were never caught, until that one day.

It was a warm, late summer afternoon, and we needed a snack. In Colonel Marston’s potato patch, we each picked a plant that might yield a potato or two. Heads down, up to our elbows digging for potatoes, none of us heard the car pull up. A long shadow formed across rows of potato plants. Colonel Marston looked at each of us and then asked what we were doing.

“Digging potatoes to eat,” my older brother, Karl, said.

I held my breath and wondered how much trouble we were going to be in for stealing his potatoes.

“Don’t do it too often,” Colonel Marston said.

Years later as a meter maid in downtown Anchorage, I often ran into Colonel Marston, and he stopped to visit. I’m sure he had a chuckle remembering the time he caught the Westfall kids digging in the dirt, stealing his potatoes.



Katy Westfall Neher was born in Alaska after her family came to Fort Richardson Army Base with the Army. After separating from the Army, her folks lived in Turnagain-by-the-Sea and also homesteaded in Knik. She has lived in Anchorage or the Matanuska-Susitna Valley her whole life. Neher is now retired and keeps checking on places outside that she may want to "retire" to but in all her travels she has never found any place she’d rather live than Anchorage.