In place of the tents and ramshackle cabins of the first few years, solid houses and commercial buildings were built along streets laid out in a grid. There was a thriving commercial center, with stores, hotels and at least half a dozen saloons. Down at the waterfront, a pier and dock were built to make it easier for ships to unload. The military, eyeing another stretch of relatively flat terrain across the Lowe River on the south side of the bay, started building an army base there, called Fort Liscum. From here the army’s Signal Corps strung cables to the north, and under the water to the south, connecting Valdez by telegraph to the rest of the world.
Among the thousands of adventurers who were lured to Valdez to seek their fortune during those early days were two Nebraskans, George Cheever Hazelet and Andrew Jackson Meals. Hazelet was in his midthirties, a high school principal in the central part of the state, when news started filtering in of riches to be had in Alaska. His friend Jack Meals was nearly ten years older and was a little less of the settled type—he had no formal education and had worked as a rancher, farmer, wagon train scout and bronco rider.
They arrived by steamship in March 1898 and proceeded, like everyone else, to unload their equipment on the ice and haul it painstakingly to the foot of the glacier. But Hazelet and Meals turned out to have more perseverance than many of the other gold seekers. After much struggle they made it up over the glacier and into the Copper River valley. Rather than heading to the Tanana and the Yukon and the Klondike, however, the men stayed in the Copper River region. After a year they had found little gold but had proved to themselves that they could survive in rugged Alaska. Despite numerous hardships—at one point, low on food, they spent several fruitless days hunting moose and had to settle for a measly marmot (which, being from the Plains, they called a prairie dog)—they both weighed more than when they had started.
Hazelet and Meals traveled and worked all over the region, mining claims and helping to build roads and dams. Valdez became their home base, and they became pillars of the community. In 1901, the two men homesteaded a square mile of land about four miles northwest of the town site. The property consisted of gravels and sands but featured some exposed bedrock too. There was plenty of flat land for homes and businesses, and along the water there was room for ships, small and large. They named the area Port Valdez and had a grand scheme to develop it. Those plans never came to fruition, but eventually, more than half a century later, the land would prove to be invaluable.
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Valdez kept booming well into the second decade of the twentieth century, with gold and copper mining being a main engine of growth. Gold mines, in particular, sprang up all over. In the Klondike most of the gold had been in the form of placer deposits—flakes and nuggets that over eons had been naturally eroded out of rock into gravel beds, which the miners sorted through. But around Valdez the norm was hard-rock mining, which required excavating ore and crushing it to extract the gold. Miners made almost superhuman efforts to haul rock-crushing machinery, known as stamp mills, into and over the mountains around Valdez. Some of the operations were fabulously successful, including the aptly named Cliff Mine, overlooking the bay about eight miles west of Valdez, which employed as many as sixty people and at its peak, from 1910 to 1915, produced a million dollars’ worth of gold.
Valdez now had three newspapers, several breweries, a bowling alley, a hospital, a library and even a YMCA complete with baths, a gymnasium and a reading room. A university opened in 1916, though it didn’t last long. The town became a district seat of the federal court system, which administered the territory’s judicial affairs, and a lot of lawyers became at least part-time residents. With the advent of the world war, the population dropped off somewhat, as it did throughout Alaska, but there were still about 2,500 people in Valdez by the end of the decade.
The road north, then called the Richardson Trail, was the other source of the town’s prosperity, as it was still the shortest route to Alaska’s interior. Stage companies, using horse-drawn sleds or wagons depending on the season, provided regular service to Fairbanks, moving freight, mail and passengers across the 360-mile route in about a week and a half. Horses remained in use for many years, as motorized vehicles didn’t begin to travel regularly on the road until the 1920s.
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Amid the boom times, Valdez suffered setbacks, including the destruction of the business district in 1915 in a spectacular fire that may have been deliberately set. Despite the best efforts of the fire department and soldiers from Fort Liscum—they exploded sticks of dynamite in some buildings in a desperate attempt to beat back the flames—most of the structures could not be saved.
Valdez recovered quickly, rebuilding most of the downtown within months. In the ensuing years, however, other problems proved to be more long-lasting. The army closed down Fort Liscum in the mid-1920s, part of a wave of postwar cutbacks. Gold mining went through a gradual decline in the 1930s (and ended completely during World War II, when the federal War Production Board shut down gold mines, considering them inessential). Fox farming and fishing took up some but not all of the slack. Most important, the rise of the Alaska Railroad cut into Valdez’s role as a hub for shipping to the interior.
Still, the military’s need to build bases and airstrips during World War II and surveillance systems during the Cold War meant that for a while at least there was plenty of cargo passing through Valdez. At one point during the war, it was estimated that a loaded truck left the port every fifteen minutes, bound for the north. The army stationed a work battalion in town, boosting the population by about five hundred.
One of Valdez’s selling points was that its harbor remained ice-free all year long—it was the northernmost port in North America that could make that claim—and after 1949 what was now called the Richardson Highway remained open to trucks through the winter too. A truck depot on the outskirts of town became the site of annual “roadeos,” driving-skills competitions that brought truckers from all over the state. By the late 1950s and into the ’60s, though, shipping had again fallen off. There was less business to go around, and Valdez found it hard to compete with the railroad.
By then Valdez had evolved into a smaller but in many ways calmer community, without too much going on but cozy and safe—the kind of place where neighbors knew one another, where front doors were never locked and people left their keys in their cars and where Saturday-night dances attracted just about everyone, including young people. High school students often brought their rifles to school, keeping them in their lockers until lunchtime, when they’d leave for an hour of ptarmigan hunting on the other side of the dike, bringing the rifles—and any dead birds—back to their lockers afterward. In the winter, one father would tie sleds to the back of his station wagon and drive his children around town, revving it up around corners to try to flip the kids off. It was all great fun.
The federal courthouse had burned down in 1940, and the district headquarters had been shifted to Anchorage, the biggest city in the territory, but the Road Commission was still a major employer in Valdez, as was a facility for the mentally disabled, the Harborview Nursing Home, that opened in 1961. There was still enough commercial fishing to support a cannery or two, although fishing went through some very lean years and even at its peak was never as big an industry in Valdez as it was in Cordova and some other communities. Valdez joined in the post-statehood push to develop tourism, billing itself as the “Switzerland of Alaska” because of its dramatic setting amid the steep peaks that were “almost more Alp-like than the Alps themselves,” as one brochure put it. A tourist boat, the Gypsy, took up to fifty visitors at a time on daylong trips through the narrows to where one of Alaska’s most magnificent glaciers, the Columbia, spilled into the water. There they could gaze in wonder at the front edge of the ice sheet, which was two miles wide and up to 650 feet thick. A blast from the ship’s horn might even cause pieces of the ice to break off and fall spectacularly into the water.
Valdez was almost exclusively
white, with only ten or fifteen natives among the population, according to one estimate. In a census taken in the late 1950s, the town was found to have 841 people, including 331 children.
Most of the population lived in a roughly thirty-block town center, with two perpendicular streets at its heart: Alaska Avenue, which connected to the start of the Richardson Highway on the east side of town and ran west to the water, and McKinley Street, which ran north–south and intersected Alaska a block from the waterfront. Homes were modest, mostly two-story affairs; many had been built by their owners. They had steep roofs, a necessary feature because Valdez was one of the snowiest places in Alaska, averaging about twenty-two feet a year. In 1928–29, townspeople suffered through a winter with more than forty-three feet of snow.
Valdez was more connected than ever to the rest of Alaska. The Richardson Highway was now a gateway not just to Fairbanks but to Anchorage, although it was a roundabout route—north for 120 miles along the Richardson to Glennallen, then west for another 140 miles on the Glenn Highway, built by the military during World War II. It took at least eight hours to drive the 260 miles, but since Valdez did not have much in the way of medical facilities—some years it was hard to keep even a general practitioner in town—many families would make the trip once or twice a year for checkups or visits to the dentist or eye doctor.
Public water and sewer systems had been installed only in the 1950s, and the town’s storm sewers consisted of a number of open ditches that led to the bay. The high tide would come in and help flush them out. When a new high school was built on the south side of town in the 1950s, it was constructed right over one of the ditches. If you were in the school’s gymnasium when the tide was right and the fish were running, you could hear the sounds of their flapping tails coming from below the basketball court.
Alaska Avenue was the only paved street in town; the others were gravel. Given the amount of snow in winter, it was impossible to keep the streets completely plowed, so drivers were quite comfortable maneuvering on snow. There were no curbs, and what sidewalks existed were built of wood planks.
Most of the businesses were within a block or two of the Alaska-McKinley intersection. There were two grocery stores, Gilson’s and Food Lanes; several banks, including the First Bank of Valdez (“Alaska’s oldest bank north of Juneau”); Woodford’s, a combination clothing-shoe-drug-furnishings-camera store; a tackle shop for fishermen and a gift and sport store that sold guns and ammunition; and for the women in town a dress shop or two. Valdez had a trailer court and a couple of hotels, including the Switzerland Inn, which had once been a children’s home but was now trying to capitalize on the tourist boom. Instead of numbers the rooms were identified by the names of Swiss cities.
Saints and sinners had their choice among a roughly equal number of churches and bars. Of the latter, the Village Morgue, at the waterfront, was perhaps the most unusual; it had been a morgue once. During the early gold-mining days, it had been home to a stamp mill for crushing ore. No one was quite sure when it became the town morgue. Because the typically heavy snow cover could make it difficult if not impossible to inter a body in the winter, the morgue had the means to store a corpse until the spring thaw, when a grave could be dug. The deceased was kept in cold storage, hung on a meat hook.
The Pinzon, on McKinley Street, which had a forty-foot-long bar that was said to be the longest in Alaska, was owned by Clinton Egan, known as Truck, a member of a longtime Valdez family that rose to prominence in state Democratic politics. Truck’s brother Bill, in fact, was the first governor when Alaska became a state. It was said by more than one politician that the de facto headquarters of the Alaskan Democratic Party wasn’t in Juneau or Anchorage but in Valdez, at the Pinzon. A local Democrat, complaining once about the state of the party in town, said that it might attract more members if the meetings didn’t take place in a bar.
Among the residents of Valdez, some, like the Egans, were old-timers. Jack Meals’s family had stayed around as well, and his son, Owen, had become a pioneering bush pilot and prominent businessman. He owned the diesel generating plant and the telephone exchange, among other ventures.
But many residents had arrived in town more recently, after the war. Some were getting away from bad times in the Lower 48, and Valdez, literally the end of the road, was about as far as they could get and still be in what passed for civilization. Some had served in the military during the war and having spent time in the town had vowed to return. Valdez had that kind of effect on people—it was a quiet, isolated place, set amid scenery that would take the breath away.
Even with the decline in the shipping business, the waterfront was still a major focus of town life. Where Alaska Avenue reached the water, a long gravel and dirt causeway carried trucks and other vehicles out across the mudflats to Valdez’s main dock. Two blocks south, Keystone Avenue led to a shorter causeway and a smaller dock, with a pipeline for unloading fuel oil, which was pumped into storage tanks just onshore. Between the two docks the mudflats had been dredged to build a harbor for Valdez’s many small fishing and pleasure boats and the Gypsy, and a slip for the state-run ferry to Cordova, which could not be reached by road. The MV Chilkat, which could carry fifty-nine people and up to fifteen vehicles, had entered service in the summer of 1963, welcomed on its inaugural visit by a flotilla of most of the small boats, decked out with balloons and streamers for the occasion, a drill team and a ribbon-cutting featuring the governor.
But it was the main dock, built on creosote pilings in about fifty feet of water, where most of the activity took place. The dock was large, with several warehouses built on it. Two of its sides were more than three hundred feet long, so that two freighter ships could tie up and unload at the same time. That seldom happened anymore, but single cargo ships still did come regularly to Valdez. When they arrived, people in town would turn out—some to work, others to watch.
George Plafker had a problem. He was finishing his second year at Brooklyn College, the public university just off Flatbush Avenue in the borough’s Midwood neighborhood, in the spring of 1947, and was all set to transfer to City College of New York, in Upper Manhattan, to complete his degree. He was good at science and math and had decided to major in civil engineering. Anxious to escape New York and his small, cramped apartment, he figured there would always be highways and bridges to design and build around the world. He’d spent the two years at the beautiful Georgian-style campus loading up on all the necessary courses in preparation for the switch to CCNY’s engineering school. But now, out of the blue, administration officials examining his transcript discovered that he hadn’t taken a required pre-engineering course—Geology 101.
Plafker was frustrated and disappointed. He grudgingly admitted that a geology requirement made sense. After all, to design and build structures you need to know something about the ground they will sit on. But it was the end of the school year, and without that credit he wouldn’t be able to start at CCNY in the fall. His plan to escape New York would be temporarily derailed.
There was a solution, his advisers at Brooklyn College told him. The school was offering an introductory geology class in its summer session. There was no one on the regular faculty to teach it, but they’d found a mineralogist with some teaching experience, a rock hound named A. C. Hawkins, to do the job. To Plafker it didn’t sound very promising, but on the other hand the course probably wouldn’t interfere much with his plans to make some money tending bar at a Coney Island restaurant over the summer. What else could he do, really—he had to take the course if he was going to get his civil engineering degree.
To his surprise, that summer would alter the course of Plafker’s life. A. C. Hawkins, the replacement teacher, a genial, pipe-smoking older man who had a passion for rocks and who believed strongly in the importance of seeing them firsthand, would play an important role in shaping Plafker’s career—as would generous amounts of free clam broth and cheap beer.
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As a Brooklyn College
undergraduate, Plafker had the trappings of a New Yorker—the accent and attitude—but he wasn’t a genuine native. He’d been born in 1929 outside Philadelphia, in Chester, an industrial river town just west of the city, home to one of the country’s largest shipyards. He was the second son of Nathan and Florence Plafker; his brother, Lloyd, had been born two years before.
Nathan Plafker had arrived in the United States about eight years before that, in his early twenties. A native of Galicia, in southern Poland, he had worked for a while in a coal mine in Germany. But with Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine battling Polish forces nearby in the Polish-Soviet War, he decided to leave, wary of becoming cannon fodder himself. He stowed away on a steamer bound for Montreal and eventually made his way into the United States.
With two brothers in Delaware, he settled in Chester, just ten miles up the Delaware River from Wilmington, where he worked as a counterman in a deli. For a while he went into the grocery business with one of his brothers. But the two had a falling-out, and Nathan set his sights on New York.
It was on a trip to Brooklyn to see about job prospects that he met his future wife, a Polish immigrant who had come to the United States several years before. Married in Chester, the couple moved to Brighton Beach after the boys were born. But it soon became apparent that Florence was mentally ill. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she was institutionalized at King’s Park, a sprawling asylum on the North Shore of Long Island, when George was three.
Overwhelmed by having to care for two young boys and struggling financially in the midst of the Great Depression, his father moved the family in with his wife’s sister and her husband, Otto and Pauline Glassman, who had a three-bedroom apartment on the other side of Ocean Parkway, in Coney Island. Nathan Plafker rented a bedroom from them, which he shared with the boys.
The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet Page 5
