Cordova, AK
Spring 1950
Dear Tiny [Rosalind Morey], Mom and Dad—
Well, here we are at the cannery at Orca Bay about a mile out of Cordova. I can look out the window of our room at snow fields right over our heads on one hand and the sea not a hundred feet at our backs. Four water-falls tumble some five-hundred feet off the snow fields and into the sea and all within sight of the window. It sounds like Multnomah Falls all the time. The sun shines bright and warm one minute and the next, and I do mean just sixty seconds away, the rain pours down and we almost freeze. The sun can be shining when we step out of the cannery door and by the time we reach our room some 150 feet away it’s pouring down.
We haven’t a boat yet. It will be about two or three days before we can get one. In the meantime we are working on the diving suit and helmet and making a diving ladder. We have a swell room here and the food is wonderful, at the cannery’s expense. Chicken for dinner, two kinds of pie, at least two fruits, coffee or tea or chocolate, vegetable salads, cake, two and 3 kinds of meat, three kinds of bread, and tell Dad mashed potatoes and spinach. They simply pile it on family style. Three big meals a day and three mug-ups as they call it. At ten A.M. is one, at three in the afternoon and again at nine at night. A mug-up consists of several kinds of cold meat, two breads, fruit, cookies, cake and pie and a choice of three drinks all puled out on tables and help yourself. I never saw anything like it. Everybody goes for the mug-up, a between meal snack.
Tiny, remember the book I had you get at the library for me, “Alaska’s Giant Brown Bear”. I was with the author last night in Cordova, Dr. Chase. You should see his collection of all things Alaskan. He’s in the process of having another book published.
We had to fly in with a bush pilot from Anchorage. What a guy and what a flight. It rained so hard the drops sounded like buckshot all over the plane and we yawed all over the sky. There was a gun fight in town just before we got there. We went down to the Frontier Bar and looked at the pools of blood on the floor and on the street outside and listened to the gossip. No one seemed to take it too seriously that some guy’d been killed. There had been one last week, too.
Cordova is all wooden sidewalks and is jammed hard against the foot of snow-covered mountains.
Dad, a black bear was walking the beach less than a quarter of a mile out of town.
Let me know how everything is going. How’s the milking coming? Are you all well?
Love,
Walt