Willis Grafe, in early 1942, had a job he didn’t like in Salem, Oregon. And he heard a rumor. The United States Public Roads Administration wanted to hire surveyors to send north to Canada and Alaska to help the Army build a Highway.
Link to another story “Civilians on the Alaska Highway Project”
In his memoir, An Oregon Boy in the Yukon, he remembers it this way. “I was hired on the spot.” In two days he found himself in Seattle Processing through the port of embarkation. “Processing consisted primarily of marching in a line between two medical corpsmen who hit us with a needle in both arms at the same time.”
Punctured and punctuated, the men made their way to an old wooden steamer where the Quartermaster Corps issued tickets for “HOLD #1”. Nine or ten feet down a ladder they found themselves in “Hold #1”, a “gloomy room… with row after row of steel pipe bunk stations, three tiers high.”
Averaging seven knots the ship made its way up the inside passage. From the deck the men saw that they followed “a narrow waterway between wooded islands”. The trip featured open air dining, and Willis found that large coils of hawser made satisfactory tables.
A few days later as they approached Skagway, the shore of the channel became “more and more impressive as the mountains got higher”. And the weather got colder and wetter. Worse, nobody had made provisions for housing in Skagway.
Signal Corps Photo
Because Willis and four of his friends could walk faster than most, they beat the crowd to Harriet Pullen’s Pullen House. A fixture in the Skagway community since Gold Rush days.
The boys couldn’t afford restaurant food so they bought groceries and took them back to the hotel, planning to prepare and eat the food in their rooms. A most gracious hostess, Harriet would have none of that. She invited them to come use her kitchen and fill her in on all the “frantic activity going on around us.”
We will come back to Willis.
Willis told some wonderful stories – his surname was Grafe, though (Willis R. Grafe)
Murray, thank you for the correction. I’m going to do some more about him and I’ll get it right.