One fact is certain, the spirited Pollocks have accepted with a wholesome eagerness the vexing challenge offered in the land of the midnight sun and flickering aurora borealis.
My father’s memorial service was held on a chilly February afternoon at the Presbyterian Church in Palmer, Alaska. Our church is more commonly known as the Church of a Thousand Trees because of its history and construction. My mother wanted to sit and quietly reflect before people arrived so we were there an hour early. As I stepped into the sanctuary with her, many childhood memories rushed to greet me. Our family had spent a lifetime of Sundays here - all squeezed into one pew - Mom and Dad always anchored the end and we six kids sat alongside them like the roll of Lifesavers Mom carried in her purse to keep us quiet during the sermons.
As I walked Mom to the front pew, the church was lit with soft winter light coming through the stained glass windows and nothing else - all was semi-dark, quiet and still. It seemed surreal to think in a short time the church would be filled with friends and family gathering to say goodbye to our father. He was the cornerstone of our family and the very reason we came to live on a mountain in Alaska many years ago.
My dad, Don Lyman Pollock, was born the son of a farmer in the rolling hills of Greene County in Pennsylvania. Love’s Hill had been in the family since the 1850s and was passed down to him as the only son. At 6’ 4”, he was the big ‘galoot’ of a Greene County farmer my mother had always dreamt of marrying. She was a dark-haired beauty with a bright smile, the daughter of a Master Farmer, Ben Jacobs. She and Dad met at a grange and married in 1950. During their honeymoon they traveled to Virginia, down the Skyline Drive. Mom told me how Dad pulled the Ford over and pointed to a cabin tucked into the woods across a valley. “Wouldn’t you like to live there?” Dad asked her. Mom remembers thinking that it would be the last place she’d want to live. She should have suspected then his pioneer spirit would take them far away from Greene County. Both her and my father’s families had been in America since Revolutionary days and I think his urge to push on into a distant territory came naturally.
As a young boy, Dad admired the poetry of Robert Service and the vivid images of the far north. I have his book, Spell of the Yukon, and in it Dad highlighted the following words: “There are valleys unpeopled and still. There’s a land – oh it beckons and beckons. And I want to go back – and I will.” During his years at West Virginia University he told his college friend, Ted Carter, that he wanted to be a pioneer. Ted told me Dad thought either Alaska or New Zealand would fit the bill.
Married for seven years with a wife and four small children, his heart was not in Pennsylvania farming. In 1956 a slideshow presentation on Alaska was given at their church and the spark was lit. Mom said after that evening, Dad could think of little else. He was bored with the daily routine of looking after sheep and cattle on their three hundred acre farm. He wanted to go north to the last frontier.
In the summer of 1957 he began to take concrete steps to fulfill his dream – with my mother’s permission – he flew to Alaska to explore some of the Southcentral region. He wrote to tell her that stepping off the plane in Anchorage felt like he was “coming home.” He drove down the coast but spent most of his time in the farming community of Palmer in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. He met Roy Heddles, a local farmer at the Presbyterian log church, and asked him many questions about life in the valley.
The transition to life in Alaska was full of challenges. The farm was sold at public auction in April of 1958. In June my father led a caravan down the main street of his hometown and probably never looked back. He drove a large truck pulling an open trailer followed by Mom in a station wagon also pulling a trailer. Her sister, MaryEllen, and Thelma Fox, a friend from church, came along to lend support in caring for we four children, ages one to six.
The local newspaper said this of the departure: “Friday, June 13, Don and Martha Jacobs Pollock, of near Love’s Hill, started their caravan on an almost 5,000 mile journey. Their destination is the fertile region at the foot of the majestic Alaska Range, near Anchorage, where they expect to settle and carve out a venturesome way-of-life in a style reminiscent of the frontier covered wagon days” … and from the end of the article: “One fact is certain, the spirited Pollocks have accepted with a wholesome eagerness the vexing challenge offered in the land of the midnight sun and flickering aurora borealis.”
It’s hard to imagine how my mother must have felt that day when she left her family and the only green valleys she had ever known to move to Alaska. In the 1950s it must have seemed as if she was following Dad to another world. Mom later told her older sister, Emily, “I knew DL would take care of us.”
The Alcan had only been open to the public for ten years when Mom and Dad moved and was seventeen hundred miles of rough gravel road. It was built by the military in seven short months to connect Alaska with the rest of the United States. Dad would have had no idea what he was leading his family into as they turned on to the Alcan. Dad told us of the white knuckle drive across the Peace River railroad bridge after the highway bridge had collapsed. “All I could see was the sky!” was how he recalled it. I can only imagine the horror my mother must have felt as she followed him onto a bridge not meant for car traffic.
Dad, as the only man and caravan leader, had to handle all mechanical emergencies. Here is a list of obstacles from a month on the road: June 19th: 3 flat tires, June 21st: missing trailer hubcap which he fixed with a can and bailing wire, June 23rd: flat tire and another flat tire on the trailer pulled by the big truck, June 30th: trailer wheel nut broke and both wheels rolled off, July 4th: ran out of gas, and the station wagon suffered a broken windshield, July 5th: flat tire, July 7th: near accident on the highway, July 9th: axle trouble on car and trailer which required welding.
After a month of driving, our family finally arrived in Palmer. Dad contacted the farmer he had met the year before and arranged for the family to camp a few nights in their backyard. In the first week Dad found work as a farm hand nearby. The farmer’s son had moved out of the basement apartment and left his father’s employ as a result of a spat and this is where our family began life in Alaska.
In just two months as the birch leaves were turning yellow in September, the son returned and wanted his job back and his apartment. Winter was just around the corner, so my father scrambled to find a place for the family to live. He found a cabin on 160 acres on Lazy Mountain and arranged to buy it. To quote Dad about the little vacant four-room house on the homestead: “There was snow on the ground. No wood had been cut and dried for the winter and the wind was blowing. Some of it went under the house, but part of it went through the house.” Coffee left on the kitchen table was known to freeze overnight. Dad didn’t have a job the first winter and spent his time cutting firewood, winterizing the house and hauling water. Dad had not visited Alaska in the winter and had not a clue how the cold north wind does blow across the face of the mountain.
My older sister, who was six when the family moved to Alaska, remembers Mom didn’t have much grocery money to spend each week – sometimes only five dollars. Luckily for us, just through the woods was the Lazy Mountain Children’s Home (an orphanage for Alaska Native kids) and they were kind and often shared food with us.
In 1960, two years after our family moved to Alaska, Aunt MaryEllen came up for a visit. She shared her memories with me of the four weeks she spent on the mountain in our small two-bedroom cabin. (It must have been bursting at the seams because there were now five of us kids and Mom and Dad).
“When we arrived early at the Pollock Lazy Mtn. Home, it was broad daylight as it had been all night. Janet, now 8, Don, almost 7, Johnny, 5 and Eva, 3, were waking up. Danny, 2 months, was asleep in his crib. The children had double bunk beds, very cleverly made by DL. There were just two bedrooms, but somehow they made a little one for me. It had a single bed and a bureau and was enclosed by walls except for an opening covered by a curtain. The children really did not remember me after two years and when they forgot I was around, they laughed and played and threw dirt at each other.
Some evenings at supper, DL and I carried on a very friendly debate. Greene County vs. Alaska. We would both conjure up glorious scenes of our favorite place. The children would listen attentively. Martha never made any comment. We both laughed a lot, but no one ever won the debate.”
Dad loved the outdoors – hunting, fishing and camping. We lived a subsistence lifestyle. Our freezer was full of game, vegetables from our big garden and wild blueberries, currants and raspberries. On a trip back to Pennsylvania five years after the move, my parents did an interview with the local newspaper and in it Dad describes our way of living:
“We raise and hunt for most of our food,” proudly stated Mr. Pollock. “My wife does all the baking, canning, and all the other household chores while I work with the Department of Agriculture in research. We raise most of the vegetables except any that need warm climates and won’t grow, such as tomatoes. The hunting and fishing is the best anywhere and therefore, we have all the meat and fish anyone could want.” And from my mother: The principal fuel and heat comes from logs and wood. “If I’ve learned anything while in Alaska,” Mrs. Pollock quickly quipped, “I have learned to chop wood.”
On our mountain home Dad spent hours each weekend with the John Deere dozer pulling in downed trees which would then be chainsawed and split into firewood for the coming week. He oversaw the Saturday morning “game” of “pick up sticks” which was code for the six of us kids throwing the supply of wood down the hatch into the basement of our house.
Each fall was the annual moose hunt – a week or two in the wilderness. Dad wore his battered tan or black felt hat with an eagle feather tucked in the brim. He dressed in a plaid flannel shirt with a woolrich jacket for warmth. He was the picture of an Alaskan pioneer. His pipe always at hand or clenched between his teeth.
I have a picture of him taken on a hunting trip many years ago. He is standing beside a flatbed trailer with a large tripod in the back and from it is hanging a moose that probably weighed a thousand pounds. He’s wearing a tan felt hat, red plaid jacket and khaki pants ... in the background is a large expanse of tundra with a wide river in the distance – mountains rising up from the left and right. He isn’t looking at the photographer but instead is gazing off camera as if to scan the horizon for another moose to put in the freezer. He was a provider.
Growing up we didn’t have the same conveniences I take for granted now. For many years my parents would haul out the galvanized bathtub and put it beside the barrel stove for our Saturday night baths. Mom would heat the water on the stove and after all the kids had their turn she and Dad ended up bathing in the dirtiest water. I’ll never forget when we got an actual bathtub - the hot water coming out of the faucet seemed like a miracle. Water was scarce on the mountain and we always had to be careful not to waste it.
Growing up in Alaska we all felt at home in the out of doors. The six of us kids roamed our hundred and sixty acres with complete freedom. It didn’t matter if it was January or July - we had no desire to stay inside and spent hours and hours outdoors building creative toys and playing. Each spring as the snow melted we would build little boats to sail in the water flowing down the ditches on our driveway and beyond. Sometimes our imagination would get us in trouble. Later, when we had horses, my younger brother and sister decided to set up a toll road point down at Wolverine corner about a mile from our house. Mrs. Richards, who was stopped by two kids wearing bandanas on horseback brandishing a toy pistol, did not appreciate being asked for a quarter. She promptly called our mother when she got home and that was the end of that game!
In 2010 both my parents passed away, first Dad in February, followed by Mom in June. As I prepared to write Dad’s obituary, Mom gave me the following description of Dad: “Your father was a great man, an adventurer, a leader and communicator, and consensus builder.” On the day of his memorial service, her comments from the pulpit were brief and to the point. “D.L. Pollock, known to many of you as Don, was a gentleman. Always. Living 60 years with him was an experience. And that’s all I have to say.”
One fact is certain, the spirited Pollocks have accepted with a wholesome eagerness the vexing challenge offered in the land of the midnight sun and flickering aurora borealis.
My father’s memorial service was held on a chilly February afternoon at the Presbyterian Church in Palmer, Alaska. Our church is more commonly known as the Church of a Thousand Trees because of its history and construction. My mother wanted to sit and quietly reflect before people arrived so we were there an hour early. As I stepped into the sanctuary with her, many childhood memories rushed to greet me. Our family had spent a lifetime of Sundays here - all squeezed into one pew - Mom and Dad always anchored the end and we six kids sat alongside them like the roll of Lifesavers Mom carried in her purse to keep us quiet during the sermons.
As I walked Mom to the front pew, the church was lit with soft winter light coming through the stained glass windows and nothing else - all was semi-dark, quiet and still. It seemed surreal to think in a short time the church would be filled with friends and family gathering to say goodbye to our father. He was the cornerstone of our family and the very reason we came to live on a mountain in Alaska many years ago.
My dad, Don Lyman Pollock, was born the son of a farmer in the rolling hills of Greene County in Pennsylvania. Love’s Hill had been in the family since the 1850s and was passed down to him as the only son. At 6’ 4”, he was the big ‘galoot’ of a Greene County farmer my mother had always dreamt of marrying. She was a dark-haired beauty with a bright smile, the daughter of a Master Farmer, Ben Jacobs. She and Dad met at a grange and married in 1950. During their honeymoon they traveled to Virginia, down the Skyline Drive. Mom told me how Dad pulled the Ford over and pointed to a cabin tucked into the woods across a valley. “Wouldn’t you like to live there?” Dad asked her. Mom remembers thinking that it would be the last place she’d want to live. She should have suspected then his pioneer spirit would take them far away from Greene County. Both her and my father’s families had been in America since Revolutionary days and I think his urge to push on into a distant territory came naturally.
As a young boy, Dad admired the poetry of Robert Service and the vivid images of the far north. I have his book, Spell of the Yukon, and in it Dad highlighted the following words: “There are valleys unpeopled and still. There’s a land – oh it beckons and beckons. And I want to go back – and I will.” During his years at West Virginia University he told his college friend, Ted Carter, that he wanted to be a pioneer. Ted told me Dad thought either Alaska or New Zealand would fit the bill.
Married for seven years with a wife and four small children, his heart was not in Pennsylvania farming. In 1956 a slideshow presentation on Alaska was given at their church and the spark was lit. Mom said after that evening, Dad could think of little else. He was bored with the daily routine of looking after sheep and cattle on their three hundred acre farm. He wanted to go north to the last frontier.
In the summer of 1957 he began to take concrete steps to fulfill his dream – with my mother’s permission – he flew to Alaska to explore some of the Southcentral region. He wrote to tell her that stepping off the plane in Anchorage felt like he was “coming home.” He drove down the coast but spent most of his time in the farming community of Palmer in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. He met Roy Heddles, a local farmer at the Presbyterian log church, and asked him many questions about life in the valley.
The transition to life in Alaska was full of challenges. The farm was sold at public auction in April of 1958. In June my father led a caravan down the main street of his hometown and probably never looked back. He drove a large truck pulling an open trailer followed by Mom in a station wagon also pulling a trailer. Her sister, MaryEllen, and Thelma Fox, a friend from church, came along to lend support in caring for we four children, ages one to six.
The local newspaper said this of the departure: “Friday, June 13, Don and Martha Jacobs Pollock, of near Love’s Hill, started their caravan on an almost 5,000 mile journey. Their destination is the fertile region at the foot of the majestic Alaska Range, near Anchorage, where they expect to settle and carve out a venturesome way-of-life in a style reminiscent of the frontier covered wagon days” … and from the end of the article: “One fact is certain, the spirited Pollocks have accepted with a wholesome eagerness the vexing challenge offered in the land of the midnight sun and flickering aurora borealis.”
It’s hard to imagine how my mother must have felt that day when she left her family and the only green valleys she had ever known to move to Alaska. In the 1950s it must have seemed as if she was following Dad to another world. Mom later told her older sister, Emily, “I knew DL would take care of us.”
The Alcan had only been open to the public for ten years when Mom and Dad moved and was seventeen hundred miles of rough gravel road. It was built by the military in seven short months to connect Alaska with the rest of the United States. Dad would have had no idea what he was leading his family into as they turned on to the Alcan. Dad told us of the white knuckle drive across the Peace River railroad bridge after the highway bridge had collapsed. “All I could see was the sky!” was how he recalled it. I can only imagine the horror my mother must have felt as she followed him onto a bridge not meant for car traffic.
Dad, as the only man and caravan leader, had to handle all mechanical emergencies. Here is a list of obstacles from a month on the road: June 19th: 3 flat tires, June 21st: missing trailer hubcap which he fixed with a can and bailing wire, June 23rd: flat tire and another flat tire on the trailer pulled by the big truck, June 30th: trailer wheel nut broke and both wheels rolled off, July 4th: ran out of gas, and the station wagon suffered a broken windshield, July 5th: flat tire, July 7th: near accident on the highway, July 9th: axle trouble on car and trailer which required welding.
After a month of driving, our family finally arrived in Palmer. Dad contacted the farmer he had met the year before and arranged for the family to camp a few nights in their backyard. In the first week Dad found work as a farm hand nearby. The farmer’s son had moved out of the basement apartment and left his father’s employ as a result of a spat and this is where our family began life in Alaska.
In just two months as the birch leaves were turning yellow in September, the son returned and wanted his job back and his apartment. Winter was just around the corner, so my father scrambled to find a place for the family to live. He found a cabin on 160 acres on Lazy Mountain and arranged to buy it. To quote Dad about the little vacant four-room house on the homestead: “There was snow on the ground. No wood had been cut and dried for the winter and the wind was blowing. Some of it went under the house, but part of it went through the house.” Coffee left on the kitchen table was known to freeze overnight. Dad didn’t have a job the first winter and spent his time cutting firewood, winterizing the house and hauling water. Dad had not visited Alaska in the winter and had not a clue how the cold north wind does blow across the face of the mountain.
My older sister, who was six when the family moved to Alaska, remembers Mom didn’t have much grocery money to spend each week – sometimes only five dollars. Luckily for us, just through the woods was the Lazy Mountain Children’s Home (an orphanage for Alaska Native kids) and they were kind and often shared food with us.
In 1960, two years after our family moved to Alaska, Aunt MaryEllen came up for a visit. She shared her memories with me of the four weeks she spent on the mountain in our small two-bedroom cabin. (It must have been bursting at the seams because there were now five of us kids and Mom and Dad).
“When we arrived early at the Pollock Lazy Mtn. Home, it was broad daylight as it had been all night. Janet, now 8, Don, almost 7, Johnny, 5 and Eva, 3, were waking up. Danny, 2 months, was asleep in his crib. The children had double bunk beds, very cleverly made by DL. There were just two bedrooms, but somehow they made a little one for me. It had a single bed and a bureau and was enclosed by walls except for an opening covered by a curtain. The children really did not remember me after two years and when they forgot I was around, they laughed and played and threw dirt at each other.
Some evenings at supper, DL and I carried on a very friendly debate. Greene County vs. Alaska. We would both conjure up glorious scenes of our favorite place. The children would listen attentively. Martha never made any comment. We both laughed a lot, but no one ever won the debate.”
Dad loved the outdoors – hunting, fishing and camping. We lived a subsistence lifestyle. Our freezer was full of game, vegetables from our big garden and wild blueberries, currants and raspberries. On a trip back to Pennsylvania five years after the move, my parents did an interview with the local newspaper and in it Dad describes our way of living:
“We raise and hunt for most of our food,” proudly stated Mr. Pollock. “My wife does all the baking, canning, and all the other household chores while I work with the Department of Agriculture in research. We raise most of the vegetables except any that need warm climates and won’t grow, such as tomatoes. The hunting and fishing is the best anywhere and therefore, we have all the meat and fish anyone could want.” And from my mother: The principal fuel and heat comes from logs and wood. “If I’ve learned anything while in Alaska,” Mrs. Pollock quickly quipped, “I have learned to chop wood.”
On our mountain home Dad spent hours each weekend with the John Deere dozer pulling in downed trees which would then be chainsawed and split into firewood for the coming week. He oversaw the Saturday morning “game” of “pick up sticks” which was code for the six of us kids throwing the supply of wood down the hatch into the basement of our house.
Each fall was the annual moose hunt – a week or two in the wilderness. Dad wore his battered tan or black felt hat with an eagle feather tucked in the brim. He dressed in a plaid flannel shirt with a woolrich jacket for warmth. He was the picture of an Alaskan pioneer. His pipe always at hand or clenched between his teeth.
I have a picture of him taken on a hunting trip many years ago. He is standing beside a flatbed trailer with a large tripod in the back and from it is hanging a moose that probably weighed a thousand pounds. He’s wearing a tan felt hat, red plaid jacket and khaki pants ... in the background is a large expanse of tundra with a wide river in the distance – mountains rising up from the left and right. He isn’t looking at the photographer but instead is gazing off camera as if to scan the horizon for another moose to put in the freezer. He was a provider.
Growing up we didn’t have the same conveniences I take for granted now. For many years my parents would haul out the galvanized bathtub and put it beside the barrel stove for our Saturday night baths. Mom would heat the water on the stove and after all the kids had their turn she and Dad ended up bathing in the dirtiest water. I’ll never forget when we got an actual bathtub - the hot water coming out of the faucet seemed like a miracle. Water was scarce on the mountain and we always had to be careful not to waste it.
Growing up in Alaska we all felt at home in the out of doors. The six of us kids roamed our hundred and sixty acres with complete freedom. It didn’t matter if it was January or July - we had no desire to stay inside and spent hours and hours outdoors building creative toys and playing. Each spring as the snow melted we would build little boats to sail in the water flowing down the ditches on our driveway and beyond. Sometimes our imagination would get us in trouble. Later, when we had horses, my younger brother and sister decided to set up a toll road point down at Wolverine corner about a mile from our house. Mrs. Richards, who was stopped by two kids wearing bandanas on horseback brandishing a toy pistol, did not appreciate being asked for a quarter. She promptly called our mother when she got home and that was the end of that game!
In 2010 both my parents passed away, first Dad in February, followed by Mom in June. As I prepared to write Dad’s obituary, Mom gave me the following description of Dad: “Your father was a great man, an adventurer, a leader and communicator, and consensus builder.” On the day of his memorial service, her comments from the pulpit were brief and to the point. “D.L. Pollock, known to many of you as Don, was a gentleman. Always. Living 60 years with him was an experience. And that’s all I have to say.”
View our favorites from the archive.
-op.jpg)
