Dad’s Story - And His Dad’s Story

Among the many things I marveled at and admired was my Dad’s uncanny ability to remember and relate history - especially stories relevant to Alaska and Alaskans. He was an old-school attorney in Anchorage for many decades. He worked for Alaska’s U.S. Senator Bob Bartlett in the early 1960s before beginning his law practice in Anchorage in 1963. Here’s a small part of my family’s history with the Alaska Highway as told by my father and rewritten by me, as best as we can both recall.

Memories locked away for nearly half a century are bound to be hazy.

But when my father, Christian James Jensen, left the time-locked town of Evanston, Illinois to build the Alaska Highway there were some indelible impressions left in my eight year old mind - impressions that I hope are not too distorted.

The year was 1943.  Our town, or more accurately, our neighborhood, was a Scandinavian enclave some twelve blocks from Chicago.  My grandfather had built the house in which we lived.  He also built the one next door.

We, the Jensens were surrounded by Larsens, Swensens, Ericksons and the like.  My mother had a name which did not end in “en” or even, God forbid, “on” so the reticence of Scandinavians to socialize was somewhat amplified by that transgression.  It was a place where kids did not cross the street without ‘parental consent’ and that consent was not given easily.

Though this piece is supposed to be about the construction of the Alaska Highway it seems important to alert the reader that my perspective is the narrow one of an eight year old boy and it’s accuracy should be distrusted by any erstwhile, and perhaps misguided scholars who may mistakenly pay attention to it.  So I shall digress further...

I suspect my Dad had about as much understanding of where and what Alaska was as I did in 1943.  He and our family, like most middle class westerners in those quiet times before the war, and except for the war, had not traveled much beyond Wisconsin, Missouri or Indiana.  I really do not remember ever thinking about Alaska at all before my Mom and Dad started all those whispered conversations about it in the kitchen.

Of course, I knew about the war.  I knew that the dime my mom gave me for weekly purchases of war stamps would somehow make everything alright.

I knew that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the president and that he was a good man even if my Grandma disliked him and his wife Eleanor.

I knew that saving lard and tinfoil was crucial to the well-being of the troops.

I knew that blue stars hanging in a neighbor’s window meant a father or son was being shot at by an evil enemy.

I also knew that a Gold Star Banner hanging in a neighbor’s window meant that a father or a son was dead.

These things are all I knew about the ware when my mother and father whispered about Alaska in the kitchen.

Then the day came.


My mother and older sister were crying.  There was a big mess in the middle of the living room.   It was a large assortment of paraphernalia spread on the floor.  It would never fit into the footlocker my dad was packing.  But the message was clear.  My Dad was really going to build the Alaska highway ... beginning tomorrow.

The next day was tense.  Having no sense of time, distance or perceptions of war beyond that provided by John Wayne for 25 cents at the University Theater, I faintly perceived that something big was happening and tried to look very serious.  My sister, at the ripe old age of 13, was worldly wise and felt comfortable scolding me for not being all that upset.  (I think I asked if I could cross the street to watch the car as it faded into the distance.)

Off he went with my Uncle Fred and second cousin George.  They were on their way to build the Alaska Highway.

Dad and his comrades started their adventure on the Chicago and Northwestern ‘500.’  Chicago to Minneapolis - five hundred miles in five hundred minutes.  Yellow and Blue, like our own Alaska Railroad engines, this steam liner which shook our house twice a day as it roared past, delivered the Bates and Rogers road building recruits to the Twin Cities where they were given military-style physicals, sworn to stay for the duration and were carted west to Seattle.

I can’t say much about what happened to Dad, Uncle Fred and Mac while they worked on the highway.  My sister and I saw some pictures and postcards and such but most of the letters were to Mom and much of their contents were, understandably, not shared with us kids.  My sister and I were the first to see the mail because our mother, like so many young women at the time, went to work in a war plant.  When letters came, usually in bunches, we waited for Mom to open them.


On those days a letter did not come my Mom would cry when she came home from work and play maudlin songs on the Victorola including “No Letter Today” and a Spanish song, “Quatro Vitas,” which I much later figured out carried the message that “If I had four lives I would live them all for you.”

Come to think of it, my Mom cried and played those records a lot ... even when the letters did arrive.

My father had light brown hair.  While on the highway he grew a full beard and mustache which turned out to be red and black respectively.  The hands in his camp nicknamed him “Jesus.”

My maternal grandmother, who was self-educated and a marvelously opinionated student of the bible, had spent a good part of her life disapproving of Dad notwithstanding that his earnings had for years been the sole source of extended family income.   I suppose her disapproval was appropriate given the disapproval of of the son of recent immigrants was obligatory to a pedigreed, though impoverished, Daughter of the American Republic.

Whether Dad’s nickname was because his given name was Christian or for some other reason I do not know.  I do remember vividly the relief in our house when my eccentric but much-loved Grandma did not blow her cork about sacrilege.  She looked at Dad’s picture and profoundly announced that he, with his beard, look a whole lot more like Saint Peter than Christ.  The whole family was greatly relieved, caring not at all about the historical accuracy of the assessment.  Actually, I think that is the only nice thing I ever heard Grandma say about Dad.

There were several ways in which time was passed by the crews building the road.  One, at least around the Peace River Bridge were Dad was working, was to manufacture rings out of silver Canadian coins - quarters and fifty-cent pieces.  The process was tedious but the result was a wonder.

The coin would first be drilled in the center with a hold just big enough to tightly hold a nail.  Then, with a piece of steel below on a table or bench, the edge of the coin would be lightly tapped with a hammer as the coin was turned.  In time, the edge flared and widened, leaving the legend of the coin on the inside.  Finally, the center hole was enlarged to ring size with a rat tail file creating a silver ring.

Of course, Dad and other workers made more things during the long and boring nights in camp.  Knives were very popular.  Truck springs were laboriously cut down by hand and filed to shape.  Handles were made of anything from fibre washers to moose horns.  One such handicraft - another product of boredom - cause considerable trouble for the craftsmen who made them when they returned home (presumably to a grateful government):  Footlockers fashioned from, God-forbid, U.S. government plywood.

When Dad and the other Midwesterners returned, Minneapolis was again the mustering point.  To the complete bewilderment of this bearded and scruffy bunch, they were met by a contingent of G-men intent upon apprehending the larcenous culprits who had imperiled  the war effort by stealing that plywood.

Believe it or not my Dad, who was spared from this particular disgrace only by virtue of his inability to drive a nail straight, was deposed months later in the continuing investigation.  For all I know the prison gates closed on the guilty.

Thank God for the FBI.

I guess what I have written about sheds little light on the construction of the Alaska Highway.  Dad spoke about wolves, circling the outhouse and resultant yellow glaciers that flowed off the back door of the barracks.  He told of losing his brakes while hauling a crew down the hill to the Peace River Bridge (the crew in back screaming bloody murder until he came to a stop on the uphill grade.)  He laughed about about the long lines of thirsty hands cued up for the occasional whiskey allotment.

All I know for sure about that magnificent stretch of gravel over which I have driven countless times since is this:  My Dad, Chris Jensen, left Evanston Illinois as a person pretty much like everybody else in our neighborhood.  When he returned he was a man possessed.  He was a man with a dream in which the familiar environs of Evanston, Illinois had no place.

In 1948 he, my mother and I realized the dream and ventured north to Alaska over that wonderful road.

But that’s another story.