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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Alaskan women: Head cheese, Monopoly, and bush pilots

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The first time I met Theda Musgrove was in 1981 when I walked into the laundromat in Delta Junction, Alaska. You could take a nice hot shower there for 25 cents back then. I’d seen the sign posted on the glass window outside. A tall, grey-haired woman was standing behind a large counter in front of me when I walked through the door and she lifted her head to acknowledge my arrival with her piercing eyes and stern expression.  “Eh,” is what she said. Her focus was downward and I had interrupted her project. It was not a scene I would ever have expected that Alaskan morning. The counter was covered in blood and she was holding a massive butcher knife over the top of a mutilated cow’s head. “Makin’ head cheese,” she said. I was hesitant to step forward, and who wouldn’t have been? The locals knew her, but I didn’t. She pushed the mass aside with strong arms, turned and wiped her hands on a cloth and was ready to do business. I could barely utter the words, “I’d like to pay for a shower?” She said, “Alright,” and we began a bit of exchange as I drew a bit closer to the counter. She knew I wasn’t a local and started to ask questions about my doings in Delta Junction. I explained that my husband and I had traveled up from Minnesota and we were living on some property outside of town. She started telling me her story of growing up in Alaska and being a schoolteacher in Delta, until she started her own business and left the teaching profession. She had never married and made it plain; she had no use for men. The manner in which she spoke was gruff. She said it took strength to live up north and that I wouldn’t be running back to my mama anymore. She overstepped her bounds in every way one could imagine with assumptions. I thought it was pure salvation for the local children when she decided to leave her chalk and take up the butcher knife instead. I took my 25-cent shower quickly, with images of The Bates Motel shower scene flashing through my head accompanied by that shrill, pulsating sound effect so well known in cinematography. I kept poking my head out of the shower, watching for Theda Musgrove and her butcher knife. She scared the hell outta me! I think I grew up ten years that day in the Delta Junction Laundromat and from that day forward, when someone mentions head cheese, I remember this gruff, old, candid female character.

   The ferociously independent Jackie Lizardi I also met while living in Delta Junction. I was walking down a trail in the woods near the cabin one day when all of a sudden a handsome silver-haired man was in front of me, seated on a horse. I thought I’d time-traveled because of the overall appearance of his clothing and his large moustache. He introduced himself as Bob Lizardi. I’d grabbed my small pup, Fairbanks, up into my arms and stood holding her tight, wondering what was going to happen next. Bob said he was a neighbor from across the road and invited Nick and me to come over and join him and his wife for dinner that evening. I accepted the invitation. The Lizards had quite a bit of acreage and had cleared much of it for farming. Their house was built of logs and was quite small. Sled dogs inhabited a portion of the yard, which was cluttered with farm equipment and odds and ends. I could tell they were industrious folks.

We entered their cabin later that day to see Bob’s wife Jackie busy preparing food at her wood cookstove. She was quite pregnant, but her boisterous personality was more apparent than her condition, as she introduced herself, wood spoon swirling in her hand all the while. This was her space and she filled the room with her persona! Her brunette hair was haphazardly piled on her head and she moved with energy as she cooked and visited. Her father had been an Army man who uprooted the family on a regular basis. She called herself an Army brat. Jackie was a skilled woodworker and had built shelves and furniture for her home. Her cooking melted in your mouth. We sat well into the night visiting and listening to her and Bob tell us stories of their Alaskan experiences in the glow of the oil lamps.

Jackie was a schoolteacher in Delta Junction but was on maternity leave when I met her. She and Bob had previously lived on an island on the Tanana River. She used to mush her dog team to the school, tie them and bed them on hay in the nearby woods and when the school day was over, she’d mush the team home. She talked about leaving the island one spring morning during break up when the ice gave way and she and the team plunged into the waters. They all managed to get out with her husband Bob’s help. Jackie was another tough woman.

Over the course of several months that we lived in the cabin in Delta, we spent lots of time with Bob and Jackie. I recall how they loved to play Monopoly in the evenings. On one particular evening their game made Guinness Record Book history, I’d swear, with its duration and Jackie’s sheer will not to lose all her properties to Bob. Around and around they went, Jackie gripping the dice, shaking while insisting to the universe that numbers would fall in her favor. It was uncanny how she hung on, owning nothing more than St. Charles Place and Virginia Avenue (considered the slums of Monopoly). What were her chances of survival?  She cursed at Bob, he barked back at her, and I figured it to be the first divorce I’d ever witnessed over a Monopoly board. We ended up leaving because the game would not end and their spousal relations were growing grimmer as the clock ticked away. We found out later that Jackie lost that game, soon afterwards going into labor, with Bob having to drive her one hundred miles to the Fairbanks hospital to deliver their daughter, which nearly happened in the car. What a feisty woman Jackie was.

There are women bush pilots in Alaska and none so lovely as the invincible Phyllis Tate. I had placed an advertisement in the Fairbanks newspaper and lined up several house-cleaning jobs for income. Cleaning for Phyllis and Murray Tate, happened to be one of them. The Tates had a construction business and they lived upstairs of a very nice office they had built. Phyllis was slim, had dark auburn shoulder length hair, big brown eyes and a rich-toned voice. She could make a sentence about scrubbing floors sound so melodious. She liked to laugh as much as I enjoyed listening to her talk about growing up in Fairbanks and her flying career. Phyllis owned a Cessna 206 and used to fly supplies out to the remote villages like Valdez, Kotzebue and Lake Minchumina. She also did emergency flights on several occasions. When I met her in 1980, she was having neck and back problems from a bad plane accident she’d recently survived. While landing, on final approach, a Piper Lance landed on her plane 200 feet above ground. It slashed the fuselage, she hit the ground nose first with the plane spinning and landing on its back. Phyllis hung upside down for thirty minutes, while she waited for the ambulance, with a broken neck and back. Bound and determined as she was, she recovered and got back into the cockpit. Phyllis ran for the Alaska Senate in 1998, missing a win by only 19 votes due to an appendicitis attack that she claims slowed down her campaign. She was a strong, gutsy lady.

In this life we meet people who impact us in so many ways, leaving us with a dusting of their strongest qualities that we either absorb or brush off. The older we get, all this great stuff from people, places and things become a part of who we are. For me, these women I have written about still resonate within me. They set an example of strength and independence in their own colorful ways decades ago for younger women like me to learn from. Thanks Theda, Jackie and Phyllis.

Lynn O’Hara can be reached at scarlet@frontiernet.net