Last November Anita Hedger won the state bowling championship for the women’s league, master’s division. Anita is nearly 79 and lives off Rowlinda in Cohoe. The master’s division is for bowlers 75 years old or older. There are five different age divisions with competitors throught most lanes in Alaska, making her win pretty special. Louise Snyder of Kasilof won a bronze metal for third place in the state for her division. In June Anita goes to Reno to compete in the national tournament. Senior citizens have league bowling twice per week in Kenai, three games for $6.

The Kenai Peninsula Historical Association spring meeting is May 3 in the Kasilof Community Church building, next to Kasilof Mercantile. Members from Seward to Kenai to Homer will be attending. The featured speaker is Dr. Linda Chamberlain of east Homer. She is an authority on dogmushing mail delivery and will speak on that subject at 1:00. Kasilof Historical Association will be hosting the meeting and the public is invited. After the meeting, a tour of the McLane Center museum and historic cabins will be offered.

White, vacuum/tank trucks are frequently seen driving through Kasilof and are involved in gas field operations. Gas wells produce by-product fluids, which are separated at well sites. These fluids are picked up by vacuum trucks and, for proper disposal, hauled to the Kenai Gas field on Kalifornsky Beach Road. Gas field drilling operations are planned for local gas fields and will begin as soon as road restrictions go off, enabling the drill rig to be mobilized. Kenai Gas Field is technically in Kasilof.

Backhoes in Kasilof should be extra careful in the future not to dig up phone lines. Alaska Communication System (ACS) owns a fiber optic telephone line, which is buried through Kasilof. ACS has contracted with Tyco Telecommunications to lay a submerged fiber optic cable from Anchorage to Nikiski. It will then hook to the existing line, which runs thorough Kasilof to Homer. From Homer, Tyco will lay a new cable on the ocean floor all the way to Florence, Oregon. The work is planned for this summer. In the past a broken phone line could disconnect half the Peninsula, in the future it could disconnect Alaska from the States.

Mike Sipes of the tallest hill in Cohoe is back from Quito, Ecuador. He has been to South America more than ten times. Originally he went for adventure, but recent trips have been for possible involvement in agribusiness and for personal dental work. Mike has had major dental reconstruction at Quito over the course of a couple years. He has nothing but praise for the Ecuadorian people and dentists.
“I have to do something to offset Borough taxes,” Mike said. “They are taxing me out of my house.”

A work party from Kasilof Community Church has recently built a 1200 square foot house for the MacRae family on Elaine Ave off Cohoe Loop. Chuck Morse headed up the work party. Jim and Dianne McRae already had a basement and recently bought material for their house, but after surgery on his brain, Jim was unable to build it. MacRae’s have a chicken farm of about 300 birds.

Kasilof Eagles Club offers Sunday breakfast potlucks from 10:00 -1:00 at their “Aerie” (Eagles nest) on Jason Road. They are raffling off a large framed print called “The Bear.” Tickets are $1 each, or 6 for $5 and the drawing will be on Mother’s Day.

Kasilof River flows out of Tustumena Lake, which has a 114 square mile surface. Skilak and Kenai lakes combine for 60 square miles of surface area. At 950 feet, Tustumena Lake is not only deeper than its neighbors, it’s deeper than Cook Inlet!

Kenai Peninsula has 11 public libraries. The one in Kasilof is housed in Tustumena School and they are holding a book fair this week. Hours are Mon-Thu 9:30-6:00, and Fri 9:30-noon. Katja Wolfe is the public librarian and Rosy Thompson is the school librarian. The public library hours are normally Mon, Tue, and Thu, 2:30-6 p.m.

Kelly Hagelund and Willow King had baby Brynn on February 3. She was born at the Women’s Way Midwifery in Soldotna and joins siblings, 6-year old Caius and 4-year old Adarra. The family lives on Capella Drive, across from Kasilof Storage. Kelly is an electrician and has been working for Kiner Electric on the Soldotna Hospital project. Willow is a connoisseur of cannery work. Her dad, Rich King, is a Cook Inlet drift fisher who has seen some water under his bridge. Willow grew up in awe of Wards Cove cannery, in Kenai. She has spent the past few summers working at the old Wards Cove plant, now leased to Kenai River Seafoods. This summer Willow will wield a spoon and a spatula as she heads up the galley.
Kasilof Historical Association will be hosting the Peninsula Historical Association spring meeting May 3 in the Kasilof Community Church building. Members from Seward to Kenai to Homer will be attending. The featured speaker is Linda Chamberlain, PhD, MPH, of east Homer. She is an authority on dogmushing mail delivery and will speak on that subject at 1:00. The public is invited.

April 10 the McLane Center was bulging with history as early homesteaders took turns reliving events. Among the speakers were: Joan Lahndt, who was born in a Kasilof cannery building in 1927; Pat McElroy, who homesteaded in 1958 and ran into some impromptu situations while welding, firefighting and bear hunting; Ruth Johnson had never seen a woodstove when she left Chicago in 1942. Now she knows the ups and downs of woodstoves better than Santa Claus. Grant Phillips hired Morris Coursen in the deep-snow spring of 1956. Morris dozed a trail from the Sterling Highway to Grant’s homestead near Ciechanski Road. This became the first road on that side of the Kenai River and much of it was eventually adopted into Kalifornsky Beach Road. Stan McLane was born in Seldovia in 1922 and raised in Kasilof. Marge Madden filed on a homestead in 1954, but her children caught polio and delayed her move to Kasilof until 1958. Katie Vasilie Macleod was a nurse with doctors Gaede & Isaac in 1968. She was the head nurse when the hospital opened in Soldotna, and became a nurse at Tustumena School. Bob and Mary Haeg went to live with the bears at Chinitna Bay in 1975. They have retired to Kasilof.

Grant and Shirley Fritz are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary on April 18. Grant was born in North Carolina, raised in Texas, and came to Anchorage with his parents in 1948. Grant’s high school coach took him and seven other students to Bristol Bay in 1949. They worked in a cannery and got to see the Bristol Bay sailboat drift fleet. Grant met Chuck Simon in school and began coming to Kasilof in 1950 to setnet with Chuck’s dad. Grant graduated from what was then Anchorage’s only high school in 1951. With the help of Archie Pearmain, the superintendent for Libby, McNeil & Libby Cannery, he bought Simon’s setnet site. He also soon bought five acres from Charlie Heckle on the Kasilof River, upstream from Pollard’s place. Heckle’s had bought the property earlier as an investment. They lived much further down-river. In 1954 Grant filed on a homestead adjacent to his five acres. Johnny Parks built a cabin for him.

Meanwhile, Shirley Karlen was born in Oregon, raised on a dairy farm and attended Lewis & Clark College. In 1951 Shirley went to Anchorage with her mom, who moved there because she had relatives at Elmendorf Air Force Base. Shirley decided to attend college at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks in 1952. She returned to Lewis & Clark in 1953, however, and graduated as a lab technician. The next year she got a job in Anchorage at the Native Hospital. By then Shirley had fallen in love —with skiing. So she attended the University of Colorado for adjacent skiing opportunities and acquired additional medical certification. Afterward she returned to Anchorage to work in a hospital for the Territory of Alaska.
Eventually, interest in skiing drew Grant and Shirley together and they married in 1958. By then Shirley’s mom had married Dick Nielson and moved with him to the Sterling area, where (in 1956) they ran Naptown Inn. Shirley joined Grant on the Kasilof homestead, but in 1959 they sold their setnet site to Pat McElroy. Grant drifted in the Inlet until 1968, when he began seining in the lower Inlet. Eventually he fished Kodiak and Prince William Sound, as well as chasing herring from Southeast to Togiak.

Grant and Shirley have three girls. When they were old enough for high school, Grant built a log home above the river on Sandwick Ave. Grant and Shirley also have a cabin in Halibut Cove and have been retired from fishing since about 1998. In the interim, their daughters have all married, had children and live in Kasilof. In addition to racing as a youth, Grant spent several winters working at Alyeska and skiing there. He recently visited a couple of his grandkids in Montana, where they are attending college. They all went to a ski resort there and enjoyed the slopes.

Kasilof Public Library holds their annual Scholastic book fair the week of April 21-25. The Tustumena School library holds their book fair in the fall and the sales from their 2006 event was over $2,000. The library’s cut is 25% of that money, but they realized a $1,100 value by buying items from the company putting on the fair. The public library sales were $1,500 in their 2007 book fair and they also realized a value exceeding 25% by buying from the bookseller. The library will look like a bookstore for the event. If someone prefers regular library visits to owning their own books, cash donations are always accepted and appreciated.

Quality Asphalt Paving has equipment staged by the Kasilof airport, waiting for the frost to go out to start work on Kalifornsky Beach Road.

Kasilof is a bedroom community for folks who work in town or at the oil patch. Commuting is a polluting, but regular activity for workers who sleep in Paradise. Since the gas price hike hit, however, sourdoughs are ready to hitchhike. Thumbing is legal on the Sterling Highway, but not safe. Carpooling is the way to go and bicycles would be better, if the highway had a pair of docile and paved shoulders. There are, however, ways to save gas. According to CNNMoney.com, fuel savings of up to 30 percent can be achieved by driving passively; accelerate gently, avoid hard braking, and reduce speed. For an illustration try walking a quarter mile, and then turn around and run the same distance. Einstein wrote something like: mass x speed = energy, so less energy (gas) is needed for less speed. This is true even without the “wind factor.” At 40 mph the energy used to displace air is moderate. At 65 mph it is tremendous.

Bob Vaderwege has been chosen as the new principal of Tustumena Elementary School. His wife, Carol, has been a “Title I” teacher at there. Shay Montoya is a kindergartner at Tustumena and her family won the Easter basket at the Kasilof Easter egg hunt.

Dave and Dawnie Watson of Cohoe Loop are back from Macedonia where they spent three weeks visiting their daughter, Anna. She grew up in Cohoe but is teaching school for Quality Schools International in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia. Anna and a classmate from Northwest Nazarene University in Idaho are roommates and both teaching at this facility. Typical students have English speaking parents who work in Macedonia, but that hasn’t stopped Anna from learning to speak Macedonian. The school had spring break while Watson’s were there, which allowed them to travel together. They enjoyed the sights and were especially impressed with Meteora, an area with butte-like rock formations several hundred feet high, topped with monasteries several hundred years old. “Meteora” is Greek for, “suspended in air.” Dave observed the drivers and felt the Macedonians smacked of danger. “I wouldn’t want to drive there,” he said. “The traffic is insane.”

Kasilof artist Zirrus VanDevere has a mixed-media exhibit, “spirit moves through everything,” at the Kenai Visitors and Cultural Center. The display is open for viewing Mon-Fri 9-5 and Sat 11-4.

Ice racing is over for the year. Weekly races were held this winter as usual on the lake behind Decanter Inn. Ralph Mills and his wife, Roxy, took home a trophy each, one for the Men’s and one for the Women’s division. Tracy Harris won the Pitman’s division and Brianna Kitchen pulled a fast one on the boys to win the Teen division. Six cars participated on big days. Everyone involved will gather for a season finale banquet.

The public is invited to a 7 p.m. April 10 meeting of the Historical Association at the McLane Center. A video of pioneer Freda Lewis will be presented with a panel of Kasilof post World War II homesteaders. The Kasilof Historical Association’s $50,000 grant was veto by Governor Palin for the second year in a row. The money was to be used to upgrade the water system and make repairs at the McLane Center museum. Also on their agenda was cabin restoration projects which are on-going.