The Mailman of Prince William Sound

by Virginia Lacy

Good morning. I am Virginia Lacy from Cordova. When I learned that the theme of this year's AHS conference was to be "Prince William Sound in Alaska's Past," I felt that information about my father, Pete Nicholoff, should be included as he was one of the true pioneers of the area. Pioneers come in all shapes and sizes but what sets them apart from the rest of us is their vision, their drive, and their determination to accomplish whatever they set out to do. Such a man was my father.

He was born on a farm in the Vilage Radonova, in Bulgaria on October 26, 1892, one of four children. At that time Bulgaria had been invaded first by the Turks and then by the Russians and there was little future for a young man. His older brother left home and found his way to Cordova, Alaska. By the time my father was 15, his family was able to save enough money to send him to America. He arrived at Ellis Island on October 19, 1907, traveling alone, speaking no English, with just a few dollars in his pocket. Other Bulgarians on the ship befriended him and took him with them to a Bulgarian settlement in Wisconsin where he went to work on a dairy farm. He worked his way across the country, and eventually reached Portland, Oregon. where he worked for a doctor and his family as a houseboy and gardener. The doctor was so impressed with his intelligence and diligence that he sent him to night school where he learned English and excelled in math. From Oregon he went to the woods in Washington and worked as alogger. He was in charge of the horse and mule teams and one of the things he did was to improvise snow shoes for the animals so the logging could continue longer into the winter It is hard to visualize horses on snowshoes but he said it worked.

It took nine years but in 1916 he was finally able to board a steamship to come to Cordova to join his brother. Sadly, that same fall the brother drowned in a hunting accident. Since WWI was in progress he joined the US Army, first serving in Cordova where one of his duties was to guard the Million Dollar Bridge. He was later transferred to Fort Liscum, near Valdez, and was discharged there as a Corporal in 1919 and became a US citizen at that time.

There was considerable logging being done in PWS and he got a job in the woods. They were logging in Sheep Bay, and in nearby Alice Cove he met the Tiedeman family.

August Tiedeman is another pioneer—a German sailor who had jumped ship in Baltimore, MD, made his way to Alaska, on a Coast & Geodetic Survey ship, jumpedship again in Nuchek where he met and married my grandmother, Matrona Chimavisky. They had a fox farm in Alice Cove and worked in a herring saltery there. But that's another story. My father married Mary, the oldest Tiedeman girl, and another logger married her sister, Freda, and the two men logged together in various areas around the Sound. One of the jobs was at Montague Island.

He decided he needed a boat so he could tow the rafts of logs himself instead of hiring boats. This worked out well, but when his logging partner moved to the Seattle area he got involved in the fishing industry, both gillnetting and seining. He then got a larger boat, the SUACO and turned to tendering.

Unfortunately, the SUACO was lost when it hit a sandbar near Egg Island and though they took a cat and other large equipment to the area to try to salvage it, winter storms caused the sand to cover it completely.

In 1942 he bought the 65 ft. M/V SIREN at a Marshal's auction right here in Valdez. He had only $5000 and there was considerable interest in the sale but he jumped the bidding in large amounts and apparently scared the other bidders out. He bought the boat for $4800.

He started operating a freighting service, but during WWII the SIREN was conscripted for use by the Army Transport Service. My father went along as Master for the duration of the war, hauling supplies and personnel from Whittier to Army locations at Shemya, Adak, and other locations on the chain. A great miscarriage of justice occurred when the war ended and the SIREN was taken to Seattle to be decommissioned. It was only after lengthy battles with bureaucratic red tape that he recovered a completely stripped down vessel. Everything except the engine had been removed—navigational equipment, rigging, charts, dishes, pots & pans, bedding—and it was up to him to replace everything and get the SIREN back to Cordova.

He then expanded his freighting by building a 30 x 100 oil barge, the ORCA 1, which was lost in a 100 mile an hour gale in Lituya Bay. But this didn't stop him; he went back to Portland and built the ORCA II. These were tanker barges. He not only filled the tanks with oil for delivery to FAA and other sites, but hauled construction equipment and supplies on deck. Since the Alaska Steamship Co. was no longer coming into Cordova he brought vehicles and trailers into town on the barge, and carried passengers on the SIREN. The freighting took him far from Cordova—beyond Valdez to Seward, Anchorage, Nome, and down the Chain. He was the first to tow a raft of piling across the Gulf of Alaska from Yakutat to Milt Brown's cannery at Ellamar. A tug had picked up the raft near Ketchikan and lost it in heavy seas. The Coast Guard rescued the raft and took into Yakutat. The original towers asked to be relieved of completing the run. My father took on the task and it took the SIREN and her crew of five experienced seamen approximately a hundred hours to deliver the raft, with 30 hours of that time spent near Cape St. Elias just holding their own in the heavy seas and keeping the proper tension on the tow lines.

He is probably best known as the mailman of Prince William Sound, as he was awarded the mail contract in 1945 and had this contract for ten years. His "Route 66" was a 500-mile round trip made twice a month, touching Valdez, Cliff Mine, Ellamar, Tatitlek, Peak Island, Drier Bay, Port Oceanic, Latouche, Chenega, Crafton Island, Falls Bay, Nellie Juan, Perry Island, Thomas Bay, Whittier, Granite Mine, Barry Arm, North Dutch Island, Axel Lind Island, Olsen Island, Fairmount Island, Glacier Island then again to Valdez and back to Cordova. During this period "Captain Pete" provided a lifeline for about 300 residents— hunters, trappers, fishermen, fox farmers, miners, FAA personnel,--all year-round residents of islands, small coves, and villages on the Sound. He carried the mail, of course, but also supplies, medicines, fuel, freight, and passengers, and he was awaited at each stop with great anticipation. Since money was tight, much of his payment for services was whatever was offered—trade for some furs or maybe a couple of loaves of fresh bread or "put it on the books." Many people still remember the SIREN as the "Santa Claus" ship because he always delivered the Christmas mail on time, even though it meant he often could not make it back home for the holidays himself. And the Christmas trip carried a supply of what we then called Japanese oranges, cases of pop, dozens of comic books, and boxes of candy bars for distribution to the kids.

Of course over the years there were mysteries and tragedies. One of the strangest concerned a Dr. Allberry, a chiropractor who had practiced in Cordova and a young fellow Al Tibbetts. They hired a boat to take them to McLeod Harbor on Montague Island. It was in the dead of winter when the boat captain unloaded them on a beach with enough supplies and equipment to last a month. No one knew exactly what they were going to do. Some say they went to prospect for gold. But you don't normally prospect in the winter. Others believe they went to beachcomb as that part of the island faces the gulf and winter storms have blown valuable articles ashore. The boat captain went back after a month but found them gone and no sign that they had been around their camp recently. He assumed another boat had picked them up. Several months later, friends of Dr. Allberry in Nome contacted my father to look for them. When he found no trace of them at their camp he decided to look on the other side of the island at Nellie Martin River as there were a couple of trapper's cabins there. He found Dr. Alberry in one of the cabins, a mere skeleton of himself, barely able to move. Al Tibbetts was in the other cabin. He had starved to death and was frozen solid. Dr. Allberry never told anyone why they had gone to Montague Island, or what they were looking for, and as soon as he was recovered enough to travel, he left Cordova, and no one heard from him again. Something that people wondered about for years was why they had taken boxes and boxes of dry cell batteries with them.

Many stories have been told of the search and rescue service that was rendered during the years Cordova was without a Coast Guard vessel. My father was a skilled seaman with extraordinary knowledge and experience in the waters of southcentral Alaska. He also piloted many boats from Cordova to Seattle, among them the Forest Service vessel CHUGACH which was stationed in Cordova for many years. He was a kind but stern taskmaster and the safety of everyone aboard was his primary concern. It has been said that if you lasted a season on the SIREN it was the equivalent of an apprenticeship in the merchant marine. I spent a season on the SIREN as boat cook. I signed off after a late October trip to deliver oil to Woody Island near Kodiak, which should have taken a week but took a month. We started back after the delivery, and waited for weather in just about every cove between Kodiak and Cordova. We were not lonesome—more often than not there was another boat in the cove with us , often sharing Dungeness or king crab or ducks or geese or clams or whatever fish had been caught that day. We were finally near Gore Point and committed to going ahead. The waves were so high that we could look back and see half the bottom of the 100 foot barge each time it hit the crest of a wave. I was sure the stern of that wooden boat would be torn out but my father had every confidence in the boat and the mile of steel cable towing the barge. He was braced at the wheel himself for 11 hours before we reached the relative calm of McArthur Pass. The boat and barge were covered with ice when we finally reached Cordova, and I was never so happy to be on dry land.

He had his share of close brushes with disaster—one time hitting an uncharted rock and having a plane report over the radio that a huge wave had rolled the boat over and they were all gone. It turned out that the boat righted itself and they were able to get pumps going and limp back into town.

But his life was not all work. In the early days one of his pleasures was to stop at a Greek coffee shop halfway down to the harbor and drink little cups of thick Turkish coffee and shoot the breeze with his friends. The owner of the shop each Christmas gave us a decorated tin of Greek candy. I can only describe it as being like thick grey putty with a skim of oil on top. It sounds awful but us kids thought it was wonderful. He was a skilled fisherman and hunter. Besides deer and goat from our local area, he harvested moose from Kings Bay in Port Nellie Juan, and he shot the first elk taken on Afognak Island. "Sunshine" Chimavisky, a deckhand hunting with him, was so startled at the size of the huge elk that he swallowed his cigarette. When he was finally able to talk again he said "Wow, Pete, that's the biggest darn deer I ever saw."

He took our local basketball teams to Valdez for tournaments, and my own Senior Sneak was a several day trip to Ellamar with our graduating class of six, and a teacher chaperon. He was a devoted family man. He and my mother lost their oldest son during the polio epidemic in 1933. His younger son, Perry, who died in 1988, worked on the boat with him for many years and learned the lessons of the sea from him, as did my son, Mike Noonan, who still lives in Cordova. All the grandkids and great grandkids dearly loved "Grandpa Pete."

I'm sure we all realize that progress does not benefit everyone. In my father's case the state ferry system put his freight service out of business so the ORCA II was sold. Mail delivery went to aircraft, but he continued to use the SIREN for hunting and fishing trips until he sold it in 1976. The SIREN had several owners but has since been laid to rest, dismantled and destroyed in Valdez in 1994.

Stories of his adventures and exploits are legendary in the Prince William Sound area. Some of you may have read the book "North to Danger" written by Virgil Burford and Walt Morey which devoted a chapter to my father and his mail boat. Jon Rush, an artist who lived in Ellamar, wrote a song about the SIREN. And the City of Cordova has named the street leading to the New Boat Harbor "Nicholoff Way".

A number of his long-time crew members were local Natives. One of them, John Klashinoff, who had only lived in a village before he went to work on the Siren, worked for a few months and began to get weak and sick. My father sent him to the doctor and he was told that it was probably the change of diet. So my father quit buying so many things from the grocery store and they all ate bear meat, seal (including the liver, which is excellent, especially with friend bacon and onions), venison, clams, crab and fish. John almost immediately began to feel better. In fact, the whole crew felt good.

Visitors were always offered the current meal on the table. A man who was waiting to put his Nash Rambler on the boat when the tide came in joined them to eat the stew that he had been smelling cooking on the stove. About half-way through he told my dad it was the best beef he had ever tasted. The Native deckhand laughed for five minutes before he told the guest that he was eating black bear.

Work on a tug operation like my father had was governed by the tide. Equipment and freight was loaded at high tide. If they were at a dock, the crew would put large planks over the bulkhead onto either the boat or the barge and the car or piece of equipment was driven onto the dock. If they were at a remote location, they would build up a gravel embankment, add planks, and drive the equipment onto shore. Many of his jobs were at remote sites where you made do with what you had—perhaps getting a tractor or loader off first and then building up your ramps to get the rest of the freight off.

"Captain Pete" died in l981 at the age of 90, having been a resident of Prince William Sound for over 60 years. My mother continued to live in the family home in Cordova until her death in 1996 at the age of 92. They were both true pioneers and I am proudto be their daughter. Thank you.