Old Petersburg Basement and Secrets of WWII.

Enge boys of multiple generations have played in the concrete confines of the basement of the Enge home on First street in Petersburg, in the inclement weather or darkness that impeded outdoor adventure. The home was built in 1929, just before the Great Stock Market Bubble of the same year. The home was built for the Martin and Augusta Enge family, with boys John, Arnold and Ernest. The boys were employed to pick and shovel the solid blue clay, that the house is built on, into wheelbarrows and wheeled up a plank to be dumped into the back yard. That provided a pretty poor place to grow anything, as Martin found out later when he planted a bushel of potatoes and got one bushel back.

The house had a large number of unique features for a Petersburg home. I always heard it was the first home in Petersburg to be designed by a bona-fide architect. Unique features include the prominent brick chimney at the front of the house, arched entry way, sliding glass paned doors to close off the living room, a curved bannister in the foyer. And one of the first central heating systems in town, the big old wood and coal furnace, with it's octopus-like airducts branching out in different directions. Martin didn't burn coal for more than one winter, but there is still a boarded up hole where a coal chute was.

That basement was usually around fifty-five degrees and dry all the time and was a favorite place for many hunters in the neighborhood to hang salted front quarters of deer, aka, spekekjott. (Pronounced spic a chit, and the first recipe in the 'Viking Fare' section of the Petersburg Sons of Norway Cookbook that I have.) At an early age, when a cardboard box looked like a good play skiff to me, a leg of spekekjott with a sampling notch in it also looked a good deal like an outboard motor for said skiff. It is interesting that I inverted the front quarter of deer in my mind to see a potential propulsion unit for my skiff. I suppose an open mind to ideas came at an early age, because later I lead several industrial design and prototype building projects.

We had moved into the Enge home on First St. not long after John and Carol came back to Petersburg from Pelican in 1951 with three new little Enges; Arnold, John and Steve. Dad had been buying fish in Pelican's new Cold Storage Plant for Elton Engstrom of Juneau. Then Chris Dahl hired him to run his and Dean Kayler's new plant in Petersburg, aka, Kayler-Dahl Fish Co. This was a pretty close second to his first choice of things to do after bringing his ship back from Japan and being de-commissioned in '45. Being froze out of his dream to resume buying fish at the Petersburg Cold Storage was one of the three big disappointments in dad's life. The other two were the death of his grandparents and his brother, Arnold, during his Wartime absence.

Us boys launched many an expedition from the stores of boots, jackets and fishing poles held in the basement of the Enge house. Along with neighbor kids like Floyd Strand, Mark Sandvik, Rob and Tom Swanson, we also charted our course to outdoor adventure on the chart table of the Cub Scout Troop my mother led in our basement. Early expeditions were of a closer orbit however, that of the crevices and hiding places in the house itself. We were in awe of the wondrous and strange implements of early Petersburg life such as trapping supplies, brass trolling gurdies and old tarnished trolling spoons.

We found voids in the house that the Architect couldn't quite reconcile: secret lairs that may never be discovered again. And then there was the bent airplane propeller. The story we heard was that it was the propeller from the war-plane Uncle Arnold lost his life in while ferrying it from Sitka to Juneau during WWII. The propeller was wood with brass reinforcing on the tip and leading edges. It was about four inches of the tip that was bent. The propeller was about five feet from one tip to the other. Very mysterious. As was Arnold's old leather flight jacket with a tiny silver cross under the collar. There was also a leather helmet and goggles with various tinted lenses.This was the attire of both he and Dad while learning to fly Navy planes with the open-cockpit Stearman Bearcat at Sand Point in Lake Washington..

Deepening the mystery was the day we dug into an old steamer trunk, being now big enough to get it off a top shelf, and read, and finding the yellow Western Union telegram from the War Department to Grandma Enge. The telegram was brief and to the point: Arnold had been killed in action. No details. Grandma had been making meatballs with Mrs. Eric Fuglvog next door when the telegram arrived. I remember discussing the find of the telegram at the dinner table that day and being filled in on some of the details.

Dad said Arnold had been ferrying a military plane from Sitka to Juneau and crashed coming into the Juneau airport. The connection between the old wood propeller and the crash was never firmed up, so mostly the connection was in us kid's minds. Apparently the Sargent who assigned the plane to Arnold knew there was a defect in the plane, but for whatever reason sent him anyway. Through the years I heard other details, like that Arnold had wagged his wings at a Petersburg halibut boat in Chatham Straits on his flight. I thought I had heard the boat was in Hawk Inlet and that it might have been the 'Middleton.'

As I write this from my desk in Oregon I looked at my Alaska Atlas and Gazetteer and sure enough, Hawk Inlet on the north end of Admiralty Island is a shortcut through the Mansfield Peninsula that comes out adjacent to the north end of Douglas Island, which is on the other side of Gastinau Channel from the Juneau airport. I fished in Hawk Inlet on the Enge family boat, the 'Augusta,' for halibut one time as well. So the stories are adding up. Here's where some of the stories head into the fog.

One; Dad said there was no airport in Sitka when Arnold made his ill-fated flight. That the plane might have been some experimental model that flew off a ship of some kind. Nobody has ever mentioned the presence of a aircraft carrier in those waters that I know of. Two; the Juneau folks wrote in their history of their town that Arnold crashed on take-off, because a small boy reported it that way. I have other information that disproves that account, including the picture of the crash site that I have just seen this winter. More on that in a minute.

The tale that has never been printed before was told to me by an old salt from Juneau who saw the accident happen. In 1990 I brought my family to Juneau from Anchorage to take a job running a seafood processing plant. We opened the plant with tanner crab production and then slid into buying black cod. I had helped arrange the pack loan and the sales contracts but not the hiring of tendermen. We had sent the 68 foot 'Christian,' owned by Ole Nelson, out to Squid Bay on the ocean side of Yakobi Island. One day I decided to charter a plane out to see how he was doing and that was one of my more peculiar experiences.

Flying in a small float plane along the coasts of Alaska is a particularly thrilling experience, but flying into the area as an adult after leaving the area as an infant added to the effect. When I had gotten situated at Ole's galley table with a cup of coffee and the plane was gone, Ole launched right in. He started with a clarifying question: "So, you're John Enge?" That opened my ears right up. Naturally he knew who his plant manager was. I think he wanted to make double sure the forthcoming narrative was going to the right address.

Seems he was a seventeen year old attending the one-room North Douglas school right across the Gastineau Channel from the Juneau Airport one fateful day. He was standing in the school-yard with the other children when a bright silver war-plane roared past them. It made a turn-around over the Channel and started it's approach to the runway. Then a second one came into view and roared past them wagging it's wings when it was abreast of the kids. At that instant the plane took a 90 degree dive right into the shallow water of that part of the Channel and mostly disintegrated on impact. Ole found out later it was a Petersburg pilot named Arnold Enge. Ole said he went to the crash site at low tide after the wreckage was removed and found a wristwatch with a shattered crystal. If Arnold's watch crystal was shattered, the propeller would have had much more damage than a bent tip. And the prop we had wouldn't have been big enough for that plane.

Dad was sensitive about the tragic loss of his brother. They had a lot of good times together. He said he and Arnold used to row down to Blind Slough to camp and sport-fish for sea-run cutthrout trout and jack cohos. And of course they crewed together on the 'Augusta,' etc., etc. Now Mom says to complete the story, so that's what I'm doing.

The crash picture cooberates Ole Nelson's story of where and how the plane crashed. The crash site is just west of the north-south axis of the runway and rules out a crash on take-off. Did someone in Juneau send an old propeller laying around as a memorial item, of was it a prop from an earlier plane Arnold flew in peacetime? The flight path was most likely through Peril Straits cutting through the mountains of Chichagof/Baranof Islands. Then up Chatham Strait, through Hawk Inlet, and across Stephen's Passage to the North end of Douglas Island. They would have rounded the Island and headed down and across the shallow north end of the Channel and the duck flats to do a hard left turn and land heading north.There is a low hill at the north end of the runway that jets now skim to land from the north.

What kind of plane it was is the subject for serious inquiry. It might be about as fruitful as getting a straight answer to what kind of charge blew Dad's LST in half in the English Channel. The official story is that his first command was torpedoed. The violence of the explosion made him believe it was a mine that didn't get cleared in time for his convoy. Any Southeast Alaska War Aviation buff might discover some interesting goings-on from the War years in trying to find out what kind of planes these were. Arnold had been a flight instructor in Ketchikan right before December 7, 1941. He had taken flight lessons at Boeing Field in Seattle and stayed in Dad's fraternity house at the University of Washington. Dad was the frat President so Arnold got special dispensation I think. Besides Dad was dating the daughter of the President of the Alaska Packer's Association and had her own Dussenberg to drive, real West Coast royalty.