In 1962, four new Wentworth graduates—John Mancuso, John McGrath, Arne Ojala, and Ken Rydberg—packed up and headed to Alaska. They sought the adventure of Alaska’s untamed wilderness and steady work. And just three years into statehood, its massive infrastructure investments offered the young men even more: the chance to lay a foundation for America’s 49th state. Here’s an oral history of their early years.
Illustrations by John Ritter
ALASKA CALLS
John McGrath, CHE ’62, former construction manager for the Alaska Department of Transportation: I had a neighbor named Helen Eaton who had a half-brother named Harry Leonard. Harry lived in Alaska—had been there since the 1920s or 1930s. Up in the Arctic in a little town called Wiseman—a town of six people. Two hundred and fifty miles from Fairbanks. I had mononucleosis when I was 14, and Mr. Eaton would come by to deliver the milk to [my parents’] dairy. One day, he knew I was ill, and Helen sent over a six- or ten-inch stack of Alaska sportsmen magazines that Harry Leonard had sent to his mother. So I spent the next month in bed with mono and discovered Alaska. And decided then that I was going to Alaska.
Arne Ojala, CHE ’62, retired founder of a civil engineering business: Somehow we got talking about it in class. Maybe that’s the “last frontier” kind of a thing. Sort of an adventurous idea. It was the last area in the US that had untamed wildness to it and that appealed to us.
John Mancuso, CHE ’62, former engineer, City of Fairbanks (AL): I think it was in our statics class. I don’t remember the professor’s name. But he would just show us slides of Alaska, of the area. The wilderness, the vastness of Alaska at the time—the animals, the hunting and fishing. I was into that kind of stuff.
McGrath: There’s always the black sheep in every small town in New England and every other place that wants to go to the end of the road and see what is there. The people running away and running towards were both going there.
THE VOYAGE
McGrath: I bought a brand-new $1,725 pickup truck. My grandfather and I built a camper top on the back out of plywood and canvas. My mother gave me a bunch of kitchen utensils, and on July first [of 1962], I left West Newbury for a five-thousand-mile drive.
Ken Rydberg, CHE ’62, retired structural design consultant: I had a ’50 Chevy. I started driving that with Arne. We got to Detroit, and my uncle was a designer for General Motors, and my mother had called him up, worried about me making it up there with this ’50 Chevy. He convinced me to sell that Chevy, and he lined us up to deliver a truck to a surplus yard owner up here.
Ojala: It was a deal where you deliver a truck to Alaska, and you paid for the gas and basically you get free transportation.… We delivered it to a store location, and that was it. After that we were on foot.
Mancuso: I bought an old Volkswagen Bug. And I got someone from the Cape to do the trip with me—one of Arne Ojala’s friends. The trip took about two weeks.
Illustration by John Ritter
McGrath: Once it became a state, there was a huge flow of money where you could rebuild everything. And I didn’t know it at the time, because I was paying too much attention to what I was doing—but that was true for the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, Health and Social Services. Every aspect of the state was undergoing this explosive growth and upgrading.
Mancuso: Back then, we were making a dollar an hour back east. Maybe a dollar-and-a-half an hour. I come up to Alaska, and I’m making five dollars an hour. That was a big raise. And with basically no living expenses because I was living in the state camp…It was federal money to do all this work—something like ninety-eight percent of it.
Ojala: In those days the wages were very good in Alaska. When you were out surveying you got a per diem of $25 plus your regular wages, which was neat because we could save most of the $25 by being frugal and cooking our own food.
McGrath: In my first few years, because I lived in Tok, I was either working on the Alaska Highway or the road they called the Tok cutoff. The existing roads were all corrugated—like a washboard—because of permafrost…. That was the stuff Arne and I were working on.
Ojala: What happened was all these roads were built over permafrost, years ago, and they settled down and were rough and hard to drive on.
McGrath: The road network was there from Alaska’s days as a territory, but it was in terrible condition.
Mancuso: Permafrost was a big issue. So when we were surveying, we’d try to find a well-drained area [for a road]. We’d have crews go out and do core drilling to see what the soil look liked. Seasonal frost level could be anything from the first two feet to eight feet. Permafrost starts at that level, and it is just frozen all the time. If it melts, and it is silty soil, it just becomes mud and there’s no structure. And it just flows like water. And whatever you put on top of it would just sink away and move.
Ojala: I worked as a surveyor on what was going to be the Copper River Highway. In the early part of the century there were copper mines at Chitna, and there was a railroad that was constructed up to Chitna from Cordova. When the railway was abandoned, the thought was to build a highway over the same route. When they built the train, there was permafrost and ice under the ground, and ultimately what happened was some of the ice melted and the railroad became unusable. Some places you’d see the rails hanging between a couple of hills where the ice had melted out underneath. I worked with a crew that was taking soil borings to find out if there was still ice in various places and indeed there was. It was quite fascinating to take out cores. You’d see cores of ice and there would be ash in the various depths. They had volcanic ash and you could see the layers here and there.
McGrath: To give you some idea of the mindset of the people that lived in that area, when I lived in Tok, if you lived within one mile of the school, you didn’t get a school bus ride. Same as around here [in West Newbury]. But the threshold for when you could ride in the school bus was minus fifty [degrees]. To go to grade school.
Mancuso: Once you got out of the urban area, it was just a vast wilderness.
Mancuso: You learn to adapt. It’s not really a shock, because everyone is in the same situation…. We were mostly all transplants, so we were mostly learning at the same time.
Rydberg: It was cold in winters. And the year in ’62 when I come up here—that winter still holds a lot of the records. People were saying that was a son-of-a-gun winter. We come up here in June, so it was warm then. But I’ve been through some winters now that have set record cold spells, and I’ve taken pictures of my thermometer outside the house at 64 below. It’s very cold, but you get used to it.
Mancuso: My first job was up on the Elliott Highway which is about 45 miles [northwest] from Fairbanks. There was a dirt road there at the time, and we were taking out some curves and realigning the road. We were cutting brush and doing some preliminary surveying, too. We actually had a guide, a local guy, because it was heavy bear country.… One night, we woke up at two in the morning and just heard this screaming. And so everyone jumped up. There were some fishermen who had a camp not too far from ours, and these guys were sleeping in their bags, and the bear had come up and started chewing through their bags. So we scared the bear off, shot him, and took the two guys to Fairbanks hospital. They survived—they both had several bite marks on their back and neck.
McGrath: In my first year, I talked my way into staying up in Tok into December with a geologic crew that was doing soil sampling for a new alignment. We worked outside to minus fifty in that first fall. And I was in New England clothes, which meant that when it got cold, you just kept adding shirts. So I’d go out in the morning with about seven shirts on.… [For materials testing] we’d have a bulldozer with a backhoe on it. The geologist would have some tank demolition materials called shaped charges. They were about as big as a basketball.… So you hang that from a tree limb, and it would blow holes in the ground six inches in diameter and two to three feet deep. Then we’d stuff it full of dynamite—true dynamite, the old style—and then run like hell. Then the backhoe could dig it up so we could get soil samples.
McGrath: We were just [working] in a little quarry site along the side of the road, and I had a certain amount of extra time, so I’d walk fifty feet down onto the highway. And there was a road, like I was used to in West Newbury. But there was nothing [coming]. I’d stand there, waiting. And then, finally, it got to be an event when a car came by. Really.
Ojala: We were surveying on the highway project and we discovered this cabin that was back in the woods, up on a hill. Nobody was there, so we just moved in. One night at about midnight, the original owner who built the cabin showed up and woke us up and came in and sat down and wondered if we had any coffee. We said we didn’t have any coffee. He said, ‘I thought I left a can of coffee under the floorboards somewhere.’ There was an axe there and he picked it up and was thumping on the floor a little bit. My partner that was with me sat up in bed and got himself close to his handgun, a .44 Magnum. He was a little bit concerned that the guy might be a little strange because he was fooling around with the axe. Finally, he decided that we didn’t have any coffee and he left. There were a few people who didn’t fit in other places and they sort of gravitated to Alaska and, once in a while, you would run in to one that was a little strange.
Illustration by John Ritter
Rydberg: I worked out on St. Lawrence Island when they paved a runway out there. When I went out, it was just this WWII landing mat. They ripped that up. I was the engineer, testing materials and doing the surveying.… I had a guy the same age as me, probably twenty-two, twenty-three, surveying with me. And his dad was the chief of the village up there.
Mancuso: We would build from a spot in the wilderness that was a road on paper, but there was no road on either side. They’d drop us in the middle, and we’d build ten miles in one direction, then ten miles in the other direction. When we were building the [George] Parks Highway [connecting Anchorage to Fairbanks] in ’64, there was nothing at all before we got there. The contractor would bring in the equipment he needed on the railroad. [He] would have his bulldozers and gravel hauling equipment. Then you’d knock down the trees and build a road. You’ve got to understand that, but for the trees, there’s nothing else you have to worry about. There was no right-of-way problems, no utility problems. Just bare ground. Knock down the trees, clear the area, and backfill it.
Mancuso: We’d take a train to our camp…. You could hop on the train anywhere you wanted to. All you had to do was wave your arms and the trains would stop for you.
Rydberg: In 1965, I was down in Valdez working for a private contractor. Old Valdez got flooded out when the tidal wave came in. And we lived there while we were putting in the roads and utilities four or five miles further west to build a new Valdez. We built a whole new city.
Rydberg: I went back to Boston in 1967. I was working for a big structural firm. I liked it. But one day, I remember, I was coming back on the T at One Center Plaza down in the subway getting ready to get on the [train]. And boy, people all crowded around, elbow to elbow, waiting for the subway to pull up, and I looked around and there was some woman twenty feet away, and she was feeling the same way. And our eyes just met, and it was right there I decided, I’m going back to Fairbanks.
McGrath: Many years later, when I took the pipeline haul road job in 1974, I remembered that [my neighbor’s half-brother] Harry Leonard was in Wiseman, and the pipeline haul road was going near him…. One night, a friend was flying out to get supplies and asked if I wanted to go, and I said yes, but can we stop by Wiseman. So I got to meet Harry, and we visited a lot that summer. I kind of closed the loop. Life is like a series of loops—like a circumnavigating sailor, you are keenly aware of when you cross your outbound track with your inbound track.
EPILOGUE: John McGrath spent 25 years working for the Alaska Department of Transportation, eventually retiring on September 30, 1987—a date he celebrates every year. He lives in West Newbury, MA. John Mancuso spent 35 working as an engineer for the State of Alaska. He is retired and lives in Fairbanks. Arne Ojala founded a civil engineering business on Cape Cod, which he recently passed down to his son. Ken Rydberg lives in Fairbanks. He finally retired at 67, more than 15 years after he had planned.
—Dan Morrell and Kimberly Thorpe
