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STAN BISHOP—A TRUE SOURDOUGH 

COMING TO ALASKA AND THE YES BAY HATCHERY

Stan: I told Mrs. Hoover that my biggest ambition was to go to Alaska. So she said, “Maybe we can help you, Stanley.” So she told Mr. Hoover about it, he was still Secretary of Commerce at the time, and he arranged for me to come up on a Bureau of Fisheries boat.
[NOTE: It’s hard to establish the chronology here, but Mr. Hoover was Secretary of Commerce until elected President in 1928. I’m assuming Stan first went to Alaska and the Yes Bay hatchery in 1928—he would have been about 16 years old then. BH]

So I was a “pull-punk.” Local boys never got through rubbing that in. But I made my way through just as tough conditions as they did; I did more work than they did, too. So it was more joking than malicious, but they never let me forget that I was a “pull-punk.” You got your job through pull. But I’ll never forget them; I’ll never forget Mrs. Hoover. I lost track of ‘em after I was up here a few years, but I still remember the number of their house, 327 Laredo Street, I can always remember that.

Then I went back and went to school, finished high school. I had to take an extra year of high school because I was short one credit...took a whole year...

Don: Where was that, Stan?

Stan: California. I managed to graduate and after I graduated I came back here and went to work for the people who were running the hatchery [at] Yes Bay. It was up on Lake McDonald. It was a big operation. People don’t realize the extent of the operations that went on here when we were a territory... Don: Is that a sockeye stream mainly? Stan: Sockeye, yes. We released about 40 million fish a year. At that time the sockeye run was just about wiped out in that part of the country. The Yes Bay run used to be a big prolific run and they just wiped the fish out, between their fish traps and everything. If it hadn’t changed, we wouldn’t have any fish today at all. Nobody was doing any conservation at all and the fish were deteriorating all the time. But the sockeye came back into Yes Bay after...thanks to the hatchery.

But there would have been lots of improvements that we could of put in but when you’re running a hatchery you have to comply with their regulations and everything, and we weren’t allowed to protect the fish once we turned ‘em loose in Lake McDonald, which we could have done. We could have protected them a lot more than we did.

[Stan’s enthusiasm for Alaska and interest in the Unuk River area was evident in a letter written April 24, 1932 by Stan’s boss, Alphonse Kemmerich, Superintendent of the Yes Bay fish hatchery from 1928 until its closing: “Stanley Bishop returned from his trip of adventure to the Unuk River country. He left a day or so before we went to town. He returned yesterday. Got a wolf on his trip. I saw him at the cannery last night. He was all excited over his journey.”]

Stan: I got a story to tell about Sam Bartholomew, who ran the Murre, a Bureau of Fisheries patrol boat [when Alaska] was still a territory... I bought this boat from this guy in Seattle and he shipped it up here, and it had a Model T Ford engine in it, conversion, and I started out from town. Filled the tank, it had an automobile tank for gas. And I ran out of gas up at Bushy Point, and I didn’t worry about it, I had a pole on there and I raised the pole and took a blanket and hung on it. And I was sailing along at a pretty good clip up toward Yes Bay and here this Murre, the patrol boat, came along. And he came to a stop. And he said, “Where you goin’, kid?” And I said, “I’m on my way to Yes Bay.” “Well,” he says, “what are you sailing for?” I said, “Well, I’ve run out of gas.” “Well,” he says, “come on here to Bushy Point and we’ll anchor up and give you some gas.” So they did, they went and anchored up and while they were siphoning gas out of the tank, he says, “You go down and have lunch with the cook.” That was the way they did things in those days, you know.

So I had a good meal and I got out of there with my pockets full of apples and oranges and stuff and they said, “Well, your tank is full and we gave you five gallons extra.” And I thanked him and I got on my boat--I just had it tied up with one line at the bow--and they pushed the boat off and I went down and got the engine all ready and I started it up and I heard a lot of yelling and screaming and I ran out to the cockpit and here I was headed right square for the broadside of the Murre. And this Model T Conversion had this old transmission in it and when the oil was cold it dragged, there was no neutral to it. So my wheel was...the prop was turning around and here I was headed right for Murre! So I just threw myself against the tiller and I grazed right along the bulwarks on the Murre --that was how close it came--and I heard Sam yelling out, “You God-damned, crazy kid!” He says, “We give you gas and food and you try to ram us!” And I was too busy to pay much attention to it, but I got to Yes Bay. Sam came into town and told a story about “the damn kid I gave gas to up at Bushy Point and he turned around and tried to ram us!”

Stan: …When the new [Roosevelt] administration came in it became a different division. It was under Department of Commerce to start with, which had charge of the Bureau of Fisheries. All our fisheries were handled as a territory then, of course. Then when it changed over to Roosevelt’s administration, they did away with the hatcheries up here. Closed ‘em all down. And we were given a choice of going down to the states and getting into a sport-fish hatchery, or quitting...If we wanted to stay up here, we just lost our job. So I just told ‘em I wasn’t moving away from here.

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Related Alaskan stories:

"Stan and the Milk Run"

"Tales of Yes Bay, Alaska"