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STAN BISHOP—A TRUE SOURDOUGH 

PORT STEWART AND THE KETCHIKAN PULP COMPANY

Don: Well, let’s see, Stan, then all those days with the pulp mill…
Stan: This month, I’ll be working, off and on, for the pulp mill for 40 years. Went to work for them in 1957. And after I retired I worked indirectly for them for another 25 or 30 years. My contract that I had with them is still unexpired. I’m going to take it in before the end of this month and resign. So I’ll probably be one of the oldest continuous employees of Ketchikan Pulp Company.

I was an individual contractor. But I was contracting through them. I was custodian of the Port Stewart storage and salvage operator and I took care of break-downs and stuff like that, raft break-ups. We used to carry around 50 million board feet in there every winter. That was the closest we had to the mill. They couldn’t afford to take a chance on bringing the rafts down for long periods of time from Thorne Bay, so they were towed down and put in storage in Port Stewart, then pulled out of there and at times they would come straight across to Back Island and come through that way with a raft just to get out of the weather as soon as they could. But it was the best bad-weather tow that they could get. They couldn’t store everything here in Rosa Reef and Lewis Reef because there wasn’t room for it.

Don: Were you living on the boat then?
Stan: No, I had a float house that I had in Mud Bay here. I had the first float house in there, and I bought it from Lloyd Wilson, who was a buddy of mine, and took it out to Wadding Cove first--that’s where I was doing my own personal log salvage--then Al Ludwig approached me and said, “Would you consider moving your whole outfit up to Port Stewart and just staying there and salvaging our stuff?” And I said, “If you’ll tow me up there and bring my outfit back when I’m through.” He said, “Well, we’ll arrange for that, yes.” So after ten years I decided I might just as well stay there.

Don: Found a home.
Stan: Yeah. And it was home to a lot of other people, too. It was amazing the number of visitors that I had. I’ve got names in my book of people from all over the country, clear as far as Baja, California. Yachtsmen, and sailboats, and I kept a Visitors Log of everybody. I never counted ‘em but I think it would amount to at least 150 new people that come there--a lot of them were repeats, come up one season from Seattle and stop there on their way to Glacier Bay and then they’d stop on the way back and lay in there for a day or so--and it was nice, I got to see lots of people and they enjoyed it because it was, well, it was so unique to them to go in there and tie up in a perfect harbor and be able to walk around on the floats and stuff and watch my tame otter and my tame mink that used to run full-length of the floats. I told my wife at the time, I says, “You know, the nearest I can describe our mink is that he always acts like he’s late for an appointment somewhere.” He was always in a hurry.

So my life became entangled with working around town to make money for grub and stuff and I was always traveling back and forth, sometimes by airplane, sometimes by my own boat, and sometimes by helicopter and sometimes if I was working for a big mining company like Selukwe Sebaka of Africa--they had a chartered Norseman from Canada and it was kept at the Unuk there and wherever I wanted to go I was at liberty to order it to stop here or there... Don: Pretty nice. Your own private plane and pilot. Stan: No, it wasn’t exactly that. It’s just that I was handy to ‘em, I was a good handy man to have around and they liked to have me along wherever they went and if I had some place I wanted to go they would put me on the old Norseman. That was a wonderful old plane.

Stan: We used to load three 50-gallon drums of diesel oil in one of those rigs and haul it up onto the glacier and drop it. Land on the glacier snow with floats. And a lot of times if the weather condition was just right they’d have an awful time taking off at Burroughs Bay. There wouldn’t be any swell or anything, just Burroughs Bay was flat. So I’d have to go out with an outboard and run up and down Burroughs Bay to make swells and then they’d try to take off and they would get off of the water and the pilot would tell me, “Stan, I’d be pouring the coal, that poor old baby, from the very beginning, just all she’d take and we’d gain just enough altitude to get over the edge of the glacier when we got in there to get level with the glacier to land.” They’d be climbing all the way, every inch of the way, just as much as that old Norseman could pull. And I told them one time, “I should rope these drums in, shouldn’t I?” “God, no, what good would it do?” he said. “If we crash, we all crash together.” You couldn’t rope anything like that in because it would tear the plane to pieces ‘cause if you hit anything, why, those drums would be just wiped right through everything.

Don: Well, I was with Quentin Deboer once in the Waco when we dropped material on top of the mountain up the Unuk and the miners had made a cross in the snow and put some coal dust in there to kind of help mark it. And that was our target. We didn’t find out ‘til later when they came down to the hanger and said, “You guys did pretty good with one exception. We had cornflakes all over that mountain!”

Stan: Well, we were the first ones to get into that drop business. In fact we had [a] special chute [built], that went from the doorway to the edge of the float and you could put a package on that and give it a push and it would clear the float. Otherwise you can’t throw it hard enough to get it out of a plane when it’s underway to clear the struts.

Don: We didn’t have that chute when I did it. We had to give her a bank and he’d drop his hand and I’d give it a big kick.
Stan: Well, when we contracted to move all our stuff in, they built this slide. It was about half up in the doorway, so a guy could stand there without danger of falling out, and you could put your legs against it and you could hold your package there, and when the pilot told you “Push!” you just gave the package a push and the pilot got so good he could tell exactly where it was going to land.

So our first trips in were gas for placer drills… anyway, our first gas was brought in 15-gallon drums, ordinary drums, small but husky drums, they were new drums. And the idea was to drop ‘em on the snow, on a bar...so McQuillen had mapped out a route for them to drop these drums and they came in with I think it was two drums at a time--two or three drums--and they dropped these drums out and they just exploded. They didn’t burn, but they exploded ‘cause of the impact of hitting that shallow snow. So McQuillen took something out there and made marks in the snow. NO. And they mistook it to say OK. So they kept flying these damned drums of gas in there, hundreds of gallons of gas was wasted on that gravel bar. And Tom took off and came to town. Had to come all the way into town to tell ‘em, “Do not drop anything more on that gravel bar.”

And then they got together in town, Blanton and a bunch of them, and they found some Pilsner beer barrels, these steel beer barrels. So they wrenched them out and filled them with gas and they could drop ‘em around solid rock and it wouldn’t even mar them. But after I used this Dewitt stationary engine for half the season, it started acting funny. And pretty quick the rings froze up on it. And I had all the necessary oil for it and everything, and then we discovered this gas was full of sugar from the beer and the sugar was ruining our engine. So we had to put new rings in the damn engine before we could use it again.

Louise: Was Tom McQuillen a prospector or what was he doing up there?
Stan: He was my neighbor. He was my Canadian counterpart. He was interested in the same things I was interested in. And he prospected in the summertime and he trapped in the winter. He prospected most of the year up there, but he worked for companies, he didn’t work independently. He had several big companies he was...along toward his later years, he was much in demand. He was so, so proficient in minerals and geology that he worked for lots of big companies and they sent him all over the world. But he was a Canadian from Vancouver and in the early days he and a fellow by the name of--there I go again--anyway his pal left here and went up to Tok, Alaska, and Tom got local guys to go in with him and they’d go in in the fall and trap all winter, then come back out in the spring, and they’d spend a few weeks in town and take off again prospecting.

They’d go into the Pioneer Hotel and play poker and they’d never stop the game, they’d sit there for hours and hours and they’d call through the wall to the Pioneer Restaurant and have ‘em pass through dinner for ‘em and they’d eat right at the table and never break their concentration. I don’t know about Tom, but I know that some of my old woods buddies would go in there and they wouldn’t stop until they were broke. They’d lose from $3,000 to $8,000 at a sitting before they’d leave.

At that time they had a little trap door in the wall and if you were in the Pioneer Pool hall you could call an order through and they’d fix it and they’d set it on this trap door and you could eat in the Pioneer Pool hall, but it’d come from the Pioneer Restaurant. Don: That hole’s still there, they still use it. Stan: Yeah, I was thinking about it the other day and I asked about it. Stan: One of their favorite games was that Chinese game, what is it? Filipinos played it all the time. It was a continuous game, it hardly ever stopped. It’d go on sometimes for days at a time. But anyway it was a good, comfortable, warm place for these guys to hang out while they were waiting for weather to clear up so they could get back to work.

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Related Alaskan stories:

"Stan and the Milk Run"

"Tales of Yes Bay, Alaska"