AUTHOR’S NOTE: A similar version of this two-part story concerning the life of Frank Rowley and the ways in which he changed the City of Kenai first appeared in the Redoubt Reporter in March 2010. Part One concerns mainly how Rowley brought about this change, while Part Two will focus on the good fortune that allowed him to come to the Kenai Peninsula in the first place.

With a small group of linemen from Anchorage and a collection of equipment that nobody else wanted, Frank Rowley made one of the most important steps toward modernization in the history of Kenai: In the early 1950s, he brought the small fishing village into the age of electrification.

In a community that had few private generators, in a place where only kerosene lamps flickered in the windows of homes after nightfall, Rowley brought light. To the throbbing diesel engine inside his Kenai Power plant in Old Town Kenai, he hooked up a series of electrical grids that would act as the template for the modern infrastructure that serves the city more than 70 years later.

After selling his Anchorage-based company called Mountain View Light & Power to the Chugach Electric Association, Rowley looked to Kenai for his next opportunity. In a community that was yet to attract the attention of the federal Rural Electrification Administration, he saw a chance to pioneer a project that he believed would improve the lives of its residents.

Starting after his first visit to Kenai in 1949, he acquired the property for his power plant and, with the help of the Anchorage linemen, used military-surplus equipment to auger holes for the treated poles that would hold the transmission lines they strung throughout the village.

The first lines were made from galvanized number-nine steel wire salvaged from old fish traps, and he began generating power to about 50 subscribers through those lines in 1951. Initially the power came from an array of three small generators—two 50-kilowatt International Harvesters and one 60-kilowatt General Motors 6-71 series—and later from a mammoth Fairbanks-Morse engine that he managed to resurrect from a junkpile.

The 1920s-vintage engine, according to his long-time employee, Hedley “Hank” Parsons, was a 32-E, a four-cylinder monstrosity that had been used in the construction of the Distant Early Warning system in northern Alaska and had become so battered that it was considered a complete loss.

According to Rowley’s son, Raymond, the journals on the crankshaft had been pounded so much that it was no longer round, and the engine had run out of oil. Still, Rowley saw potential in it, and he had it shipped in pieces from Nome to Kenai, where he hand-repaired the damage and then reassembled the entire machine.

He bolted it to a concrete slab about five feet below the surface of the ground, and then he constructed a metal building over it and a shop out in front of it. Near the front of the shop, he placed a 5,000-gallon barrel of diesel fuel to run the engine, and nearby he later added an auxiliary 2,000-gallon barrel.

Parsons, in 2010, said that when Rowley began his electrification project in Kenai, many members of the community eyed him skeptically. Some of them, he said, “made fun of Frank because they didn’t know what the hell he was doing. And then he lit up the whole town and supplied power to the canneries in the summertime.”

Suddenly, no one was laughing.

Once Kenai residents got electricity, “the whole town depended on it,” said former borough mayor Stan Thompson.

The town’s dependence and Rowley’s dedication to keeping his power plant running meant that he was on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Donnis Thompson remembered that Rowley became so accustomed to the loud, rhythmic pulsing of the generator that he frequently said, “I don’t hear noise. I hear silence.” And when he heard silence, he knew that something was wrong.

When a shutdown occurred, Rowley responded rapidly. “If he was driving a nail, he’d drop the hammer and go,” said Stan Thompson. “He would really tear off.”

In fact, Rowley was so dedicated to the maintenance of his plant that he lived next door to it with his wife, Vena, and their five children: Effa, Billie, Aileen, Frank Jr. and Raymond. Their home was an old Russian cabin, onto which they had added extra rooms.

Down the gravel street and abutting the Thompsons’ business, Kenai Korners, the Rowleys had a small office for Kenai Power, necessary because, in addition to supplying electricity, they also had to bill their subscribers for its use, which meant reading meters, sending out statements, and collecting on bills left unpaid.

Vena, with help from her daughters, did most of the work in the office, where they sold electrical-related items in addition to performing bookkeeping duties. The Thompsons also remember that Frank had an unsold large chest freezer in the office, and onto it he once dumped the hundreds of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle for customers and visitors to work on when they stopped by.

Frank and Vena had married in 1932, and neither of them could doubt the other one’s sense of toughness and determination. Vena, who died at age 93 in 2006, had been raised on a sheep ranch in Wyoming, where, by age 10, according to her obituary, she spent her summers with her camp wagon, a shotgun in hand, and her sheepdog, Jackie, at her side. Her mother had died when Vena was just 13, and she was on her own by age 16.

Frank, the tenth child in a brood of 13, was born in 1905 and was raised on a ranch in Colorado. According to his son Raymond, Frank’s birth name was Finis—French for “the end” and usually pronounced “fee-NEE”—and was actually pronounced “FY-niss.” The name, said Raymond, was meant to indicate that he would be the final child: “He was supposed to be the last. His mother was trying to put the brakes on, but it didn’t work.”

Rowley’s father died when Frank was in second grade, and his mother died only a year later, leaving him to live with an older sister until he reached the age of 16, when he decided to leave home, change his name, and hop aboard a freight train bound for Tulsa, where another sister lived.

Unfortunately for Rowley, “free rides” came with a price. He was arrested in Tulsa and put to work on a chain gang doing road work. After he had served his time, he got a job in a Tulsa hospital, sharpening scalpels for surgeons and cleaning up after them. The doctors took a liking to this teen-ager and sent him off to a trade school in Chicago, where he learned to operate a machine shop and the ins and outs of the electrical business—all while earning 50 cents a week for doing shop work.

A few years later, he joined one of his brothers in Wyoming to open an industrial machine shop. During the oil boom in that state, the Rowley shop became the biggest industrial-electric machine shop in all of Wyoming. Frank Rowley was only 28 years old.

Married then, and with a growing family, Frank and Vena decided in 1938 to head north to Alaska, where they saw in the young city of Anchorage the opportunity to produce and sell electricity. It was a decision that would lead them eventually to Kenai.

TO BE CONTINUED….

The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was born on May 11, 1935, in the era of the New Deal under the presidential administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Its primary goal was promoting rural electrification in the United States, and by 1939 nearly 300,000 households had their electricity provided by rural electric cooperatives.

Getting such electric power to the Kenai Peninsula, however, would take more than a decade longer.

Down in Homer, according to the Homer Electric Association, Sam Pratt, who was already electrifying his own home in 1945 with a water-powered Pelton wheel, began holding meetings in his house with other southern peninsula residents who were interested in forming an electric cooperative. Of those other residents, it was Robert Kranich who is credited with first suggesting that the group contact the REA about securing a grant to jump-start their plan.

The REA required nine incorporators, and those nine men became the first board of directors for the HEA. Their first official corporate meeting occurred Dec. 17, 1945, and their first purchase was a 75-kilowatt Caterpillar generator in 1946.

After nearly five years of building infrastructure—line construction began at Fritz Creek and terminated in Homer—lineman Karl Baier was given the honor of turning on the power at 7:07 p.m. on March 13, 1950, for all 56 members of the cooperative. (Just a few months later, Frank Rowley used his own generating equipment to provide electricity for about 50 Kenai clients.)

Today, HEA serves more than 25,000 members in a service area of more than 3,166 square miles.

Photo courtesy of the Rowley Family This is the Kenai Power complex. The long side of the plant faces the Frank Rowley home, seen here at the right side of the photograph.

Photo courtesy of the Rowley Family This is a portion of the exhaust system inside the Kenai Power electric-generation plant.