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 mainly concerned how Rowley brought about this change. Part Two focuses on the good fortune that allowed him to come to the Kenai Peninsula in the first place.
As miraculous was the coming of light and power to Kenai, it was even more miraculous that the bringer of this light and power, Frank Rowley, was even alive in 1951 to flip the switch.
In July 1946, the soft-spoken Rowley was involved in an incident that for several consecutive days made the front page of the Anchorage Daily Times, nearly cost Rowley his life, and ended with what was at the time reported to be the largest personal-injury lawsuit west of the Mississippi River.
In late July 1946, Rowley, a civilian electrician employed at Fort Richardson, was completing an electrical power plant in Anchorage that would become known as Mountain View Light & Power and eventually supply about one-fourth of the city with electricity. Hoping to purchase a fuel tank for his plant, Rowley visited the business of Z. E. “Slim” Eagleston, who owned and operated Alaska Salvage, Anchorage’s first junkyard, located just north of E. Fifth Avenue, near Merrill Field. There, the two men made a deal.
However, the agreement between Rowley and Eagleston, who had previously served prison time for shooting and killing a man during a card game in Wyoming, apparently soured. At about 8:30 a.m. on July 30, Rowley drove to Eagleston’s personal residence at 209 Fifth Avenue to voice his displeasure.
James Foote, who witnessed the ensuing confrontation, testified in a preliminary hearing that he heard Eagleston say to Rowley, “You can’t come to my place and call me a liar.” Then, according to testimony, Eagleston asked Rowley to take his glasses off, whereupon the junk dealer hit the electrician, who fell into a wood pile.
Eagleston then seized a heavy No. 2 shovel that had been leaning against a shed, and Rowley grabbed Eagleston by the arm to prevent him from wielding it; however, he was unable to prevent the junkman from smashing the implement onto the crown of his head.
Another witness, Louis Strutz, testified that he saw Eagleston deliver two blows with the shovel after striking Rowley three times with his fists. Rowley crumpled to the ground, his skull fractured, his brain injured. Foote ran for a wet towel, which he applied to Rowley’s wound, and then rushed to call a doctor.
About three hours before FBI agents arrested Eagleston, Rowley was rushed to Providence Hospital, where his condition was assessed as critical, and one of the doctors prepared to perform brain surgery.
And this is where good fortune stepped in.
The highly regarded, Stanford-trained Dr. Howard Romig, who was the Rowley family physician, learned of the incident and convinced Frank’s wife, Vena, to allow him to perform the operation. She consented, and Romig went to work — first placing a call to some pre-eminent doctors in New York for advice, then reading several medical journals on the subject of brain surgery before finally operating while conferring the whole time by radio-phone with the doctors in New York.
The surgery lasted about six hours, during which time Romig extracted a tiny piece of metal from Rowley’s brain and removed a portion of his damaged frontal lobe. After a lengthy convalescence, Rowley recovered, although his speech and memory were likely somewhat impaired by the assault and the medical procedure.
In the lawsuit that followed, Rowley sued Eagleston for $55,000 (about $600,000 in today’s money), and won $41,000, just enough, according to his son Raymond, to cover medical and legal expenses and buy new dresses for his three daughters.
Eagleston was also convicted July 30, 1946, of assault with a dangerous weapon and was sentenced in January 1947 to three years in prison. He fought the prison time for more than two years until a federal judge refused to suspend the sentence and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the case. He was sent to the McNeil Island federal penitentiary in Washington.
In the years that followed, Rowley began to explore a move to the relatively untapped electrical market of the western Kenai Peninsula, where only the Homer Electric Association had any sort of foothold.
Finally, four years after the assault, according to an account written by Vena Rowley, Frank sold his power plant to the Rural Electrification Administration — it was eventually controlled by the Chugach Electric Association — and made the move to Kenai.
Despite the severe cranial injury, Rowley thrived. By 1951, he had a power plant up and running in Old Town Kenai, and, said Raymond Rowley, Frank took off only three personal days in more than a decade of supplying Kenai with power. Raymond remembers once, when Frank was 55, he stayed up for three days straight (with only one two-hour nap) to keep the engines going and the power flowing.
Of his father, Raymond said, “He was the toughest man I ever met in my life, easily.”
Throughout his life, Frank Rowley demonstrated that it took a lot to keep him down. When Rowley was a teenager in a trade school in Chicago, a metal shard hit his unprotected right eye, and when the eye became infected, he lost the use of it. At the time of the altercation with Slim Eagleston, Rowley had had his right socket filled with a glass eye and had taken to wearing spectacles.
As he worked with electricity, he also built up a tolerance for being shocked. One of his Kenai employees, Hedley “Hank” Parsons, recalled: “I’d seen him going around testing circuits. Now this was low voltage, you know, house voltage, and he’d touch his fingers to his tongue and go around and check the voltage that way. I asked him one time, I said, ‘Jesus, Frank, how can you do that?’ He said, ‘Oh, you get used to it.’”
Raymond also recalled the time that some of Frank’s linemen were placing a 30-foot power pole, complete with glass insulators, into the ground. “The line (hoisting the pole) came loose, and the pole started to fall. Everybody ran for their life. My dad ran over underneath it, and caught it just enough to break the fall so that it didn’t break the glass insulators.”
On an everyday basis, Rowley worked hard for the people of Kenai. Evelyn Akers wrote in “Once Upon the Kenai”: “It was always a challenge to get through the first part of the Sunday morning services before Frank Rowley started his weekly maintenance on the generator. Often there was no power; other times, if the voltage was low, the organ would sound like an ancient Victrola badly in need of being wound.”
In the end, however, Rowley’s indomitable spirit was not enough to save Kenai Power. After moving his power plant to Sport Lake near Soldotna to take advantage of a nearby natural-gas wellhead and then signing a contract to supply power to the military base at Wildwood, he was expanding and improving his system of power lines when he ran into union problems.
Years later, Rowley’s children still harbored some resentment toward the agencies and individuals responsible for those problems, but they preferred to remain publicly quiet about the details. By 1963, the ensuing lawsuits and the financial strain on Rowley forced him to sell his company to the City of Kenai, and HEA acquired the utility some years later.
While many people who were in the central peninsula in the 1950s remember Rowley now only for the electricity he provided, his family hoped that he would also be remembered for the service he gave to Kenai during the months leading up to its incorporation as a first-class city in 1960.
Rowley, an original signer of the city charter who later served on the city council, pushed hard for the incorporation of as much land as possible, with the idea of creating a large tax base from which to extract money for needed services.
Meanwhile, bereft of his power company, he continued to serve the area in any capacity he could, including running a freight barge to wherever his contracts required. Then, at age 65, while riding with a friend on a return trip from Anchorage in October 1970, he suffered a cardiac arrest and died.
Despite his passing, he left an indelible mark upon the central peninsula.
The Peninsula Clarion wrote: “Frank was lineman, administrator, bill collector, trouble shooter, engineer, power producer, mechanic — the whole ball of wax…. It take 20 or so men and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment now to do what Frank did with a little baling wire.”
Frost Jones, who was a retail clerk in Kenai throughout the 1950s, once wrote about the first night that she and her husband, Casey, spent in an apartment near the Kenai bluff: “We went to sleep that night to the throb of the Kenai Power diesel plant that Frank Rowley built and managed in the middle of town. The power was off and on some, but Frank really tried hard to keep it going.”
It was tough to keep that good man down.
Photo courtesy of the Rowley Family Frank Rowley was the founder of Kenai Power, the first regular producer of electricity in the city of Kenai.
This is the back of the plant owned by Kenai Power. (Photo courtesy of the Rowley Family)
Bearing the Fairbanks-Morse trademark, this is a portion of the main engine at the Kenai Power plant near Old Town Kenai from early 1950s to the early 1960s. (Photo courtesy of the Rowley Family)
File photo from the Anchorage Times Slim Eagleston, a junkyard owner who assaulted Frank Rowley and fractured his skull in 1946, is seen here with his feet propped up on the desk in his office just before his 1961 retirement.
