Remembering the Kenai Peninsula’s 1st history conference — Part 2

The first Kenai Peninsula local history conference took place at Kenai Central High School on Nov. 7-8, 1974. In the decades since then, speakers and community members involved in that first conference made notable contributions to peninsula communities, Alaska history, and scholarship. In the second of this two-part series, former reporter Shana Loshbaugh remembers a 2017 history conference inspired by the 1974 gathering.

When Alaskans prepared to mark the 150th anniversary of the 1867 U.S. purchase of the land from Russia, the 1974 Kenai Area History Conference example inspired me and others to organize the second Kenai Peninsula history conference, held in April 2017 at the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Kenai River Campus in Soldotna.

In 2016, as I planned the new conference, I hoped to include a nod to the 1974 event. I knew some participants were still alive, and strove to locate and invite them. They said that people filmed the first conference, but the films got lost in the intervening decades.

That year, I got to visit Juneau for the first time, because the Alaska Historical Society staged its annual fall meeting there. I arranged to stay in the capital for two extra days, so I could explore the town and archives in the Alaska State Library Historical Collections. Beforehand, I scouted the library website for material about the Kenai Peninsula. Eureka! It listed an entire box about the 1974 Kenai conference. I made an appointment to visit the archive and examine what was in that box.

At the appointed time, inside the beautiful new facility housing the state’s library, archive and museum, I waited while Assistant Librarian Sandra Johnston fetched the box. I hoped to find a program and photos to display at the new conference. When Johnston returned and opened the box, we were stunned to behold tapes of half-inch, reel-to-reel film. She called film specialist Damon Stuebner from the back room. He said the tapes were probably too old and frail to salvage, but offered to try.

Years earlier, the library had digitized its old film collections. Due to an intake glitch, no one knew that box contained the lost black and white videos from Kenai Central. After I returned to Fairbanks, Johnston sent word that the odds of success looked poor.

But in early December, Johnston phoned with good news. Stuebner, using heat treatment, a vintage video player, and new, specialized camera equipment, was able to salvage and digitize most of the original footage. He later told me that he’d spent hours turning the tiny reels by hand. Johnston estimated that he spent 50 hours working on them.

Shortly before Christmas, a parcel brought me the awesome gift of DVDs from the state library. They contained about 8 ½ hours of conference film; only about half an hour was garbled. Moreover, in the cover letter, Johnston wrote that the estimated commercial value of the restoration was $2,500 but, because of the content, the state was donating the videos to our 2017 conference. “We believe they will prove invaluable to you, and are happy to have rescued such an important resource,” she said.

I spent days watching the grainy movies on my computer. They featured faces familiar and unfamiliar from so long ago: lecturing, watching from the audience, and discussing the area’s memories and mysteries.

Besides Claus Naske, Stan Thompson, Betty Warren, and Jess Nicholas arguing about the virtues of homesteading, the films contain numerous other lively exchanges. Examples: Peter Kalifornsky read his original “Mouse Story” in Dena’ina. Sister Victoria discussed Kenai’s most notorious crime, the 1918 dual murders of bullying shopkeeper Alec “Paddy” Ryan and Commissioner Cleveland Magill, with Thompson and Phil Ames commenting on the lack of early law enforcement, and Mary Nissen and Alex Shadura sharing their childhood memories of that terrifying day. Dolly Farnsworth talked about the history of Wildwood, and students Tom Stroman and Thomas Tilden described Native education programs there. People had questions and suspicions about the new Russian Old Believer community of Nikolaevsk, answered by teacher John Jones, who worked there. Other topics included translations, disease, bootlegging, abandoned villages, access to archives, local Orthodox church history, oil leases in the Kenai Moose Range, Native land claims, settling refugees, and reading recommendations.

After watching this amazing video time capsule, I was anxious to share it. In the next few months, Soldotna videographer Paul Gray and I edited a one-hour “highlights” version of the 1974 recordings.

When 150 Years: Kenai Peninsula History Conference opened on April 21, 2017, two speakers — Alan Boraas and James Kari — also had spoken at the 1974 conference. In the audience were others who had been at the first one: James Hornaday, Doug Reger and Bill Workman. That evening, we showed the short-version 1974 film and had Hornaday introduce it. I saw some damp eyes among the viewers.

Since, I’ve been sharing copies of the digitized video files with any person or group who wants them. This includes tracking down and meeting family members. The state library posted the unedited versions on YouTube, each title beginning “Conference on Kenai Area History Audio Tape Side …”. The Facebook page, “Yaghanen Ht’ana,” affiliated with the Salamatof Tribe, posted the hourlong highlights video, available for Facebook users to view at www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1756479597990353. Just last month, during the 2024 meeting of the Alaska Historical Society, I shared the files with two retired historians from Anchorage.

I hope that, on the golden anniversary of the first conference, we will have a chance to share the highlights video with new viewers, to share these true stories from our great tradition-bearers.

Shana Loshbaugh is a former reporter for the Clarion and Homer News, now semi-retired and working on peninsula history projects.