This parting was not sweet sorrow — Part 2

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The funeral 57 years ago for North Kenai’s George Coe Dudley became the stuff of local legend. A similar version of this story first appeared in the Redoubt Reporter in 2010.

Peggy Arness, of Nikiski, remembered George Coe Dudley as “one of the colorful characters” at the dock she owned and operated with her husband Jim during the 1960s. Although Dudley owned a fishing site just south of the dock, Arness said, “he didn’t do much fishing. There was more drinking than fishing going on, but he was down there.”

Dudley spent much of his spare time with his friend and drinking buddy, Irving “Mosey” Molander, Arness said. Molander and his wife, Gladys, ran an early 1950s movie house out of a portion of the former territorial school building in Kenai after a new school was constructed.

“We had to have longshoremen loading and unloading all the time,” Arness said. “And George and Mosey both were there. Pretty faithful. They were as good as any of them. They did their work. They knew how to hook and unhook. That’s what they did…. But they were always sober when they came down to work. They never came down to do a shift if they were drinking. Jim just didn’t allow that. When (Dudley) was on the job, he was sober.”

During his off-hours, Dudley, who had been single since the early 1940s, had occasional girlfriends — some of them, according to both Arness and former Kenai resident Hedley “Hank” Parsons, being “Eadie’s gals,” a reference to the North Kenai night club, Eadie’s Last Frontier Dine & Dance, that featured exotic dancers and had more than a whispered reputation for prostitution.

Dudley made Eadie’s “his second home,” Parsons said, and his heavy drinking continued unabated. According to the Alaska State Police, 58-year-old George Dudley died at about 4 a.m. on Sunday, April 30, 1967, in his North Kenai home.

“I wouldn’t say he ever appeared to be in the best of health,” said Parsons. “And he probably just wore himself out drinking.”

A Pathetic Farewell

George Dudley’s funeral was held the following Friday, and Parsons was there. The details from the event come from several sources, including Parsons’ recollections during a 2010 interview. Also, Ridgeway’s Rusty Lancashire, who died in 2000, used to tell a rollicking version of the story, and an anonymous letter describing the funeral was discovered in 2010 in files donated to the Anthropology Lab of Kenai Peninsula College.

The letter —which Parsons said was remarkably accurate — claimed to depict “a firsthand account of (Dudley’s) passing and the send-off his friends, enemies and casual drinking acquaintances gave him.” Furthermore, the letter writer averred that Dudley “boozed away everything he owned, drank up his homestead acre by acre, and died intestate with only his shack and few feet of property left.”

Parsons believed that, because of Dudley’s high bar tabs, Last Frontier proprietor Ethel “Eadie” Henderson ended up with Dudley’s homestead property after his death.

As a result of Dudley’s poverty and insobriety — and in spite of the fact that he, from all accounts, was affable and generally well liked — his estate could not fund a funeral. “So the locals did it their way,” Parsons said.

Soldotna resident Al Hershberger said he heard a rumor that on the night before the funeral, Dudley’s drinking buddies “took the body around to all his hang-outs and propped him up in the corner and poured a few drinks in him.”

Parsons said he never witnessed that particular behavior but would be unsurprised to learn that it was true. “There was somebody else they did that with at Kenai Joe’s,” he recalled. He called such actions “common” among certain Kenai crowds of the mid-20th century.

The funeral was scheduled for 2 p.m. on May 5, and spring break-up was in full, sloppy bloom at the Kenai Cemetery, which at that time had no surrounding fence or wrought-iron gate, and received very little maintenance.

“When it came time to plant George,” said the unsigned letter, “a few of his friends rounded up everybody they could from the bars along the North Road, and we all trooped to the cemetery. Everyone was dressed in their usual spring Kenai Attire — dungarees, oilskins, gum boots, etc., and it’s a good thing…. We all had to slog in from the highway … and by the time we reached the grave, everyone was mud to the knees.”

George, meanwhile, was encased in an unadorned box-like casket and was transported to the burial site on the same backhoe used to dig the grave.

Among those in attendance was a former Dudley girlfriend named Carmen, whom Peggy Arness believes was one of the dancers from Eadie’s. The letter writer painted her and many of the others there with brushstrokes of colorful language:

“Carmen was there, wearing a dungaree jacket over a tight print dress that was split where it stretched the tightest. Her slip bunched out through the hole and waggled back and forth like the flag on a whitetail buck as she waddled through the mud in saddle shoes, no socks.”

According to the letter, no one at the funeral lamented Dudley’s passing more loudly than did Carmen, who “mourned like a coyote,” despite supposedly hating Dudley for the previous several years because he had once “belted her off a bar stool with a fresh salmon for snitching his drink.”

“The funeral music was furnished by a local lady lush with an accordion,” the letter continued. “She couldn’t find the right keys on the instrument, and I think she dropped it in the mud at least twice. Since George wasn’t exactly well known in Christian circles, the eulogy was delivered by the mortician, between hiccups.”

Although Hedley Parsons was there, he said that he didn’t remember every detail contained in the letter, but he recalled enough of them to believe that the letter writer must have been one of the 15-20 mourners on hand and, with an exception or two, recorded the event faithfully.

Besides the characters named or described in the letter, Parsons recalled that Kenai’s Swede Foss was in attendance, and Foss at that time was married to a woman nicknamed Dottie, who was well known in the area as an accordion player for any occasion.

When it came time to settle Dudley into the grave, Parsons said that the difficulty of the task was exacerbated by the inebriated state of the pall bearers, who used ropes to attempt a balanced lowering process.

“As they lowered away,” said the letter, “they became uncoordinated and George got away from them, did a slow roll and landed in the grave upside-down. George hit the lid with a hell of a thump, and one of the pall bearers fell in the grave on top of him, and lost his glasses down alongside the coffin. They fished him out looking like a nearsighted mud statue and retrieved his glasses with a shovel.”

Parsons remembers that last part a little differently: “I know one of them fell in with him, and I think it was a kid that the undertaker had to dig the grave and help out. And it just scared the s—- right out of him. He scrambled up out of the grave — or they helped him on out — and he took off.”

With the living extracted, only the dead man remained in the grave — still inside his upside-down casket and solidly wedged into the mud. No amount of drunken exertion could right the situation, and a woman referred to in the letter as “Old Lady Paige” hollered out something obscene and suggested that Dudley was better off in the position he was in.

After that outburst, according to Parsons, the mourners returned to the bars because the mortician had dismissed them by asserting that he could use the backhoe to turn Dudley right-side up. “We followed his suggestion,” said the letter, “and nobody seems to know today whether George is right-side up or upside-down.”

The letter’s author wrote that he awoke the next morning, nearly freezing and with a vicious hangover. He found himself inside of his camper, which was parked with both front wheels in a ditch.

He said that Dudley’s funeral was an event that even Dudley himself would have enjoyed. And he concluded with this remark:

“I’m sure you will be pleased to know that although (old) Kenai may be dying, she hasn’t gasped her last yet. I don’t think it will be too long until she does, but just in case, I’m not signing my name. Mayhem and homicide are still regarded rather lightly around here, and I’m the cowardly type. Anyway, you know who this letter is from, and it is all gospel — so help me!”

To add insult to injury, according to Kenai Cemetery archives, the wooden cross placed initially over Dudley’s grave identified him incorrectly as “George R. Dudley.”

Nearly everything else may have gone wrong, but at least he is accurately identified now on a brass plaque centered on the peeling white-painted cross marking his final resting place.