CHAPTER 25

Palmer Colony Makes News

ALL SUMMER, ARTICLES AND PHOTOGRAPHS ABOUT PALMER were appearing in newspapers and magazines from coast to coast. One woman got her picture taken with a pyramid of all the tins of salmon she had canned. A sketch artist drew a cartoon of a mother outside her tent with her washtub, laundry lines, and five children playing around her. A Baltimore photographer picked four boys to hold flowers and look sad at Oscar Eckert’s grave.

“He should have picked us,” Cally said. “We sang at his funeral.”

“Those boys didn’t even know Oscar Eckert,” Polly said.

“I’m glad he didn’t pick you,” Mother said. “It’s ghoulish, taking pictures at a poor child’s grave.”

And now there was news that Will Rogers, America’s favorite actor, was planning to visit Alaska to gather material for his newspaper column.

• • •

On the morning of August 14th, an excited crowd gathered on the shore of the Matanuska River.

“I see it!” At the shout, five hundred heads turned skyward. Terpsichore clutched the batch of oatmeal raspberry cookies she’d wrapped in a dishtowel to protect them from the folks elbowing in at her prime position next to the ropes that cordoned off an improvised runway on the river.

“That’s a Lockheed Orion model 9E Special fuselage,” Mendel told her and Gloria. “But you can see that Wiley Post has rigged it with a Lockheed Explorer Model 7 Special wing. See? It’s at least six feet longer than the regular Orion wing.” Mendel was gratified to see several grown-ups’ heads turned his way and nodding.

Mendel spoke louder once he knew he had an audience. “And hear that engine? I bet it’s at least five hundred horsepower.” He pointed toward the bottom of the plane as it landed. “And they’ve replaced the fixed landing gear with floats. Wow! Look at the size of those floats! They look like they were designed for a bigger plane and could cause a problem.”

The plane slid along the river with a rooster tail of spray and came to a stop. First out was Mendel’s hero, Wiley Post, who had flown around the world in only seven days, eighteen hours, and forty-nine minutes. He looked more like a pirate than a world-famous aviator, with his mustache and white eye patch. He stood on the wing and waved.

After Mr. Post jumped off the wing onto a short pier extending into the river, Will Rogers filled the doorway. One of the newsmen used a microphone to be heard above the crowd trying to get Mr. Rogers’s attention. “How do you feel, Mr. Rogers?”

The crowd hushed for the first words of Will Rogers.

“Why, uh, why—wait’ll I get out, will you?” Mr. Rogers said. “I came to look around, not report on my health.” He joined Mr. Post on the pier and was quickly surrounded by colony administrators who would take Rogers and Post on a quick tour of Palmer before they took off again for Fairbanks.

The colonists had been gossiping about all the excuses the administrators were going to have to come up with to explain why families were still living in tents and why there were piles of sinks with no plumbing fittings, crates of electric meat slicers when there was still no electricity, and only twenty hammers for the CCC workers who were supposed to be building houses.

When the administration car returned after the tour, Terpsichore and her friends thronged back toward the river but were pushed toward the back of the crowd. How was she going to get Mr. Rogers the cookies? Rogers stepped over the rope farther down the line. “Mr. Rogers, Mr. Rogers!” she called.

Mendel and Gloria called too. “We have cookies for you, Mr. Rogers!”

One of the men just in front of them heard about the cookies. “We’ll get Mr. Rogers those cookies, Missy. For Mr. Rogers,” he said as he passed them along.

“Thanks!” Terpsichore bounced on tiptoe, trying to keep track of her cookies as they were passed from hand to helpful hand to the front. She relaxed when she heard someone say, “For you, Mr. Rogers, compliments of one of our colonists.”

By then, Mr. Post was already in the cockpit and Mr. Rogers had clambered up to the wing of the plane again. Above the shoulders of the men in front of her, Terpsichore could see the knot of his tie, his broad grin, and his Stetson hat.

The sun had not yet set behind the mountains when Terpsichore, Gloria, and Mendel drifted back to their families’ wagons.

Gloria exhaled in a swooning sigh. “Imagine, the most famous actor in Hollywood visited us right here in Palmer. Everyone back home will be so jealous!”

Mendel sighed too. “Who’d have thought a flying ace like Wiley Post would ever fly to Palmer? I got to see him, eye patch and all.”

Terpsichore couldn’t hold back a smile. “Do you think Mr. Rogers is eating one of my cookies right now?”

“Probably,” Mendel said.

“You betcha,” Gloria said.

The three linked arms and agreed: When Rogers wrote about his visit, everyone in the country would know where to find Palmer on the map.

• • •

But the excitement over Will Rogers was not over. After supper the next day, the Johnsons gathered with everyone else near downtown Palmer at Pastor Bingle’s tent.

Pastor Bingle had a battery-powered radio with antenna wire stretched along a barbed wire fence. At news time, he turned up the volume so everyone could listen to the broadcast from reporters following Mr. Rogers’s travels. What would Will Rogers say about Palmer in his interview?

But instead of the lighthearted report they expected, a somber voice intoned the night’s news without preamble: “Will Rogers and Wiley Post, cultural icons of Hollywood and aviation, are dead. They lost their bearings in the fog between Fairbanks and Point Barrow, above the Arctic Circle. They landed to get directions at an Eskimo village. The engine failed on takeoff, and the nose-heavy plane plunged into the lagoon. It is believed that both men died instantly. Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh may fly north to supervise the return of the bodies of Will Rogers and Wiley Post.”

Mendel, who had sidled up to Terpsichore, was as pale as a winding sheet. “I was just being a smarty-pants, repeating what one newspaper article said about the floats being too big for the plane. Now I feel like I jinxed them.” He reached under his glasses with one finger to brush away a tear.

Terpsichore patted him on the back. “You may be a smarty-pants, but you’re not a jinxer. It was just an accident.”

She let her hand rest on his shoulder as she thought about one of Will Rogers’s most famous quotes: “I never met a man I didn’t like.”

Terpsichore knew it was a good attitude, but she was realizing that sometimes it took a while to know someone well enough to like him. To think that she hadn’t liked Mendel at all when she first met him.