Ernie Deboer Story - DN
When Ernie Deboer first came to Ketchikan in 1948, he came for a job that no longer exists here, dairy cow wrangler.
Deboer, who died recently at the Ketchikan Pioneer’s Home at the age of 100, had been born and raised in western Washington. He had experience with dairy cows and there was a job in Ketchikan that sounded interesting. The Anderes family owned a Ketchikan dairy business called Crystal Dairy that provided milk and other products to Ketchikan residents.
“The owner of Dairygold in Seattle was a friend of one of the Anderes, so Mr. Anderes got in touch with him and asked if he could find somebody that knew how to handle cows and was willing to come up,” Deboer said in 1994, during an interview with the Ketchikan Public Library Oral History Project. “I always wanted to go to Alaska and (I) figured it was a good opportunity. He sent us (DeBoer and his wife and two children) plane tickets and had a house for us to move into, that was all there was to it.”
At the time, Deboer said, he figured to stay in the First City for a few years, make enough money to afford a house in Washington and then return to the Lower 48. He ended up staying nearly 75 years. Of course, most that time be was not a dairy cow wrangler.
“We did that for four and a half years until they (the Anderes family) decided to get out of the cattle business here,” Deboer said in 1994.
Deboer said that the cost of shipping feed to Alaska was rapidly increasing and that there had been multiple shipping strikes on the West Coast in the 1940s, making it impossible to get feed at any cost. Finally, a coast wide strike in 1952 brought an end to local dairies like Crystal Dairy – although the business continued on without the local cattle for another 20 years.
“The final decision was made when Alaska Steam had one of their periodic strikes and so we had to start butchering the cows at that time,” Deboer said in 1994. “We saved the best cows and butchered the worst ones. We finally were able to get a load of hay from Canada on one of the Canadian ships that was running through the Southeast at that time, and they were almost into Ketchikan when they got word that they couldn't unload it because of the hoof and mouth disease in Canada at the time. They couldn't clear it, so we were stuck again until they went up north and they then got clearance to unload it on the way back. By that time, we only had about 15 cows left.”
Deboer’s brother purchased the remaining 15 cows and took them south, with one final Ketchikan cattle “drive.”
“We got all the cows together and about five or six people took them and run them right down the street all the way. It was kind of a round-up and handed them right down the street all the way to the Alaska Steam dock and they had kind of a pen fixed up there and we run them right onto the boat, and my brother took care of them, milked them all the way to Seattle,” Deboer said. “Mr. Anderes sold out the herd, then he still continued to deliver milk in town, and the way he got his milk then was to ship in barrels of powdered, dry milk, powdered skim milk, and we would ship in fresh, whipping cream from the Seattle area. It came in once a week on the boat and we would recombine the powdered milk and the whipping cream, pasteurize it, homogenize it and bottled it. It was a very good tasting milk, about as close as you could come to the real thing.”
That lasted about six years, Deboer said before better milk refrigeration made the process obsolete. Crystal Dairy continued to operate in the 1970s, but eventually it just became easier for the local stores to get milk from their suppliers. In the meantime, DeBoer had branched out on his own.
“The owner of Dairygold came up here (in the late 1950s) and asked me if I would like to be the Dairygold distributor in Ketchikan,” Deboer said. “I distributed (Dairygold) products for 11 years after. Then I bought a commercial troller and I fished for 13 years.”
Then Deboer took on the job that most Ketchikan residents remember him having, a bus driver for the Eichner family’s Northern Bus Company. He continued to fish in the summer, but he primarily drove school buses in the winter. That job lasted for another 13 years. He then drove special education buses for the school district for several more years before retiring at 65.
Growing up in Washington, Deboer said that moving to Ketchikan wasn’t too much different, and that they expected to get more rain, but the family was taken aback when more than 200 inches fell in their second year (1949) in the First City.
The other first arrivers, he said he was surprised when the small plane from Annette Island actually landed in the water in front of Ketchikan, but he figured that it was okay because no one else on the Grumman Goose seemed concerned.
Their first home was on Tongass Avenue, not far from the Crystal Dairy building on Water Street, the actual dairy farm was in what is now the rockpits across from the Airport Ferry Terminal parking lots.
DeBoer bought some land in the undeveloped Carlanna area, near what is now the corner of Hill and Baranof and built a home that he stayed in for decades until it was time to move into the Pioneer’s Home.
“There was hardly anybody up here (in Carlanna),” DeBoer said in 1994. “There were a couple of houses. It wasn’t a (real) road then. Just of bunch of puncheon (pieces of wood) laid across (the muskeg) and they did drive on it.”
Carlanna was also beyond the city limits at the time (Washington street). It would be the expansion of the area during the Pulp Mill boom in the 1950s and 1960s, that brought development into the Carlanna area and made it part of the city.
“The Carlanna area really boomed,” Deboer said. "You can see the houses that we have got up here compared to that time...our next-door neighbor was probably two, three blocks away. They just kept going on up the hill as far as they could go. It was fast building, the Carlanna area.”
Deboer also said the local outdoors opportunities were important to his family.
“We would take (the company truck) and head out into the back country, the Ward Lake area, as far as we could go,” Deboer said. “It was very enjoyable for us.”
And it was the “back country” of Ward Lake that provided the most famous story about longtime Ketchikan resident, Ernie Deboer: How chorus frogs got to Ward Lake.
Back in the early 1990s, several researchers became curious about why the only colony of chorus – or tree – frogs in Alaska were located in Ketchikan, mostly around Ward Lake.
There was a story in June of 1992 in the Ketchikan Daily News about the rare frogs and several theories about how they ended up here. Most centered on the frogs hitching rides on log rafts or cargo ships from down south.
But Deboer knew the real story.
They arrived with some human help. Courtesy of Ernie Deboer.
Growing up in Washington, Deboer said, one of the first signs of spring in Washington was the sound of frogs, usually in late February or early March.
“When I came to Ketchikan, I missed them very much,” he said in 1994. “There were many things I missed but mostly it was the frogs.”
So, when he and his daughter were visiting his family in Kirkland in 1960. He told his nephews that he missed the sound of the frogs and the nephews went out and collected a five-gallon bucket of frogs from a nearby lake.
“We took it right to the airport and they (Pan Am officials) were very skeptical about letting us take it on,” Deboer said. “But they said if you keep it in the seat in front of you and watch it very carefully, they would let us take them aboard. We got them into Ketchikan through Annette and then over to Ketchikan and got them home.”
Deboer immediately took the bucket to a pair of small lakes near Ward Lake – appropriately called the Frog Ponds today – and let them loose. More that 60 years later, you can still hear the descendants of those tree frogs singing away in the Spring.
“The frogs are all in chorus and it echoes in the hills up there,” Deboer said in 1994. “There is no other sound (like it).”
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