In the late afternoon of August 7, 1944, in the middle of
World War II, if you had been standing on Brooklyn Avenue in Kodiak, Alaska, which ran about
where the back of Sutliifs Hardware is now, you could have waved to President
Franklin Roosevelt as he drove by in a station wagon. It was Roosevelt’s first
visit to an Alaskan town, and the only visit by a sitting president to Kodiak.
A few weeks earlier, Roosevelt had boarded the heavy
cruiser USS Baltimore in San Diego and sailed with several escorting destroyers
to Hawaii to talk strategy with
Admiral Chester Nimitz and General
Douglas MacArthur, his commanders in the Pacific war against the Japanese. A
few days later, the flotilla headed north to the Aleutians, and then to Kodiak.
The Japanese
had invaded the Aleutian islands of Kiska and Attu in June 1942, and been
driven out in the summer of 1943. By 1944, the Aleutians had become a lonely backwater
of the war. For the troops on Adak, hunkered down in Quonset huts in an
unforgiving climate, with little to do and thousands of miles between them and female
companionship, spirits were low.
Roosevelt’s
aides figured a presidential visit would help the troops’ morale, but there
were other reasons to visit Alaska. By 1944, eleven years into his presidency
and three years into the war, Roosevelt was physically exhausted, and though
few knew it, suffering from heart disease. After seeing him in Hawaii, General
Macarthur told an aide that he thought Roosevelt would be dead in six months. But
Roosevelt loved the sea and his aides thought the trip might be good for him. And
too, Roosevelt was running for re-election that fall, and Roosevelt and his
team thought a visit to a war zone, even a now-quiet one like Alaska, would
look good to the electorate. Roosevelt left First Lady Eleanor at home, but brought
his Scottish Terrier, Fala.
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| FDR dines with the troops at Adak |
At Adak,
Roosevelt dined with the troops and made a speech. “I like your food. I like your climate.
(Laughter) You don't realize the thousands upon thousands of people who would
give anything in the world to swap places with you. I have seen some of them.
Of course, I haven't been down to the Southwest Pacific, but last year I saw
two battalions of our engineers down in Liberia, and I would much rather be
here than in Liberia.” The soldiers loved it.
After bypassing
Dutch Harbor because of stormy weather, the Baltimore and its destroyers
arrived off Kodiak early on the morning of August 7, but stood offshore for
several hours waiting for a fogbank to burn off. Around noon the coast was
clear and Roosevelt and his party transferred to the destroyer Cummins, which
landed them in Women’s Bay where an honor guard met them on the dock, including
an all-black Navy band, reportedly the only such military band the President
had seen in his travels.
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| The President on Buskin Lake |
After meeting
with the Kodiak Army and Navy commanders and reviewing the sailors in
front of the hangers, and the Seabees on the baseball diamond at Fort Greely, Roosevelt’s
entourage headed into the village of Kodiak, population 500. With the sun
shining, the town was at its best and the brief tour was a great success. According
to Roosevelt’s official appointment diary, “This was the first Alaskan town he
had ever visited and most of the delighted populace was out to welcome him to
their midst.”
On the way back to the ship, Roosevelt was taken fishing
on Buskin Lake. Two Dolly Varden were landed- the President caught one and the
fishing guide, a Lt. Branham, USNR,
caught
the other one. The record is unclear as to whether Fala, the Scottish Terrier,
accompanied the President on the Buskin expedition.
Before heading back to the Baltimore, the President was informed
that “Mr. Chas. Madsen, Pres. of the Alaskan Guides Assn. had presented him
with an Alaskan bearskin rug. It was delivered in Seattle a few days later.”
The President crossed the Gulf of Alaska to Auke Bay, near
Juneau, before disembarking in Bremerton, Washington. Almost immediately, Republicans
began railing against Roosevelt for allegedly having sent a warship to retrieve
Fala after he’d been left behind on an island. Roosevelt, a master politician, responded
at a Teamsters campaign dinner-
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| FDR and Fala |
“These Republican leaders have not been
content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with
that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent
attacks, and my family don't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them…as soon
as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had
concocted a story that I'd left him behind on an Aleutian island and had sent a
destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight
or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same
dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself ... But
I think I have a right to resent, to object, to libelous statements about my
dog.”
The Republicans stopped talking about Fala and Roosevelt easily
won election to a fourth term a few weeks later.
In Kodiak seventy years later, Deedie Pearson still
clearly remembers standing as a little girl on the side of the street while the
President drove by, a few feet away.
And as Clarence Selig told an oral historian in 1993,
“I can still remember everybody lining up the street down
at Brooklyn Avenue and he drove by waving at everybody. That was a highlight in
my life watching the President drive by our yard.”
But the sea trip to Alaska did not revive Roosevelt’s
health. He died eight months later, in April 1945, in Warm Springs Georgia.
As the train carrying the President’s body back to Washington
went through Spartanburg, South Carolina, Myrtle Olsen watched it pass. The
previous September, a month after Roosevelt’s Alaskan visit, she had made a
twenty-one day journey from Kodiak to South Carolina to join her fiancé, a man
she had met while he was stationed in Kodiak.
“It’s funny,” she says now, “I worked at the Island
Fountain, right down there by where the Subway building is now, serving Coney
Island hot dogs and ice cream and chocolates they made right in Kodiak to all
those servicemen, and surely I would have seen the President that day, but I just
can’t recall him in Kodiak that day. But I do remember watching the train
carrying him going by after he died.”
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