99 years and counting

PALMER — Margaret Lucas is likely to best all comers in any one-upmanship contest related to her Valentine’s Day plans.

Blue skies and balmy weather greeted partygoers who came to an open house at the Lucas home along the Glenn Highway just outside of Palmer in honor of Lucas’ 99th birthday Thursday. The Palmer Moose Lodge hosted a second party for family and friends Friday night, too. The Lucas family are longtime members of the Lodge and donated the land on which it sits and the nearby Kiwanis Park.

Thursday, more than one guest shared their story of moving to Alaska with the Lucas’ number tucked in a safe spot and instructions to call them when they arrived in Alaska.

Mary Ann Anderson said her family was one of those. She moved to the Valley as a child with her parents in 1945. The families knew each other from working together in Colorado.

“We’ve been friends ever since,” Anderson said.

Years later when Lenita Deda moved to Alaska in 1970, she too arrived with Lucas’ phone number in hand.

“I’ve known her and her husband since then,” Deda said. “She’s like mom to me.”

Born and raised on a ranch in Colorado, Lucas said she and her husband, Leo, were convinced to move to Alaska in 1939 by a friend who was working on the railroad in Cordova.

They boarded a train for the trip from Colorado to Seattle and booked passage on a steamship from Seattle to Cordova, she said.

Once in Alaska, she said they lived in Anchorage for a couple of months while Leo worked on the military base.

When they’d saved enough, they purchased 160 acres of land with a small house on it near what is today the intersection of the Glenn and Palmer-Wasilla highways.

The couple raised their three children — Dan, Elaine and Larry — in the new, snug house they built on the hill outside Palmer in 1947.

The original residence was donated to the Alpine Historic Park, Lucas said, as it had been moved to Palmer from Chickaloon where it had originally served as U.S. Navy housing.

Inside the pale green house, the walls are adorned with animals husband Leo killed during his many years as a guide and hunter.

“When we came here, everybody knew everybody,” Lucas said. “I still say those were the good all days.”

Among the remembrances of 99 years of living that adorn the home’s walls hangs a small horseshoe that would go unnoticed if not for the story it has to tell.

The horseshoe has been part of the Lucas’ family’s home since Leo and Margaret were courting each other as kids in Colorado. He’d driven over to her family’s ranch to take her to a dance about 40 miles away, she recalled Thursday.

On the way to the dance, the pair saw the horseshoe in the road, but kept driving. On the way back, they saw it again and stopped to pick it up.

“It’s a decorative horseshoe that fell off someone’s car,” Lucas said.

Leo gave Margaret the horseshoe as a gift, and that’s about the time she agreed to marry him.

In the Valley, many old-timers have stories about the Lucas family and how they helped them clear their land with a bulldozer.

“When we came this was grass and brush,” Lucas said, looking out the window at the cars streaming by on the Glenn Highway against the ever-changing backdrop of Pioneer Peak.

Jack Seemann was a young Marine who had just returned from serving in Korea in 1954 when Leo punched the first road into his parcel and cleared the first field, he said.

Leo carved a lot of the roads into the wilderness in the Mat-Su, Seemann said.

Partygoers Pat Lawton, who celebrated her 95th birthday Feb. 1, and Anderson spent a few moments at the party sharing memories of how they first met 63 years ago.

It was May 22, 1949, when the perky blonde who’d graduated high school four days earlier bounced into Bert’s Drug Store and announced to all present, “I’m getting married today.”

“Man, she was on cloud 9.5,” Lawton recalled.

Contact managing editor Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.