Palmer agrees with engineer

Real people

When John Dolenc and his wife, Helen, settled in Palmer in 1966 and planned to retire, you might say they were ahead of their time. Thirty-five years later their neighborhood has a senior center, the Palmer Pioneer's Home, a new housing development for retirees, and a golf course nearby.

Dolenc, now 97, won't say that he saw all this coming while still in his 60s, but he did recognize something he liked on that first visit to Palmer.

"I think that Palmer is the nicest little town in the state. We plan 20 years ahead, and it shows," Dolenc said.

Palmer was carefully planned from its beginnings in 1935, after New Deal Democrats in Washington, D.C., proposed a colony here. The colony townsite quickly became the hub for the Matanuska Valley. Palmer had competing grocery stores and hardware stores by the time Dolenc arrived, while Wasilla was still a one-store town.

That Palmer's orderly layout appealed to Dolenc isn't surprising — he spent more than three decades as a mechanical engineer in Alaska. He lived in Sitka but inspected and repaired boilers, heating plants and refrigeration gear all over the state. Dolenc has seen what spur-of-the-moment development looks like, and he'd rather see things orderly — like Palmer's streets, or perhaps like the blueprints for a building's boiler room and heating system.

Dolenc first arrived in Alaska in 1934 at the docks in Ketchikan. He came up on a four-masted schooner christened the Alumni, but the boat wasn't under sail. The Alumni was towed from Seattle by a tug. The reason was typically Alaskan. Even in the early ‘30s, Ketchikan business people looked at their local port the way people in other places look at vacant commercial property.

"They were going to operate a brewery on this ship," Dolenc said, "but when we got to Ketchikan the brewmaster had decided that the rolling of the ship had prevented him from making good beer."

Dolenc had been in charge of the brewery's refrigeration since the Alumni's makeover in Seattle and during the trip up the Inside passage while the first batches were being brewed. He helped reinstall the whole works into a dry land warehouse. After about five years the Ketchikan investors gave up, and Dolenc took his mechanical skills to Juneau, then eventually to Sitka. From there he was dispatched around the state as a mechanical inspector and repairman. Dolenc also met his wife, Helen, in Sitka. She was working as a bookkeeper for the Columbia Lumber Company when John came shopping for materials for a construction job.

"I asked her to be my permanent bookkeeper," he said.

John and Helen stayed in Sitka through most of their careers, and while John had traveled most of the state, he didn't see Palmer until Helen insisted on visiting friends here in the summer of 1966. The couple planned to retire on an 80-acre plot they purchased near Homer, but those plans changed while John was exploring downtown Palmer that first afternoon.

"When she came back to pick me up, I said, ‘I just bought a hotel,'" Dolenc said. He was kidding, of course, but when he showed Helen the property that was for sale, she loved it, too. John and Helen were hoteliers for about five years, operating the Highland Hotel on West Evergreen Avenue.

"It was too small to hire help, and too big for Helen to take care of, and I wasn't gonna make beds so we sold it." John said.

That's not to say he's inactive. Ask John Dolenc about retirement and you'll find a man for whom retirement never seemed to happen.

"My motto all my life has been to have a project ahead, so I always have something to look forward to," he said. When Dolenc served on the Palmer planning commission he managed the numbering for Palmer's street addresses, which the Matanuska Colony's planners had apparently overlooked. He also served on the city council, been active with the Lion's Club and the Palmer Senior Center, and taken up sculpting. His sculpting projects include the silhouettes at the Little League fields, the pipeline and wagon wheel monument at the Palmer Visitor's Center and the new gate at Palmer Pioneer Cemetery which features a "Jacob's ladder" reaching toward the sky.