Past more simple, but not necessarily better

Before the historic Breeden barn found a home at the Alaska Museum of Transportation and Industry, it housed dairy cows for the Linn family.

“You know that barn that’s out there? It’s called the Breeden barn, but it’s the Linn barn,” said Allan Linn, a spry, 81-year-old lifelong Valley resident. “The reason I say that, without any antagonism toward the Breedens or anything, is that Frank Linn arranged to get the two barns (that make up the current structure) hooked together.”

The barns were part of Frank Linn’s 160-acre dairy farm, which he began after purchasing land in the Palmer area in 1928. Father of Allan, Frank staked Linn family roots that predate colonization and began a whirlwind path that would lead his son to be a dairy farmer, college graduate, state director of agriculture and highway engineer. Along the way, Allan Linn saw a man walk on the moon, the Last Frontier win statehood and watched the ground ripple during the 1964 earthquake.

“First of all, we’re not Colonists,” Linn said. “My dad came up here in 1927 and he worked at the experiment station and spent three years there. Then, he went to Fairbanks, but he had acquired land here (in the Valley), so he came back down here about the time the Colony started.”

Although Linn was only a small child at the time the Matanuska Colony was established, he recalls the sentiments of some already here were similar to what some say today about growth.

“There were a few who were probably upset that they were invaded by newcomers,” he said. “We’ve been in the Valley my entire life, except when I was going to school. It was a lot different then, and we have a little different perspective (on the early days of Palmer) than a lot of the people who were Colonists have, because we didn’t have the traumatic past history a lot of those folks had. For us, life has always been pretty good. We never wanted for anything. We never had any money, but growing up I had no idea what having money meant.”

On the dairy farm

Linn’s early memories of Valley life focus mostly on the family’s dairy farm, an operation that lasted until five years after his father’s death in 1953.

The sale of the farm “took care of my mother’s retirement,” he said.

And for Linn, who had already earned degrees in agriculture and engineering, it meant a drastic change in profession.

“It was a very different set of times,” he said. “I just finally decided that I had a degree in agriculture and, I do miss the land, but I don’t miss the cows. To me, the seven days a week didn’t bother me, but the 52 weeks a year did. Cows don’t take vacations, so I decided I didn’t want to do that.”

Growing up on the farm, Linn recalls there wasn’t much to do other than chores and how the family’s first pickup — a 1940 International — revolutionized their operation.

“When we graduated to having a pickup, wow, that was something,” he said. “It was just before the war and it was a big deal. We had a Chevy sedan before that. First of all, it gave us something to haul the milk to the creamery with, and since there weren’t many of them around, my dad ended up hauling the neighbors’ milk, too.”

At that time, milk was transported in 10-gallon cans, he said, and because the dairy business was considered essential, the farm was exempt from the rationing that went on during World War II.

“You didn’t have any problem with tires, because the rationing didn’t occur for farmers,” he said. “But, at the same point in time, you couldn’t get any anti-freeze, which was bad news.”

Especially in winter in Alaska. That meant having to drain the radiator after driving the pickup, and filling it with hot water before starting it up again.

Conveniences like anti-freeze or even electricity are so common today they’re taken for granted, Linn said. He was nearly 13 before the family farm got electricity.

“Boy, that was wonderful, absolutely wonderful,” he said. “All you had to do was pull the string. It was like magic. You get up in the morning and you want to make coffee before you go out to do the chores — click.”

It was a more simple time, but not necessarily “the good old days,” Linn said.

“From my perspective, it was a lot easier to live in those days than it is today in a lot of respects,” he said. “It was more simple, it was less involved, there weren’t as many needs tugging you in different ways. Conversely, we didn’t have penicillin in those days, we didn’t have electricity. I don’t think the times of the past are any better or any worse than they are today. You have pluses and minuses.”

So, what was there to do for fun on the dairy farm?

“Everyday fun? There wasn’t any,” Linn joked. “There was a theater in the gym, where they showed films once a week on a Friday or Saturday night. Mostly, you made your own entertainment.”

For sports fans, the only game in town was the Palmer High School basketball team. A 1946 PHS graduate (part of a class of nine), Linn was on the basketball team, but admitted he wasn’t an athletic star.

“Basketball was the only thing there was in the line of sports,” he said. “No football, no soccer, no baseball, no hockey. It was strictly local, there were no Harlem Globetrotter visits. We played Anchorage and Eklutna, and that was it.”

In the winter months, many folks would engage in what is still a favorite pastime, Linn said — complaining. People would spend time coming up with things to complain about for local boards, then let loose during their annual meetings.

“They would come roaring into the annual meetings and they would have 20 questions to ask the board members, or 100 questions or whatever,” he said. “But it was wintertime, you know? What do you do in the wintertime when you don’t have any money and about all you have to do is feed wood into the furnace to keep warm? You think of things to get mad about.”

The modern age

Linn’s upbringing and early adult life may have been spent mostly on the dairy farm (he didn’t have a telephone in his house until about the time he was married), he left briefly to earn a bachelor’s degree in agriculture from Washington State University and another bachelor’s in civil engineering from Oregon State.

He worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the local Soil Conservation Service, but left when the agency asked him to move to Fairbanks.

“I didn’t want to do that,” Linn said. “I’d been in the Valley all my life and didn’t want to leave.”

So he went to work for the state Department of Transportation, then spent a year working for a private engineering firm on the pipeline. In the mid-1970s, the state called again and he served three years (1975-78) as state director of agriculture.

“That was very interesting,” he said. “Some day, there will be a lot of agriculture in Alaska, but right now I don’t think the state is particularly interested in seeing it evolve.”

He also doesn’t think the Valley’s future is in agriculture.

“It will not mean very much to the future of the Valley,” he said. “It’s limited in the standpoint that land is too high valued. It will continue to produce things like the high-valued crops, like the vegetable farmers.”

On the political front, the debate over statehood in the 1950s “was very emotional,” Linn recalled. “There were an awful lot of people who were violently opposed to it and an awful lot of people who were violently in support of it. I was very much in favor of it.”

Linn could see the writing on the wall that, eventually, statehood would come.

“I also saw it as something that, in theory, we were going to no longer be governed by Washington, D.C., edicts, but by our own rationale and local community,” he said. “One of the principal goals was to get rid of the canned salmon interests in Seattle’s control of the Alaska Legislature.”

The earthquake

The largest literal shakeup in Alaska and the Valley came in 1964, when a 9.2-magnitude earthquake rocked the 49th state. Linn recalls he was at home with his wife, Bernice (they’ve enjoyed 56 years of marriage) and his young sons, Kevin and Kelly, who were about ages 7 and 5 respectively.

“We were in northeast Palmer in a small house,” Linn said. “We had very little damage. We had a concrete block chimney and one block flipped off and hit the roof and poked a hole in the aluminum roofing we had. I had just gotten home a few minutes earlier, then it hit.”

Being from Oregon, Bernice wasn’t used to earthquakes, and when the big one hit “the next thing I knew she had a boy under each arm and she was headed out the back door. She was headed back to Oregon.”

The family rode out the quake on their porch, which was a small concrete pad. From there, Linn said he could literally see the ground move like water.

“The most interesting part was you could see the energy waves in two different waves,” he said. “You could see the ground waves coming across our lawn and you could see the trees weaving back and forth.”

Palmer was spared most of the devastation and death involved with the quake, Linn said. Well, almost.

“The only casualty that I know of in all of Palmer was our dog,” he said. “It was a young pup and it happened to have its home right by that chimney. It was psychologically traumatized and never recovered from the shock.”

Contact Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.