Ruby Rokeberg

Glancing out the living room window of our duplex on Iliamna Drive I couldn’t have missed Ruby Rokeberg on her hands and knees furiously yanking from the flower bed my newly transplanted flowers. The year was 1954. We were new to Alaska, having lived our first year on Government Hill, and new to the neighborhood, Susitna View Park, just west of Turnagain-By-the-Sea subdivision, where Ruby and Mel lived. Their son, Norman, and I had become friends.

Though we had raised chickens and rabbits and had planted a vegetable garden in Florida, there were no horticulturists in my family, and no knowledge of Alaskan flora. My dad and I had hauled shale rocks from along the Seward Highway, surrounded on end a small stand of birch in our front yard with them, and backfilled the enclosure with topsoil. I was assigned the task of providing the plants for the new flower garden, so I dutifully went into the woods nearby and dug up a number of fireweed, blue bells, columbine and lupine—practically weeds by any Alaskan’s definition—regardless of their beauty in the wild.

As I crossed the yard, Ruby was vigorously replacing my local transplants with pansies and assorted domesticated annual flowering plants. It was a kindly gesture in spite of its abrupt execution, and we took it at face value—a seasoned Alaskan’s introduction to Alaskan Gardening 101. Noticeably in a dither, Ruby asked me, “What are you trying to do, kid, ruin the neighborhood?”

As a friend of Norm’s I had plenty of occasions to visit the Rokeberg home, in fact, we neighborhood kids found any occasion an opportunity not to be missed. Ruby, of Danish descent, made excellent Danish pastries. In those days, before our legions of bureaucrats set up shop and began to force-feed us a mind-boggling array of regulations—all of course for our own good—a person could prepare food in their own kitchen for commercial purposes. Ruby made Danish pastries and cookies in her kitchen that were served to none other than passengers on Pacific Northern Airlines flights. Her baking efforts produced a small percentage of rejects and though they might not have been pretty enough to sell to the airlines they far exceeded the culinary standards of Norm, Johnnie Tegstrom, Vaughn Cartwright and me, so we were regular visitors. We were like Pavlov’s dogs, responding to the smell of pastries, not the sound of a bell. We liked Norm too.

Ruby also baked the dessert trays of French and Danish pastries for the Garden of Eatin’, Anchorage’s leading restaurant in the 1950s and 1960s.The fact that the city’s finest restaurant was located in a Quonset hut in Spenard speaks volumes about the era. After WW II, the Navy was overstocked with these long, half-domed, steel buildings that required so little in the way of foundations and could be easily assembled with unskilled labor. They were sold as surplus and set up all over town to accommodate the needs of the steadily expanding city. Incidentally, my first wife Lilla and I lived in a Quonset hut on Dubin Street in Muldoon for a year after returning to Alaska in 1967. We had moved from a suburban home with a two-car garage and large fenced yard in Sacramento for $135 per month into the Quonset hut for $175 per month. That first winter back in Anchorage, its fuel oil furnace erupted and covered everything we owned—which wasn’t much—with soot. Twice.

In the 1950s, Ruby used to take us boys on an occasional adventure. One summer, when I was probably still attending the old Central Junior High, since razed to accommodate the Performing Arts Center, Ruby took Norm, me, and Roger Harman, who lived across the street from us, on a fishing trip to Hope. We drove to Hope in the Rokeberg’s 1950 burgundy Mercury. Before the earthquake of 1964, there was a general store in Hope run by an elderly gentleman who sold everything under the sun, stacked from floor to ceiling on either side of the several aisles. It is one of the many missing uniquedies (I’m coining that word) that helps to define pre-earthquake Alaska from post-earthquake Alaska. I can still walk its aisles in my mind every time I think back to the summers my family and I used to spend in Hope camped along Resurrection Creek, my mother determinedly bent over the creek panning for flakes of gold by the hour while my dad and my friends and I snagged humpies from the crystal clear water.

Of course the Hope General Store sold the ubiquitous red-and-white Daredevil lure for which I had little need at the time. I made my own snag hooks. Growing up in Alaska in the 1950s I didn’t know a single person who fly-fished or practiced catch-and-release. We were harvesters. That’s the way I was raised. My idea of a fly was a chunk of lead with a big treble hook attached. I would take a Coleman burner down to the crawl space in our house, melt lead in a pan and pour it into the molds I had punched into the dampened sand with a hoe handle, immediately inserting twisted pieces of coat hanger, sinking them in up to the eye with a pair of pliers. After they cooled I would tie them to the underside of treble hooks and I was good to go. I tied a bright colored piece of red, orange or chartreuse material to the base of the treble hooks so I could see the juxtaposition of the “lure” to the fish, allowing me to jerk smartly on the line at the proper time to impale the critters.

We had a grand time camping and snagging humpies with Ruby that year, but the return trip turned into a real adventure when heavy rains and a flash flood washed out the highway at Indian. We were stuck on the wrong side of Indian Creek, now a torrential, brown, debris-filled stream, and there was nothing we could do but improvise until the road crews were able to make suitable repairs. Fortunately, there was log cabin nearby owned by a friend of Ruby and Mel’s who worked for the Alaska Railroad, so we didn’t have to sleep in the car. We had plenty of fresh-caught fish to eat, a roof over our heads and a deck of cards, so it became a delightful sojourn. The fish we couldn’t eat didn’t fare so well due to a shortage of ice. They became fertilizer for the Rokeberg’s garden, naturally enough, resulting in a bumper crop of potatoes later that season.

Ruby doted on us kids, took an interest in what we were doing and did things with us. She was fun to be around, always making the best of things—even those rotting humpies. Years later my mother admitted to me that Ruby was the only person in her life of whom she had ever been jealous.

I said, “But why, Mom?” She replied, “Because my son regularly came home carrying on about Ruby this and Ruby that!”

Of course I was just being an adolescent and had no idea what my enthusiasm about Ruby had meant to my mother. There is no doubt Ruby was tough competition, and she was home all day—Mel frequently working out of town—while my mom taught school five days a week. Mom also didn’t have those requisite Danish baking skills.

Though Ruby was a sweetheart, she was a little hard on Norman, who never seemed to be able to live up to her expectations. Ruby and Mel had lost their first son “Donnie” to polio. He was a senior in high school at the time of his death, seven years older than Norm, and a fine young man by virtually everyone’s measure. He was among the last polio deaths in Alaska, succumbing to the disease only a year before the Salk vaccine was released. Ruby was never the same after the loss. Donnie had been exemplary—the perfect son. He hung up his clothes. Norman was intransigent—a bit of a challenge—and left his room a mess. Ruby couldn’t help spoiling him because of the loss of her eldest son, but she also couldn’t help nagging at him, and would refuse to wash his clothes until some were hung up and others found their way to the hamper.

Our Boy Scout Troop 673 was sponsored by the Spenard Lions Club and we met in the North Star Elementary School until homesteader Chet Lampert allowed the club to put one of those ubiquitous Quonset huts on his property on the north shoreline of Blueberry Lake—now the northeast corner of Northern Lights Boulevard and “A” Street. Eddie Peabody played his banjo for us in that Quonset hut and, clever boys that we were, we made up a little diddy about how Eddie “Playbody” had peed for us. Another highlight of my scouting years is that the Black Panther Patrol, of which I was the patrol leader, was awarded the coveted Presidential Award for having the best campsite throughout the course of a Summer Camporee held near Campbell Airstrip. Ruby had made our patrol flag—a black panther sewn on a field of red.

Norm, Johnnie and I all became Eagle Scouts. Norm even got to attend a Boy Scout Jamboree in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. To me, at that time, that was the most incredible trip I could imagine. Was I ever envious!

Ruby loved to dance and was known to drag unsuspecting males of all ages onto the dance floor. In the 1920’s, returning to Denmark to spend her teenage years in Copenhagen working as a housemaid, she took great pleasure in taking center-stage at a dance exhibition, where she introduced the most popular dance of the “Roaring 20s,” the Charleston, to Denmark. She even coerced the members of the Black Panther Patrol into taking dancing lessons. We were adolescent Boy Scouts and had not the least interest in learning to dance. When the dreaded day arrived she dragged us to a dance studio on Spenard Road where the Tiki Lounge is now and introduced us to two statuesque, tall, beautiful, blonde twin sisters, in their late 20s or early 30s, from Vienna. We were instantly transformed from Black Panthers into Eager Beavers.

Over the course of several months we learned to tango, waltz, foxtrot and rumba. I was pretty height-challenged at the time, being only an inch or two over five feet tall, and as such spent much of those sessions in a dancing embrace with my face smothered by one or another pair of humongous breasts. Needless to say, it was hard to keep my mind on my feet.

Ruby’s husband Mel was a mild-mannered, intelligent man with a slight Norwegian accent who also took an interest in us kids. He was an electrical foreman who worked on large construction projects all over Alaska. Mel was born in Minnesota, grew up in Norway and worked hard to Americanize his speech, but he had a problem with pronouncing the letter “J” like most Norwegians. There were a number of Norske’ among Anchorage’s founding fathers, hence the absence, in the alphabetically arranged streets, of a “J” Street downtown between “I” and “K.” The only time I went fishing on the Kenai River until I was middle-aged was when Mel took Norm and me to Bing’s Landing to fish for rainbow trout with the world famous Bing Brown, one of the early guides on the river that helped turn it into the international fishing destination it is today. I left my humpy-snagging gear at home on that occasion.

One day when I was maybe a sophomore in high school and Norm and Vaughn were freshmen, we were all practicing throwing a discus in the Rokeberg’s front yard. I somehow managed to throw it right through their large living room window. I felt terrible about the incident and promised Mel and Ruby I would pay for the damages. It was a lot of money for a kid and I’m sure they thought I’d probably never keep my promise, but I squirreled away money from my paper route and paid back every cent. I know that meant a lot to them both, Mel in particular, and it was no doubt part of the reason I was, in 1967, included when Mel put up $8,000 at 8% for Norm, Johnnie and me to invest in a business that ended up being the Bird House Bar forty miles south of Anchorage on the Seward Highway.

Once in the early 1980s, Norman and I all grown up, Mel and Ruby elderly, and The Saltry Restaurant had only been open a year or two, Norm and his wife, Gayle, and Mel and Ruby came to visit my wife Shelli and me in Halibut Cove, riding the Danny J across Kachemak Bay from Homer. Because of the small size of the restaurant then and the large size of the group, we had dinner upstairs and Marion Beck, the proprietress, waited on us herself. There was a very limited menu, most of the items on it caught by her husband, Dave, a commercial fisherman, and either “sushied,” “pokied,” or pickled. Ruby threw a fit. There was no alternative menu, sushi had not become popular in America yet, especially in the Alaskan outback, and it wouldn’t have mattered to Ruby if it had. She asked forcefully, “Do you know about Pearl Harbor?” “Don’t you know who won the war?!” All the while, Mel was kicking her under the table and the rest of us stared in stunned silence. It was a button on Ruby I had never witnessed being pushed. I know Marion has a temper, but she kept her cool, smiled and carried on admirably. It was quite a show, and we’ve laughed about it many times since.

Ruby not only made pastries, she also made cakes for weddings, birthdays and other occasions. She had not been able to make a wedding cake for my first marriage, which occurred in San Francisco, or my second, which had taken place unremarkably in my log cabin on Sixth Avenue in Anchorage, but she was determined to make the cake for my marriage to Shelli. She called me several times and I kept mentioning it to Shelli. The cake wasn’t a big issue for Shelli, but it was for Ruby, who felt we needed a proper one.

She did make the cake, which was at my request a carrot cake, requiring cream cheese on it instead of frosting. The little sugar rosettes Ruby spent days patiently forming with her arthritic fingers and freezing in Tupper Ware containers wouldn’t adhere properly to the cream cheese like they would have to regular butter cream frosting because it was soft, and the flowers tended to sag and fall off, so Ruby had to stand guard over the cake, butter knife in hand, surreptitiously slapping those rosettes back in place. There was never a more focused wedding cake attendant until it was time for it to be served.

It was a beautiful cake and a big hit at the reception. Ruby had outdone herself, and I was pleased that she was so pleased to have been involved.

Looking back, there were two parents I remember that gave generously of their hearts and time to us kids when I was growing up. One was Mr. Snipes, the father of Larry, another schoolmate and fellow Boy Scout who I always addressed respectfully as Mr. Snipes, even into adulthood. The other was Ruby, though Mel certainly receives honorable mention.

I took the time to visit Ruby after Mel had died and she was living alone in the Pioneer’s Home in downtown Anchorage. I also attended her funeral at Evergreen Memorial so I could say a final goodbye to her. While expressing my farewell to her peaceful but inanimate countenance I thought about the other Ruby, the oh-so-animate Ruby, diligently tending the wedding cake, yanking those feral plants from our front yard garden and giving Marion Beck the upbraiding of her life about her menu at the Saltry’s insensitivity those still angry over Japanese atrocities in WWII—and couldn’t suppress an adoring smile behind my tears.