To Adak and back...again

WASILLA — An antiques dealer never knows what he might find when the right connections are made.

Kelly Turney, owner of Alaska Picker, has spent years “picking,” buying antique items from all over the country to brush up or repurpose and sell back home. But never had he encountered a place quite like Adak, Alaska, until this summer.

“I’ve gone to some pretty cool places but Adak totally blew them out of the water,” Turney said.

According to Turney, Adak is the last commercial stop in the Aleutian Chain — so far west that it’s in a different time zone than the rest of Alaska. Roughly 1,200 miles southwest of Anchorage, Adak had 326 residents as of the 2010 U.S. Census, though only about 60 reside there year-round, Turney said.

In the 1940s, however, the island was rife with activity.

“There’s an old Navy air station out there that was a significant base during World War II,” Turney said. According to the Centers for Disease Control’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Adak was home to 100,000 U.S. troops in 1943.

The Agency reports a decline in population to 995 military and civilian personnel by 1966, and a peak population of 5,600 people in 1990 before the base was shut down in 1997, after multiple reports by the Naval Energy and Environmental Support Activity of environmental contamination by hazardous substances.

It’s what’s left behind — especially the old military furniture — that Turney is interested in.

“It’s made of mahogany, it’s very well built, it’s very much in fashion and in style now, too. Pretty much, it sells as quickly as it comes in. Everybodys looking for it,” he said.

“Everybody remembers it, too,” he continued. “If you were a military kid growing up, it was in all the base housing.”

But Turney wasn’t aware of just how much Adak had to offer until recently.

“About two years ago, I had two guys come in in the same week — neither one of ‘em knew each other — telling me the same story: ‘Oh, there’s some really cool stuff out in Adak,’” he said.

One guy said he had actually seen the furniture, but didn’t take any pictures, Turney said, so he put the idea in the back of his mind. Since it costs about as many dollars as there are miles between Adak and Anchorage for a roundtrip plane ticket — and the island’s airport only receives flights on Sundays and Thursdays — Turney wasn’t about to make that kind of investment with nothing but a stranger’s word that he could get that money back in sales.

This summer, he received a voicemail message at Alaska Picker from a woman whose friend was working with the Aleut Corporation to move things off the island. The woman who contacted Turney said he had bought a few things from the estate of a friend’s mother in Anchorage a few years ago, and wondered if he would be interested in any of the Adak items.

Again, he wanted proof, and requested a photo. The first she sent back showed what looked like hundreds of chairs stacked on top of one another in a darkened warehouse.

“I’m like, OK, now you have my attention, but I can’t go to Adak for 1,000 chairs,” Turney said.

Over the next week or so, his contact proceeded to send him pictures of chairs, doorknobs, desks, dressers, tools, tables, keys, signs, light fixtures and more, most of which greatly interested him, as a picker.

At the beginning of August, Turney finally committed to a four-day trip to Adak, where he discovered a new, eerie kind of Alaska. From wind-ravaged buildings, an abandoned movie theater and the shuttered McDonald’s to the old “Smurf Houses” and the mossy floors fondly known as “Adak carpet,” the island has an almost post-apocalyptic feel, Turney said.

“It is a trippy place,” he said.

To highlight both the charm and the remoteness of the tiny town — technically incorporated as a city in 2001 — Turney mentioned that the one grocery store on the island is only open evenings, five days a week, since the guy who owns the store also works at the airport on flight days and as the city manager from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

“Everybody in that town I think has two or three jobs to keep that town running,” Turney said.

And as a visitor especially, “If you need something, you either make it, find it or you’re out of it,” he said.

What’s next

Turney had to obtain special permission from the Aleut Corporation to tour most of the buildings on that first scouting trip, and upon returning to the mainland had to write a proposal to the corporation detailing how long he would be in Adak, what he would take, and how he would transport items off the island.

With at least one other helper, “It’s gonna take a week’s worth of work to get all that stuff out, for sure,” Turney said.

The goal is to fill two, 40-foot connexes with “super cool stuff,” he said, which will then be literally shipped to Anchorage on a barge. Turney is set to depart Oct. 20, and plans to host a special sale of the Adak items at Alaska Picker in early December.

Turney will be documenting his travels in “webisodes” and photos posted to the Alaska Picker Facebook page at www.facebook.com/akpicker/

Alaska Picker is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday at 5401 E. Mayflower Lane in Wasilla.

For more information, visit www.alaskapicker.com or call 357-PICK (7425).

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.