by Hank Nuwer, First Published in Cordova Times
Allan Lund’s name came up now and again as I read early issues of The Cordova Times in search of column-worthy individuals. During the 1920s, Lund served as chairperson of the Cordova City Council. He was instrumental in getting the area streetlights, better roads, and its first sidewalks.
When the City Council thought Alaska Public Utilities was overcharging Cordovans, Lund became part of a task force charged with obtaining reduced rates for telephone service.
Lund left his native California for Alaska as a young man and gained a reputation as a builder who knew how to construct canneries.
His first construction job occurred in 1892 in the remote Inupiat fishing village of Golovin on the Seward Peninsula. A Russian trading post hired him to put up several buildings for a commercial trading post there.
After that accomplishment, he drifted from one mining camp to the next, erecting buildings and mining a bit on the side. One of his regular employers was the Pacific-American Fisheries Company with headquarters in Bellingham, Washington.
Eventually he settled in Cordova and told The Cordova Times of Dec. 30, 1914, that this was the first he felt that he truly was at home. He took a wife and had a daughter.
From time to time, he left Cordova to take freelance construction jobs offered him. In 1915, for example, he put up a small cannery on the Kotzebue Sound for Pacific-American Fisheries, and then put up warehouses at Port Haden and Port Mullen, returning to Cordova by late autumn.
Lund told The Cordova Times an amusing story about himself in which he went back to San Francisco to reconnect with his ill sister, a brother, and friends he hadn’t seen in decades. (He had two additional sisters in Australia, one of whom whose husband perished in World War I).
The city had been rebuilt after the great earthquake and fire, and he found himself getting lost in every neighborhood he visited. Few of the landmarks he had known remained.
While in San Francisco, he attended an air show put on by the daredevil stuntman Lincoln Beachy. He was so impressed that he went out and took his first-ever airplane ride.
On Lund’s first day in San Francisco, he disembarked from a steamship and searched for a place to get a bite to eat. The eatery he found, however, appeared to have the area’s worst service, Lund told the Northwest Mining Journal.
After sitting unserved for an extended time, Lund charged the proprietor at the cash register and unleashed his displeasure.
“What’s the reason I can’t get served here?” he barked. “Ain’t Alaska money any good here.”
With that, the proprietor informed Lund that he had taken himself to one of the first cafeterias in the city.
Every meal was self-serve, the proprietor explained to the red-faced rube from Cordova. Cafeterias had no waiters.
Hank Nuwer is currently acting over the holidays in both “A Christmas Carol” and “It’s a Wonderful World.”