St. Mary's Bewish Interview

A few of the long distance cousins in some place and he was strong enough to swing an axe. They were pretty soon they were after him to come and live with us. What do you mean memories of a cougar wreck? Well, I think the main memories of it was, uh, well, a cougar wreck. The reason that the cougar wreck is this there is there is one place where there's a higher ground when we do have floods in the spring, especially when the Yukon breaks loose and all those sides loose. It's a high place that it couldn't get to us. We get pretty high and we may move some of the boats along the slough that were anchored for the winter, but that was the main reason that they didn't have to worry about being washed away and the whole grounds and the whole area there was so why would say three, three, four miles deep as far as the whole land. There was actually a river that kind of the river or the slough, I should say, kind of circle this and then there was another river not very far away.

Another slough and it was we're almost on an island, but we could get off of it, you know, normally if we had to. And what do you remember most about it? Well, what I remember most of it is the first of all was the isolation. For me, but as soon as I was there for a couple of weeks I had so many little projects going, things I wanted to do that pretty soon the days were going by and I didn't have enough time to do some of the things I wanted to do. So I enjoyed that that much and I really enjoyed working with the kids there. They were, a lot of them didn't know too much on English, you know, there was the day year that I came there. In fact, there was about four or five kids that came from different places. The priest would have an orphan or something or the kid wasn't being taken care of or the father was a drunk or something like that. And the kid was getting beat up every time somebody was drinking or something and they were the ones that was most anxious to go to the correct because the other kids that were there before told them what it was like and it didn't sound too bad to them.

And when they came, it was something new to them all the way around. I can even remember here, after we moved up here, the first year we got some from outside, they flew them in here. And we got a group from Hooper Bay, they landed down here in the river and a pontoon plane, you know. We got them in the boat and hauled them to shore and there we had a truck down there where they could put all their suitcases and all their little bags of goodies that they had with them. And there's one young kid, he was very small, but quite bright and he did know English pretty well. I could say that for him. And I said, come on, get up in the front seat here, there's too many in the back. They might push you out and he's okay and he looked around and we started up the hill and he says, you know, brother, this is the first time in my whole life that I ever had a right in a car. So we came up to the house and we unloaded and I took him upstairs and I took him into one of the, we had, they didn't have private rooms or anything. We had maybe six or eight beds in a room and I told him, this is your bed and this is where you stay.

And there's a locker there for where we had a locker for him and everything. He says, you know, brother, this is the first time in my whole life that I ever had a bed of my own. And it was just, you know, something to make me think. He says, how lucky I was. And then the kids themselves, we kind of pushed English in this sense that here they were going to go to school. The teachers, you know, the sisters and one day another and the teachers there, they didn't know English. I could see myself that my gosh, they were just beginning to buy radios and things because the, well, the year I got there. The U.S. Postal Service decided that they would start hauling partial post. You know, contracted out for airplanes to fly it and so it began to come out of Bethel and they had a usually flight twice a week, the beginning. And catalogs, serious and robot, come on, got my words, swamped the place with catalogs and they started looking at every, in a district with customers and everyone, every family had one.

And then they came up and their problem was the older people didn't ever, or really ordered anything, they always went to a store. So we had to show them how to, you know, how we did it, those who could write English and so forth. And so after a while, I taught, we got some of the bigger boys that were there that knew enough about it and I taught them how to, you know, make out of order. Then I haven't tested and make it out of order. So when people would come, they wanted to buy something out of the book, but they didn't know how to do it. Instead of spending them all my time on, I had those two or three kids lined up to help them. And it was amazing, a simple mistake, what would come in the mail. I can remember specifically the guy wanted some kind of a, I think it was a flashlight or something, is I remember it. And with batteries, and he came to me with his package, he was out on the flats, got the boat thing and opened it up and then he came to me upstairs, his brother, I never ordered this.

And it was sad for a cost. He put a wrong number in there and it just threw the whole thing off. And another guy wanted a radio, so he got a radio and he took it home and he came back within a week and said, brother, I can't get this radio to work. These two little funny things sticking out here. I said, well, what kind of electricity do you have? Well, we don't have any electricity. Well, that's for electricity, you know, a light plant to hear our generator out there. That's what you got it for. So I plugged it in on ours. Oh, he was all excited. He says, but I don't have that at home. I said, well, it's nice and clean yet. Let's send it back and tell him that you made a mistake and get a battery one. And I helped him pick up a battery one, you know, things like that where they couldn't understand some of the things why they got what was wrong. Describe the move from a colorect to St. Mary's. Well, the one they actually moved before we moved, we had a tear down a lot of things, you know, we took down there.

Hang on a second. We got some people walking upstairs and waiting for them to history of the move from a colorect to St. Mary's. Well, once at that time, when we were at a colorect there, we found out that the bishop that we had, the bishop, Fitzgerald, was, I think he died. And we couldn't, didn't know it right away because well, we had radio, but if you didn't get it on the news that day, there was, it was only broadcast once and those days and it was usually armed forces. Radio, we could, they had no radio at Bethel or known or anyplace, so it was always a long distance or radio communications. And anyhow, we, we did finally hear there was a bishop, the father of Gleason was appointed a bishop for Alaska, our area. And he came down to a colorect and when he saw the place, he said, oh, my gosh, we've got to get you out of here. And my father Laurenti was in charge there and we also had father, oh, what's his name?

He was in Bethel, so I can't think of his name right now. Let me think. Time off. Okay. What's his name? When it was, had the thing started, you know, as far as coming up and looking to place over. And we had, what we had to do, or the bishop did, we grew up what we wanted a piece of land and why and where it was located and how much we wanted. And then we sent that to our congressman and asked them if we could, you know, get the land through Congress, you know. So we could have it at a title of our, of our own. And the idea was also that if we got the land and got it long enough and wide and deep enough, we would probably have a little controller of other people coming in and just moving in and causing all kinds of troubles. Otherwise it was kind of, we wanted to have a model city if we could, that was the idea. And we did get to, except we asked for a mile long when he only gave us a half a mile long along the waterfront and a mile back was what we got.

Which was enough reading, but we didn't know exactly where we, when we got it, you know. We had no, we just told him where we were, where we wanted it. We had no, not much digging to see what was underneath or anything else, you know, or what kind of a land it was. But, well, because the ground was looked good. Start with this site was chosen because. This site was chosen because we had plenty of water was available. The river of water was clean. It was easy to get in a boat and go to the Yukon, up or down, or to the fishing grounds. It was good hunting up river. The ground itself, they dug enough when they were surveying the land, kind of surveying it on our own. How much we wanted.

They found that the soil looked pretty good for gardening. We had Father Spills was in charge here. He was a little farmer from Eastern, or, yeah, Eastern Washington. And he thought the boy, we could have a nice garden. And he was from Holy Cross himself and he had big gardens up there. So we envisioned big gardens and everything else. And he was all for getting what we had. And right away, well, the second year, first year, he's still busy building the building with. He got me on a tractor with a plow, he hung it and disc and everything else. We had that. He just got them from Holy Cross bottom down here. We put in a pretty big garden, but we didn't have the fertilizer and things like that. But the garden didn't turn out too good the first year. But the next year, we had a sister, Scott Astika here, who was from Germany. And they knew garden because she came one way, way back. And she knew garden pretty well.

And put in a good garden the second year, and the third year was very good. And then finally, the amount of students we were getting because of the new school and everything. And the results and the people were coming. And the kids were writing a home and so forth and giving them all the information. The priest also came. And when I think we had a meeting here or a retreat or something the first year or so. And they went home with pictures and everything else. And all at once we had people, I mean, kids from every place were applying to come. And we had, I think, around 125 students here, all of them borders. And that's why we had to, they began to build another separate dorm for the boys. And we didn't ourselves, the Jesuits ourselves, I was living with the boys. And they just had a couple of rooms and everything.

It was really crowded because you're only in this one building here. But after a few years, they extended it out and got another building about the same size as this. Not as quite as elaborate, but for boys' dorm. And we had a shop over in the basement part of it. And we had our Jesuit quarters there. There was about four or five of us here. And a little chapel over there. And then we had, they built a gym in it upstairs, top floor. A lot of the graduates from the school have gone to college and had very successful lives outside. Why do St. Mary's kids seem to do better? Well, I think one of the things would probably be the discipline and then they have to be a study period. And none of this year, if we went around, you know, we just didn't allow it. They were in get down detention pretty quickly. It wasn't a very severe, but then they had a competition between the kids and maybe the villages too. It was kind of a deal like that.

They were finding out that some kids were smarter than others and they wanted to be up there. And there was a good competition. And they knew that we were out to help them and everywhere we could. If they would cooperate, we could give them plenty to do. That's the way it worked out that they eliminated anyone that was very poor. They weren't bright, you know. They didn't know you were sending kids that couldn't learn English or were just fooling around school and would want to go hunting instead of going to school for a couple of days and take off and his ability to go hunting. And then the next time grandpa was going to another ability to jump in a boat and go, that type of the students never going to learn, you know, they're never going to be able to pass one grade to an exit through running around like that. And up here it was just a school was the main thing and they saw that and they also saw that they had where we had basketball here and we had football out there and soccer and anything we could get going volleyball.

And then we had hikes and the kids lost the blueberries here so they loved that blueberries and the fall. And then even the fishing, some of the kids would get chance to go fishing and get them pulled out. I had the extra pulls and I'd give it to them. They'd go down and catch some fish in the river. So for some of them it was different because down at Nelson Island they have some streams there. I guess they really can get some of those. Dolly Bard don't want to take another. But the kids in the inland here and the village's office side slews all they could do was the only thing they knew about fishing was put a net in. In fact, one time I went up the Andrewevsky river with a couple of, I went ahead for the medius with me and a brother Huck. And we went up there and we caught our limits so we came formal. Then we had just too many fish. It was in the summertime yet. There was no kids here and we didn't have a big walk in freezer or anything like that. So I took some of the fish down to the village, some of the people.

And I went to Maggie Sipper's house and shoulder I had some fish with me and I gave her about ten fish in it. And I was telling her about all the nice fish. She says, brother, you know, you can catch a lot more if you'd put a net in. So the idea of sports was just not there, you know. It's just not there. A couple of the people that we've spoken to so far have talked about that. Yes, I do because I do because I have them, some of them come to the bakery to help out. You know, they're assigned to the bakery as a kind of a morning chore on the airplane. Let's start with some kind of a statement. Maybe there is a feeling of... Yes, there is a feeling of community here at St. Mary's. I think they worked pretty well together when they're putting on a way to raise money to buy whatever they want, to like maybe the seniors that have something going on

if they want to get a graduation ring or something and then eat a little money to help them out. Well, they'll pitch in that way. And the students themselves, they come down like when I have some of them there in the bakery. They know that let's get the work done instead of fooling around trying to figure out how to get out of it because I don't let them get out of it. And they learned how to work that way and they can see that, well, if we work together and everybody's here on time, we get done on a hurry. So they... I don't think they really mind. They know that if they're not here in the bakery while they're going to be someplace else. And some of those jobs, they don't get a cookie for sweeping the floor. Or something on that already. And also, I usually have some tidbits around. They know that on Pi Day, they get a little pie about so big before everybody else has pie at separate time and so forth. And I tease them a lot and try to tell them, you know, they don't... Some of them don't understand.

They've washed the dishes or whatever at home, maybe, or pots and pans. But they don't seem to me that they don't have that... Well, I know many times. My mother got after me when I was a young kid. We had take turns in washing. There's grease. There's grease. You got to get that grease out of there. You can't wash and grease everything's getting greasy. And I had to learn that. And these kids, some of them are very poor that way. They just put everything in. The water gets greasy or greasy or greasy or greasy. And I just go down and I said, I had to do it all over again. You had one pot. You put the grease pot in there and then the grease is on everything else now. So they said, oh, he was like, oh. So I tried to teach that. And as I said before, or have said before many times with them that when we had the bigger crowd here, there were so many of them that they were glad once in a while to be get a chance to get out of the... study hall or something. Some of the kids were pretty smart and they were...

They worked through their problems pretty quick as far as the school was. And others were very slow and they had teachers. I think they were kind of feeling well. We better not give them too much otherwise they'll never get through the poor kid. So the smarter kids they went through and they were to be asking, could they go down the bakery and help out? And some of them I did teach them how to make bread by hand, you know, in your home, or you're out in a tent some place on a river and you will only have a pilot bread. But you have flour and sugar and salt and so forth. Let's make some bread. And then the first thing we got where we're going to make, can't make it outside is too cold. The wind's cold. You got to have a warm place and we went through the whole thing of putting it in the box or putting some hot water in a pan with a big rock in it, you know, a nice hot rock. And then let that steam circulate in there where the dough was rising after that.

And oh, they didn't know that. They tried to make bread and never... So I taught them, tried to teach them that and then making cookies and everything that I could. They were interested in it, not only the boys but some of the girls do. Then some of them actually took a class they would come two or three times a week for a semester. And we're okay, now we're going to do this and they would mix it to bread one day, the dough, weigh it out and everything. Then they would mix it by hand, put it in the pan, grease the pan, cover it, and then put it in the refrigerator because the time was up in the 40 minutes I think. Then the next day they had to come early and the morning before school would get that out where it would thaw out. Were you going to put it to thaw it out now and think, see. And then by the time it was their class period that would be thawed out and raising. Then they would make the loaf of bread the next day. Then after lunch they would say, well you better come and get the bread because I have too much bread, I can't use it all. So they would be glad to grab the bread.

Then the rumor got spread around, we were making bread for everybody. Then everybody was anxious to give a try. If you had to, in a sentence or two, 21, 46. Oh boy, let's go to check.