This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.
Rich Mattson remembers playing in the ruins of Treadwell Mine as a kid in the 1950s, and he said that planted seeds of curiosity about Juneau’s past.
Now, he researches history for Gastineau Channel Historical Society, and publishes daily “This Day in Juneau History” posts on juneauhistory.org. Mattson says he’s an amateur, but it has become almost like a part-time job in his retirement.
Listen:
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Rich Mattson: A popular bumper sticker in 1986 was “I survived the tsunami of 1986,” because there was a 7.7 magnitude earthquake in the Aleutian Islands on May 7, and it was feared that there would be a tsunami that would even reach into Juneau.
So people went out to Auke Bay and lined the road to see the tsunami. Now, if there really would have been a tsunami, that would have been a pretty foolish thing to do. But as it turned out, it was only a two-inch wave, so bringing a rise to the bumper sticker, “I survived” that tsunami.
I’m Rich Mattson. I just retired from DIPAC about 2018. And I’ve been following my passion for local history ever since. I grew up in Douglas. My dad came up as a fish biologist and with our family in 1957 and we ended up living down at the end of St. Anne’s Ave.
Well, growing up in that area, Treadwell was our playground, and Sandy Beach. There was an old timer here named Sim MacKinnon. He had made quite a collection of historic photographs, which, by the way, is in the State Library, fascinating to look at.
And I just remember folks brought us down to a presentation he was giving. It was a Taku blustery night, and here’s all these pictures of old Treadwell. It just sort of set the scene. And that just hooked me as to be a lifelong student of Treadwell. So that really was what got me into local history.
I got a whole list of interesting stuff I found. And sometimes you find some goofy stuff.
One of the first ones I came across, as a student of history, was, ‘Has anybody ever heard of 250-foot Johnson?’ Well, it turned out, Treadwell hired lots of Scandinavian workers, and there were lots of Johnsons. And so in the times there, most people had a handle of some kind that was assigned by their contemporaries. And this one, Charles Johnson, was working in the Treadwell Mine.
Mr. Johnson was getting off his shift one afternoon, and he must have been sort of absent minded, and it doesn’t sound like they had a lot of safety railings around this thing, and he stepped off on the other side and promptly fell down the shaft. Well his friends were alarmed. They immediately went down on the hoist to recover his remains, and there they found him standing in the sump of water at the bottom in knee deep water, looking rather dazed.
He had some bruises, no broken bones, and he’s a little bit in shock, understandably. Well, the newspaper reported that the next week, and they said he fell 250 foot down the Treadwell shaft.
They said ‘ah, it was deeper than that.’ And they actually took a tape and measured that darn depth there. It wasn’t 250 feet, it was 256 feet! And from then on, Mr. Johnston was known thereafter as 256-Foot Johnson.
But for today, I actually went into my “This Day in History,” January 17. What was happening on that day? I think the one that was more interesting that I doubt very few people know, is the Goldstein ice skating rink. Well, the Goldstein building, as most people who are long timers around here know, is that big six story building at the corner of Second and Seward Street.
Well, in 1939, that building got burned in a tremendous fire. It was probably the biggest fire in Juneau, certainly to that time, and even since then. The thing was just totally gutted.
But in those years when it was gutted, it was just a hollow shell. It was just the concrete walls, and because of the no roof, and it would rain and it would freeze, and presto! Juneau had an indoor, so to speak, ice skating rink. And so, Chief of Police [Ralston] was warning people that with the thawing weather that it was probably unsafe, so don’t go skating in the Goldstein ice skating rink until it freezes again. That was January 17 in 1940. So stuff like that.