CONCORD - W. W. "Bill" Allman has made it back to Concord for one more winter vacation, and considering the way he lives, that is news.
Allman, 82, left his home in Cabarrus County at 18 to go west. "It was pretty tough to get a job around here about then," he recalls, so I went out to work in the lead mines." But he's spent the last 59 years in Alaska where he's lived a life that a Hollywood scriptwriter would have trouble believing.
After all, your average everyday citizen doesn't get himself clawed by a polar bear. Nor does he get trapped on a drifting iceberg for 12 days with little to eat other than raw bear meat or look foward to going polar bear hunting again next spring ("There's no telling what you could get for a good polar bear hide. I've seen them things bring in $40,000 and up.")
Nor does the average senior citizen have to spend most mornings chopping firewood to stay warm at night. It was the daily woodcutting that finally got to Bill Allman. When he got tired of it he began leaving his sod cabin in Marshall, Alaska, for Concord every winter. Too bad | can't hibernate like a bear" he laughs. "Sure would save a
pile of money sleeping all winter."
Allman came south a little ahead of schedule this year. "The snow come early and my woodpile was getting low, so I come on down here where I don't have to cut wood," he explains.
In Concord, he rents a tiny room in the Hotel Concord and spends the winter months visiting old friends and telling anyone who will listen about life in
the frozen north.
Bill Allman has plenty to talk about. After he went west to
work in the mines, he worked on Scandinavian whaling ships and held jobs as an Arizona cowboy and a Washington lumberjack, worked on a railroad and learned to fly rickety World War I fighter planes as a fledgling Army pilot who never got to Europe. Eventually, he tried working on commercial fishing boats in Alaskan waters but found that a bad deal. "You either make a bunch of money or you don't make nothing," he says. In 1921 he visited Alaska and two years later moved there, joining two old trappers who taught him how to survive in the wilderness.
Pioneer Pension
Now he's one of Alaska's Pioneers, with at least one lake and a couple of mountains named after him. He's entitled to a Pioneer Pension of $1,000 a month, but he has to live there to collect. "They allow you a month's vacation every year," he says. That kind of money isn't worth much in Alaska, where a room can cost $100 per night and a meal can cost another $100.
In Alaska, Allman has prospected for gold, trapped, worked as a guide for hunters and for two years carried the U.S. mail via dogsled, earning $100 per month. "My route ran all across Alaska, 160 miles I had to make every 30 days," he says. It was not a job for a softie. Sometimes, in soft snow, he had to break trail for the dogs, who were
bogged down.
On occasion, bad weather forced him to sleep on his sled. "Wasn't nothing to it," he says. "Just turn the dogs loose to keep the wolves away and crawl into my blankets. I had a rifle in the sled and a pistol in a shoulder holster if I needed it.' When he was fortunate enough to get into one of the small villages along his route in late afternoon, he'd deliver the mail and then spend the night. "That gave the people who got mail a chance to answer it, because otherwise I wouldn't be back for a month or so," he
says.
Bush Pilot
His brief experience as a flier came in handy in Alaska. As the country grew more settled and people prospered, everyone began traveling by air. "In Alaska you're either flying or walking or standing still," he chuckles. "Planes are as common there as
bicycles are here." Allman has owned a number of planes. "I've got a special license that lets me fly in Alaska, but I'm not allowed to go into commercial airports," he says.
Like most bush pilots, he has crashed a few times. He regards it as a minor inconvenience. "I crashed in the woods once," he says, "and I run over a cabin once and another time I ran over a bear. The bear got the worst of it," he says. "I was already
down, landing on some ice and he run out in front of me."
He says he did get hurt "pretty bad a time or two" in crashes. "Broke my arm when I went down in the woods," he says, chuckling.
He was married once, had two daughters. One died of pneumonia at age 3. The other grew upto become an airline stewardess. She died in a crash somewhere between Vera Cruz and Hong Kong about 1953. She was in her 20s at the time. Allman and his wife were divorced and he never remarried. "I reckon I've had enough of marriage," he says.
