In my last column I shared the story of Margarete Von Scheele, one of three Kodiak women who were chosen to go to Anchorage to meet the new pope, John Paul, in 1981.
The other two ladies were Emma Dillon and Isabel Moseley.
Born and raised in Germany, Margarete accompanied the Swedish Von Scheele sisters to Kodiak where they were to visit their father, Herman Von Scheele, and Herman’s brother Robert, whom Margarete eventually married.
Margarete (called “Greta” by her family,) wanted to go back to Germany the day she landed on the shores of Afognak Island. But she settled into island life, ultimately working as a volunteer in the maternity section at Kodiak Island Hospital.
Like Margarete, Emma Dillon volunteered there, too. She began in 1955, shortly after she and her husband, Walter Dillon, moved here.
Reminiscing about her arrival in a Kadiak Times interview, Emma said that Kodiak was still a frontier town.
“The first time I had my hair trimmed at the barber shop, a cow looked in the window,” she recalled.
As a little girl, Emma and her family lived across the street from a penitentiary in Stillwater, Minnesota. Later the family moved to Walla Walla, Washington. “And what do you know, down the street from another penitentiary.” said Emma. “Good thing we were good people.”
And they were also hot people, she says, describing the unbearable heat of Eastern Washington. “We were next to Hades. It was so hot, you could see the heat in the air.”
When Emma graduated from high school in 1918, World War I was winding down, concluding a few months later with Armistice signed on November 11.
But before the war ended, Emma became what she called a “90-day wonder,” alluding to the fact that she was hired for a position vacated by men who were called to fight in Europe.
The term actually refers to men commissioned in the military after a three-month long officer training course.
Emma didn’t serve as an officer, but she held a position that was similarly daunting.
She was hired as a station operator for Great Northern Railroad, which took passengers from St. Paul, Minnesota to Seattle and back.
Established as a Kodiak resident, Emma said “Now I don’t even hear a train whistle.”
About the time Emma Dillon was getting used to Kodiak, Isabel Moseley was strutting through the halls of a U.S. Air Force school in France. She was the principal, and she said the only trouble she had was “keeping those teachers in line.”
While working in France, Isabel found time to sneak over to Margarete’s hometown in Germany. Although Margarete never returned to her homeland after moving to Kodiak, she knew that it had drastically changed from the country that she loved.
Isabel also managed to “dash down to Rome” where she beheld Pope Pious XII.
She didn’t have to travel far to see the present pope either. Anchorage is just a 45-minute plane ride away.
Considering the efficiency of air travel, and the relative ease of arranging flights, Germany isn’t such a long way off either.
Margrete, who may not have the urge to return to her homeland as she did the day she arrived on Kodiak Island, nevertheless talks about going back.
Perhaps the old maxim, “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy,” might be applied to these ladies, although baptized into a completely different way of life they were raised in, have a yearning to go back to their roots.
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