David & Daisy Mae Bell
David Graham Bell was born November 5, 1925 in Minnesota. His family moved to Palmer, Alaska before 1940, and they appear in the 1940 census there. David served in the Kansas infantry in WWII from 1944-1946, receiving a Purple Heart for valor during combat. He and Daisy Mae married in 1957.
By 1962, Dave and Daisy Mae had moved to Kenai. In 1964 he filed on 160 acres, the NE 1/4 of Section 23 in Nikiski. In this area, off Island Lake Road, you will see streets named Daisy Mae, Bell, and Graham Avenue, names associated with the Bell family.
Dave Bell drove a school bus in the early 1960s. One student, Mike Huhndorf, remembers him:
"One [bus driver] who stood out was Dave Bell, who gave my sister Mary and I a flashlight for Christmas. We had to walk out a mile plus in the dark mornings to catch the bus he was driving. He saw us running down a snow machine trail in the dark in the early morning to catch the bus he was driving and he saw us running in the dark. On the last day of school before Christmas break, when he let us off the bus, he handed us a wrapped Christmas gift. We were one of the last stops so not very many kids saw it. We opened it up on Christmas day and my parents almost cried at his humanity. That flashlight hung from the log girder of our log house for years. I can still see the chrome knurled flashlight in my mind's eye hanging from a screw eye on the log beam in our cabin. This was a day of true humanity for human need and I will always remember Dave Bell. I attended his funeral at the Methodist Church in Kenai when he died from drowning three years later while checking a commercial salmon net in a storm. The funeral was at the church right across from the Kenai Alternative School, today the old high school and junior high of yesteryear. I was attending junior high there at the time, so all I had to do was walk across the street. It was painted brown then. He was a man among men, Dave Bell."
David Bell was a fisherman, and drowned in 1967 when he became entangled in his net at his fishing site at Point Possession. He is buried in the Kenai City Cemetery.
