LES AND BETTY VANDEVERE
The story of Betty Idleman VanDevere is told by Clark Fair and published in a series of articles in the Redoubt Reporter. Photos here are also from that article.
Click here for the original articles:
No Idle Time for the Idlemans (June 2, 2010)
Aiming for the Good Life (June 10, 2010)
Since the early 1960s, Elizabeth Florence “Betty” VanDevere Idleman has been living comfortably in her Island Lake home nearly 20 miles north of Kenai — but her life on the Kenai Peninsula didn’t begin in such comfort. The early days involved privation, isolation and more than the occasional gunfire.
There was, for instance, the time that she and her first husband, Lester Dyer “Les” VanDevere Jr., desired to have a well with a pump in their first home on nearby Parsons Lake. They had a sand point ready to drive into the earth, but their home already had a solid wooden floor covering their intended well site. They had a keyhole saw with which to cut the proper aperture, but they lacked a hand drill to bore a small hole in which to start the action of the saw.
“My husband put an X on the floor where the well was supposed to be, at the edge of the sink, and he stood on a chair and shot a hole in the floor,” Idleman said.
Her husband’s bolt-action Springfield 30.06 shot through the floorboards and gave them the opening they needed, and they struck water at a depth of only 7 feet.
After they installed a pitcher-pump, Idleman said, she was the only one in the area with both running water and a sink that drained.
But life on Parsons Lake was far from being filled with such luxuries.
In 1956, the VanDevere family’s first year in Alaska, they filed on a homestead that had been defaulted on by the man for whom the lake was named. Idleman said she was told that Mr. Parson had gone into town to Eadie’s Frontier Club during the winter and got caught in a “hellacious snowstorm.” Thinking back to his half-completed cabin on the lake, he decided to forget the whole homesteading adventure and leave the state.
Betty VanDevere stands in front of her cabin (from Redoubt Reporter 6/9/2010)
In Kenai, through “scuttlebutt from fishermen in town and the locals,” Les and Betty heard about Parson’s abandoned property (the structure and nearly 140 acres), and took actions through the land office to secure it for themselves.
When the VanDeveres arrived at the lake in late autumn of 1956, they discovered a roofless cabin made of unpeeled spruce logs. Nearby, the logs to finish the rest of the cabin had lain since Parson’s exit. With no prior building experience, Les and Betty erected a tent as a temporary dwelling and set to work to complete the structure before the onset of winter.
Betty VanDevere Idleman and Dyer stand between the mirror-flat Parsons Lake and the edge of their vegetable garden on a gorgeous late-summer day in the early 1960s.
Once completed, the cabin sat just back from the water on the tip of a small peninsula projecting into the lake from the southern shore. To reach their new home, the VanDeveres had to drive from Kenai on the graveled Kenai Spur Highway, then follow the narrow Island Lake Road until they reached a series of even narrower Cat trails that led eventually to the northwest shore of Parsons Lake. There, in summer, they had to row a small boat across to their property. In winter they used snowshoes.
Les VanDevere, son Dyer, and dog in front of their Parsons Lake home in Nikiski. (Redoubt Reporter)
The isolation and the inaccessibility began to work on Idleman, although she said she never felt homesick for the rural Pennsylvania environs in which she grew up. In fact, she said, “if his parents and my mother hadn’t sent us five dollars every so often, or stamps for envelopes, they wouldn’t have heard from us.”
Born in 1937, she graduated in 1955 from Neshaminy High School in Bucks County — just north of Philadelphia, but far enough away that cornfields were growing out behind the community’s elementary school. Only a year removed from public school, she was married to Les and they were angling across country in their 1954 Ford pickup, with a homemade wooden canopy packed with belongings in the back, and with every intention to turn north toward Alaska.
Because they slept out under the stars for the first few nights, Idleman said, they reached Wyoming before they realized that they had neglected to pack the poles for their tent. They made do with sticks the rest of the way.
Making do with whatever they could make or find, hunt or gather became a pattern for the VanDeveres over the next several years. They cooked with a three-burner Coleman stove all the way up the Alaska Highway and during all the years they lived on Parsons Lake. When they stopped along the Alcan, they dropped the tailgate and set up the stove there, extracting a card table and a pair of folding chairs for their open-air dining room.
At Parsons Lake, the Coleman was even more utilitarian.
“There was an oven you could set on top of the Coleman — could put three or four loaves of bread in it,” she said.
She also had a pressure cooker that she could place atop the burners when it came time to can meat, vegetables or berries.
Cranberries and blueberries grew plentifully around the lake, schools of rainbow trout and spawning sockeye from Bishop Creek plied the waters, and moose were frequent — and sometimes unfortunate — visitors.
According to a Donnis Thompson article about the VanDeveres in the Philadelphia Enquirer’s magazine section in May 1959, Idleman canned 112 containers of moose and trout in 1958. They also grew potatoes, cabbage and carrots in the summer and canned them for winter use. A moose shot late enough in the season could be hung under the eaves, where it would stay frozen until a portion was needed for a meal.
Idleman baked her own bread because store-bought bread was too expensive (45 cents per loaf, according to Thompson’s article), and she used powdered milk for the same reason. Regular milk in a store at the time cost about 45 cents a quart. For a family surviving on commercial fishing and sporadic seasonal employment during the rest of the year, pinching every penny was crucial.
One year they managed a fish trap on the west side of Cook Inlet and netted only $400, which was most of their total income until the next fishing season.
“It bought a chainsaw or a drum of Blazo for the Coleman, and maybe a drum of gas for the outboard or the chainsaw,” Idleman said.
In the early days, she said, there were nine families in the general vicinity — Island Lake, Dogbone Lake, Parsons Lake and Bishop Lake, among others — but it was almost five years before anyone lived close enough to her to easily walk to visit.
In the wintertime, Tony Johansen ran a trapline in the area and stopped in to see the VanDeveres once or twice a week. Otherwise, especially when Les was away on a job, Betty would be alone in the cabin. In 1958, their first son, Lester Dyer VanDevere III, was born, but even his presence did little to alleviate the loneliness.
She spent much of each day caring for her infant, preparing food, cleaning and feeding the woodstove from the numerous head-high piles of firewood covering the porch and the surrounding ground. In Thompson’s article, Les said, “We’ve had some tough times, but Betty never has become upset. In fact, when things are really tough, Betty is at her best.”
Typically, they parked their truck at Dogbone Lake near the home of Guy Moore because Moore worked every weekday at the Wildwood army station and so he kept the road open. If the winter weather was particularly severe, they would dig out the snow under the truck and place a lighted Coleman stove beneath the vehicle to heat the oil pan. They would cover the engine with blankets and then go visit with Moore until the truck was ready to start.
If the condition of the roads — because of too much snow or too much mud — made driving to Kenai impossible, they adopted an alternate strategy. They would start walking, knowing that if no one picked them up and gave them a ride within six miles, they’d turn around and walk all the way home, hoping in the meantime that someone would save them some legwork.
If they made it all the way into town, Idleman said, they could always count on a ride most of the way from Morris and Bertha Porter, who lived nearby and operated the telephone company in Kenai.
By 1961, because they found the Parsons Lake property “too inaccessible,” the VanDeveres purchased three lots on Island Lake and built a home where the roads and neighbors were more plentiful.
1959 Article from Philadelphia Inquirer
ELIZABETH IDLEMAN OBITUARY
Nikiski resident, Ms. Elizabeth Florence "Betty" VanDevere Idleman, 82, died Sunday, Dec. 23, 2018 at Central Peninsula Hospital in Soldotna.
A celebration of her life/ potluck will be held 1:00 p.m. Saturday, January 5th, 2019 at The American Legion Post #20 in Old Town Kenai. Bring a dish if you wish and lots of stories to tell about Betty. Betty was laid to rest at The Spruce Grove Memorial Park in Kasilof.
Betty was born May 10, 1937 in Narberth, Pennsylvania. In July of 1956 Betty drove up the Alcan with her husband Les VanDevere. They took up homesteading on Parsons Lake in North Kenai. She commercially gillnetted for Salmon in Cook Inlet from 1959 to 1973. She remarried to Harrel Idleman in 1978 and lived on Island Lake up until the present. Betty worked at Greenwood Dairies in Pennsylvania, Alaska State Bank in Kenai, Wade Oilfield Services in Nikiski. She ran Betty Idleman Hearing Consultant for a number of years. She also worked elections up until recently. She loved to go to Chinitna Bay with her family for all kinds of adventures. She was a member of the Totem Tracers Genealogical Society, The Moose Lodge, and was a member of the Garden and Mushroom Club.
She was preceded in death by her parents, Rodger Shupert Burns and Madge Lucille Lunger; brother, Francis Burns, uncle Clarence Edgart, and Herbert Burns; former spouse Les VanDevere and husband, Herrel Idleman.
She is survived by her sons, Lester Dyer VanDevere, III of Kasilof, Vance VanDevere of Nikiski, Bill Idleman of Nikiski and Charles Idleman; daughter, Sue Idleman; grandsons, Dyer Cassidy VanDevere of Seattle, WA, and Justin (Lillie) VanDevere of Nikiski; nephew, Rodger (Debbie) Burns of Evansville, Iowa; niece, Gene Burns Rusch.
