Homer Alaska - News

Moving to Seldovia was a move south for Helen Crawford Josefsen, a youngster just 10 or 11 years old when she arrived in what was then a bustling fishing community on the south side of Kachemak Bay in the mid-1940s.

Born in McGrath, a community on the Kuskokwim River, in 1934, Helen, her parents, Hetty and Leroy Crawford, her brother, John, and her sister, Diane, moved to Fairbanks and then to Anchorage, before settling in Seldovia.

Photo by McKibben Jackinsky Helen Crawford Josefsen, center, enjoys a weekend in Homer with daughter Trinket Gallien, left, and granddaughter Laurie, Gallien's oldest daughter. All three generations live in Seldovia.

"My dad wanted to fish. He was a machinist who worked on motors so he came down to work on boats at first and then bought a boat and started halibut fishing," said Helen.

If Seldovia was small by comparison to Anchorage, Helen wasn't aware of it. What stood out was being surrounded by friends.

"The school then was all in one building and all the kids intermingled, so you had a bunch of kids around you all the time," she said.

Besides, there were visits out of the community in order to maintain contact with family members. Helen spent several school years in Anchorage, living with an aunt and uncle and her grandmother, returning to Seldovia to graduate from high school.

"Then I met Louie Nagy and married him," she said, recalling their wedding in St. Nicholas Chapel, the small Russian Orthodox Church that sits atop a hill in Seldovia, overlooking the village and the bay.

Nagy worked on a fishing boat and also was an artist. Helen kept busy as a cannery worker, waitress and bartender. The couple's first two children — Louis Jr. and Marilyn — were born in Seldovia.

Photo provided A Seldovia cannery employee in the mid-1950s, Helen Crawford Josefsen takes a break from the action in the once-bustling fishing community on the south side of Kachemak Bay.

Then came a 10-year stay in Anchorage, where their son Lawrence, nicknamed "Lorne," was born. While there, Helen attended beauty school and was working as a hairdresser in a shop on Northern Lights Boulevard when the 1964 earthquake rocked the state.

"It was Good Friday and the kids were with their dad in the Safeway store on Ninth Avenue," said Helen. "My oldest ran outside, but he stayed away from the cars and that was good because they were all banging together."

The rest of her family remained inside the grocery store, ducking lighting fixtures being knocked from the ceiling and groceries falling from shelves as the 9.0 quake threw the state's southcentral region into havoc.

The shop where Helen worked was a sea of spilled hair products. The family's home in the Dimond Boulevard area was undamaged, but "everything was thrown around."

"The kids went into one of the bedrooms and came out and said nothing got hurt but it was still a mess like it was before," she said. "I got a chuckle out of that one."

A year or so later, the family packed up their belongings, put everything in storage and left Alaska for a year in Mexico.

"We drove down there and spent most of our time in a little fishing village on the Gulf (of Mexico) side, south of Veracruz. It was a neat little town," Helen said. "The kids went to school with the Mexican children even though we couldn't speak Spanish. We were just like gypsies. I really enjoyed that."

At the end of that year, the family returned to Alaska, making their home back in Seldovia, where their youngest daughter, Trinket, was born.

"I just had this thing after the earthquake that I wanted to get back home," Helen said.

Even though the Kachemak Bay area had dropped as much as six feet in some places as a result of the earthquake, dramatically changing Seldovia, Helen felt the community offered greater safety than Anchorage.

"There, on the flats where (Anchorage) is, it's all clay underneath and that really shifted," she said. "I just wanted to come home. É And I've been here ever since, doing all the community things. Time went so fast."

After returning to Seldovia, Helen became involved in the restoration of St. Nicholas Chapel. The project included renovation of the bell towers, the church's foundation, painting of the interior and exterior and careful attention to the religious icons. Through her efforts, it was included in the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. She has served as a fine arts and cultural coordinator in the community, was Seldovia Village Tribe's lunch cook, developed alcohol prevention programs, served as a health aid and was active on Seldovia Native Association's board of directors.

In 1979, she and Louie Nagy divorced. A couple years later, Simon Josefsen, who had attended school in Seldovia, returned to the community. He and Helen became reacquainted and "he decided he wanted to marry me," she said. Simon has since passed away.

Her son Louie Jr. now resides in Anchorage, where he is a professor of aviation maintenance technology at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Her daughter Marilyn is a heavy equipment operator, has a home in the Sterling area, but is spending this winter in Panama. Her son Lorne lives with his three sons in Ketchikan, where he captains the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's vessel, the Enforcer. Daughter Trinket remains in Seldovia, near her mother. Trinket, who was Seldovia's citizen of the year in 2005, is the assistant director for Seldovia Village Tribe. She has three daughters, one of whom also lives in Seldovia.

Watching her grandchildren grow, Helen said she is aware of how much time has passed since she first moved to Seldovia. The changes that have occurred since then also increase her awareness.

"It's kind of hard to even place where buildings used to be," she said. "And the community part of it is not as close as it used to be, but it still has that same feeling. É It's a nice comfortable place to be. I don't have any desire to be anywhere else."

McKibben Jackinsky can be reached at mckibben.jackinsky@homernews.com.