AUTHOR’S NOTE: After the Ann Pederson suicide and the Jack Griffiths murder in 1961, the former Circus Bar in Soldotna became known as the Hilltop Bar and Café, under new ownership. For a few years, starting in 1962, the violence diminished. Then came a confrontation in December 1967.
Dispute
In the early morning hours of Dec. 11, 1967, a disagreement over the payment for some food led to a shoot-out at the Hilltop Bar and Café, along the Sterling Highway two miles east of Soldotna. Four men were injured, one of them critically.
Two patrons, 40-year-old Thomas Louis “T.L.” Gintz and 36-year-old Harvey Dale Hardaway, along with 47-year-old cook Elbert Marshall Dorsey and 69-year-old bar owner Wilford Lorenzo “Bill” Hansen, suffered gunshot wounds.
Gintz, a bartender at the Port Inn in North Kenai, had been grazed across the forehead by a bullet. Hardaway, an employee of the Chemical Construction Company of North Kenai, had been shot in the mouth. Dorsey had been hit in the left shoulder, but Hansen had gotten the worst of it.
Hansen had been shot four times — twice in the stomach, once in a hip, and once (just a grazing, according to police reports) across his forehead. By the next day, according to an article in the Anchorage Daily Times, he had undergone several hours of surgery and was listed in serious condition at Providence Hospital in Anchorage.
Authorities had been alerted to the scene of the shoot-out by the Hilltop’s daytime bartender, Chester Lee “Smiley” Newton, who was living in a trailer behind the bar but had heard none of the gunplay. In fact, according to the Cheechako News, Newton might have slept longer if he hadn’t been awakened by an unnamed “cleanup boy.”
When Newton entered the establishment at 3 a.m., he discovered the wounded Hansen and Dorsey and then called for law enforcement. Gintz and Hardaway had fled the scene.
Personnel from the Kenai Volunteer Fire Department rushed to the bar and readied Hansen and Dorsey for transport to the Central Peninsula Clinic in Soldotna. There, they were treated by Dr. Elmer Gaede and prepared for further transport to Anchorage.
Gintz and Hardaway, meanwhile, had already driven through Soldotna and Kenai. They had gotten as far as the Wildwood Air Force Station when they realized that their need for medical attention could wait no longer. They drove up to the guard station and asked for help. An Air Force ambulance crew hauled the two men back through Kenai to the same small clinic in Soldotna where Hansen and Dorsey had been taken.
Ultimately, all of the men except Gintz, who was least injured, were sent to Providence Hospital for further treatment.
The argument back at the bar apparently had centered on hamburgers and pennies. According to Bill Hansen’s son, Eugene Hansen, Gintz and Hardaway had attempted to pay for a meal with a bunch of change, and Bill Hansen had taken offense. The argument over payment then escalated from men shouting to wielding pool cues to flashing pistols to firing shots.
Initial reports from the Alaska State Troopers indicated the possibility that two or possibly three handguns may have been involved in the incident.
Hard Road
Bill Hansen was born in October 1898 in Driggs, Idaho, to Anders and Anna Hansen. Twenty years later, when he registered for the military draft, he was working as a farmhand in Twin Falls.
His registration card describes Hansen as short and stout, with blue eyes and light brown hair. It also refers to the condition of his left hand, which it calls “mutilated.” When he registered again for the draft 24 years later, the registrar described that same hand as “deformed.” Paperwork five years later, in 1947, provided more detail: “Four fingers missing on left hand.” The cause for this condition — a birth defect or some accident suffered before his 20th birthday — is unclear.
Hansen married his first wife, Hattie Mae Campbell, on Christmas Eve, 1919. They had three sons and a daughter together before Hattie died near Thanksgiving 1930, succumbing to an abdominal tumor and a cystic ovary. She was only 31 years old.
When the 1940 U.S. Census was enumerated in Twin Falls, Hansen, a farmer, was listed as a widower and the single father of four children between the ages of 11 and 17.
But before life improved for Hansen, it added another bump in the road.
While living in western Montana in May 1947, Hansen was arrested. He was charged with illegally removing mortgaged property (a truck) from the state without the consent of the “mortgagee.” Hansen, 48, was jailed in Kalispell until he could furnish a $300 bond, which he did two days later.
In March 1950, while living in Butte, Montana, Hansen married a 34-year-old divorcee named Ann L. Swanson. Later that year, the Hansens packed up and moved to Alaska, first to Fairbanks.
According to Hansen’s son, Eugene, Bill and Ann moved to the Kenai Peninsula in about 1953-54, and Bill began work as an independent water-well driller. Eugene also asserted that his father was involved in the construction of the Circus Bar — that it had been some sort of temporary structure beforehand — and that Hansen had received a half-interest in the bar for his efforts.
On July 18, 1960, Jack and Alice Griffiths and Bill and Ann Hansen signed a warranty deed that transferred to the Hansens half of the Griffithses’ interest in the bar and the 208-foot square of land upon which it stood. Perhaps this warranty deed was part of the agreement Eugene believed his father had forged with Jack Griffiths.
In the spring of 1961, classified ads began appearing in the Kenai Peninsula Cheechako News promoting Hansen’s well-drilling services. According to the ad, interested parties could contact Hansen through the Circus Bar.
Around this same time, a souvenir travel guide called “Alaska Highway Sketches” appeared, featuring black-and-white Connie Silver drawings of various businesses, including the Circus Bar. Looking fairly nondescript and rectangular, the bar has a flat roof, two windows and a door on the side facing the highway, one window and a door facing west, with what appears to be a simple, lettered sign (“CIRCUS BAR”) mounted on the roof.
By autumn, the Hansens had bought out the Griffithses’ share of the business for $4,000. Only Jack’s liquor license, at this point, still tied him to the bar.
Then a streak of misfortune struck Bill Hansen.
On March 27, 1963, a year and a half after Jack Griffiths’ death, Bill Hansen’s only daughter, Nadine, and her husband drowned in a boating accident in Seldovia Bay. Three years later, Hansen’s wife, Ann, died, making Hansen a widower for the second time.
Only a year after that, he was gunned down in his own bar.
Harvey Dale Hardaway, seen here in his military uniform, was one of four men involved in a shoot-out at the Hilltop Bar and Café in December 1967. (Public photo from ancestry.com)
This is the opening paragraph of the Dec. 12, 1967, article about the shoot-out at the Hilltop Bar and Café. (Excerpt from the Anchorage Daily Times)
