Lawrence Alexander Burrow
1909-1988
Charles Jacob and Mabel (Galloway) Burrow with baby Lawrence, 1910.
"Rattlesnake Bluff"
Larry described his early years, in a 1981 letter to his sister Joyce:
"Dad and my mother were married in Des Moines [Washington] in 1907. Her folks were living in Des Moines at the time. Sometime between Dad's marriage and my birth they moved to the Okanogan where Dad took up a homestead near Riverside at a place called Rattlesnake Bluff. Understand they had to lug water up the bank for 300 feet to the house. He did not make a success of it. Seems he planted to wheat and some other things but had a bad frost etc. and lost most of it. His horses ran away and then he came down with "lung fever." He gave it up and went to work in a logging camp at Havillah for a while. Its located just south of the Canadian border near Lake Okanogan. I'm confused to where they went from there but Dad mentioned they were in Sumas and Nooksack when I was a baby. Also he said they were on a cattle ranch near Tule Lake in northern California for a while where he took care of the horses and all the riding stock…. Think they then returned to Des Moines where Dick was born [August 21, 1911]."
Larry's mother Mabel recounted an incident at the homestead, in a 1969 letter to Larry:
"I'll have to tell you about one day in the summer time on the homestead. Your Dad was over to one of our neighbors helping him for the day - rode over there with his team and wagon. I was all alone until my dad came up and had dinner with me at noon. He went down to the garden and got a watermelon for our dinner and we hadn't got any screen doors on yet, it was a hot day and I put you to sleep on the floor where it was cooler there on a quilt and near the front door. I was busy doing something around the house. I turned around and there was a large rattle snake just curling up getting ready to strike at one of the old hens near the door and near where you laid so I grabbed your dad's 30-30 rifle and shot the rattle snake right in two and it flew out in the yard. My Dad heard the gun and ran all the way to the house to see what was wrong. He thought at first that I had shot my self by mistake. I told him to look out in the yard and see the snake and he cut the rattles and kept it. It had eleven rattles and a button - it was large. So you see I was glad to get away from there, believe me."
Richard and Lawrence Burrow, Des Moines, Washington, 1913.
Living in Des Moines and Seattle
Larry's folks, Charlie and Mabel, separated and were later divorced, in 1914. Larry stayed with his father. He later recalled:
"Dad had a small farm like nearly every one else did those days and was located on the road that goes up the hill from Des Moines to Zenith and just north of where the Masonic home is now. I remember hoeing beans and spuds on it. And picking up rocks, and rocks, but not the right kind. Dad worked in the woods as a lumberjack and a boom man and I remember going out to the logging operations. My main interest was the cookhouse and mess hall where the cooks treated me first class. When Dad was on the boom I would sometimes go out on it and naturally I would eventually fall off and have to be fished out with a pike pole, this was before I could swim. The dumping of the logs into the water and the storms uncovered many agates along there and we had quart mason jars full of them filled with water all over the house."
Larry and Dick later moved with their Dad to Seattle but continued to spend weekends and summers at Des Moines, either with their aunts and uncles or camping along the beach. Larry attended Youngstown Elementary School and West Seattle High School. He quit school during his junior year to help his Dad who had been hit by a car while working on the streetcar tracks. Larry got a job as a roustabout in a broom factory for $12.50 a week.
Slide show
Young Larry
North to Alaska, and back - about 17 times
Not seeing much of a future in broom making, Larry soon enrolled in radio operator's school at the Seattle YMCA. He passed his FCC license exam on May 29, 1929 and was immediately hired as a radio operator on the passenger ship SS Queen. He sailed the following morning, making round trips from Seattle to Southeastern Alaska ports every two weeks for the next eight months. Regular ports of call were Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg, Juneau, Sitka and Skagway.
Queen, docked at Chilkoot Barracks, Haines, Alaska, 1929
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The Queen was built at Philadelphia for the Pacific Coast Steamship Company in 1882. Originally named Queen of the Pacific, the iron hulled steamer was 330 feet long, with a 38.5 foot beam and displacement of 1,697 tons. She was sold for scrap to a Japanese company shortly before World War II.
Slide show
Larry's life on the Queen
Starting an Army career in Alaska
In February 1930, hearing that Queen was about to go into drydock, Larry quit his job and joined the Alaska Communications System (ACS), then known as the Washington Alaska Military Cable and Telegraph System (WAMCATS), a branch of the US Army Signal Corps. The unit, headquartered in Seattle, was established by Congress in 1900 with the primary purpose of linking Army garrisons scattered throughout Alaska Territory. By 1930, the system, which operated on a paying basis, was handling all manner of government communications as well as commercial traffic. As over-the-air radio transmitters replaced submarine cables and land lines, which were largely phased out by the mid 30s, radio operators were increasingly in demand.
Larry was initially assigned to the ACS radio station at Fort Lawton in Seattle. When the main submarine cable to Alaska broke in May 1930, Larry was assigned, due to his marine operator experience, to the Army cable ship Dellwood, which was dispatched to make repairs.
US Army cable ship DELLWOOD Built in 1919 by Hanlon SB & DD Co., Oakland Length 320.7 ft Breadth 46 ft Depth 24.5 ft Gross tonnage 3478 Purchased by the US army in 1921 and equipped by Johnson and Phillips. Laid a single-wire 7-circuit telephone cable in 1923 from San Pedro, California to Avalon, Catalina Island. In 1924 laid an Alaska cable manufactured by Siemens Bros., who supplied 1894 nm of cable. Returned to commercial trading in 1931 as a cannery ship for the Alaska Trading Company. Requisitioned again in 1942 and fitted with new cable equipment which had been developed by the Sundfelt company from a sawmill winch. Used for both cable laying and harbour defence work, the latter on the US west coast and in Alaska. Sank at Attu, Alaska on 19th July 1943. Data source: U.S. Armed Forces Cables, by Bill Glover More photos of Dellwood at: University of Washington Digital Collections |
Subsequently, Larry was based at ACS stations in Nome, Candle, Sitka and Ketchikan. Near the end of World War II, he was stationed on Adak and Umnak Islands in the Aleutian Island chain. He retired from the ACS in Seattle in 1956.
Shipped to Nome on the "Vic"
In October, 1930, Larry was transferred to the ACS radio station at Nome, sailing from Seattle aboard the Alaska Steamship Company's Victoria, the "Old Vic," one of the most renowned ships in Pacific Northwest and Alaska marine history.
Launched as the Cunard Line's Parthia at Dumbarton, Scotland in 1870, Victoria was originally designed for the emigrant trade between Ireland and the United States. Her hull was constructed of hand wrought, inch thick, iron plates, which later proved superior in ice-breaking capability during her many years in the Alaska trade.
As Parthia, she served 15 years in the North Atlantic trade, with brief service as a British troopship during the Egyptian campaign of 1881, then was sold to John Elder & Company and placed in service on runs to Australia, the Hebrides and South America. In 1887, she was sold to the Canadian Pacific Railway Company and operated in the Vancouver-Orient service until, after overhaul in England, she was renamed Victoria and returned to the Pacific in 1892 under the ownership of the North Pacific Steamship Company, taking time to make three voyages as a US Army troopship during the Spanish-American War, and also to journey to Nome during the height of the Alaskan gold rush. She was sold to the Northwestern Steamship Company in 1903. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 she served as a blockade runner, carrying supplies to the Russian port of Vladivostok.
Victoria, in the Bering Sea ice, led the traffic into Nome each spring.
When the Northwestern Steamship Company merged with the Alaska Steamship Company in 1908, Victoria hoisted the Black Ball flag that she was to carry until her last offshore voyage in 1952. She sailed as a passenger liner until 1937, when she was retired. War demands, however, brought about her conversion to a freighter in 1940 and she provided service to Alaska throughout the war and after. In 1954, with the advent of containerized cargo handling, she was reduced to the ignominious role of a barge. Renamed Straits Maru, in 1956 she was loaded with scrap iron and towed to Japan for dismantling.
Passing Flyers
Nome became a crossroads of international flying in the early 1930s, as a number of aviators passed through on various long distance flights.
On June 30, 1931, Wiley Post and Harold Gatty, eastbound from Khabarovsk, Siberia, landed their plane Winnie Mae on the beach twenty miles east of Nome at Solomon, where they refueled and continued on to New York and an around-the-world speed record.
In their book, "Around the World in Eight Days," Post described the scary takeoff from Solomon:
"With 100 gallons of fuel aboard, we started to take off. Taxiing back along the beach, the ship started to sink into the sand. With a quick thrust I banged the throttle open to pull her through it before we were stuck. But all I succeeded in doing was to boost the tail up into the air. With a loud slap the propeller cut a hole in the sand and bent both tips on the blades. I cut the emergency switch just in time to keep 'Winnie Mae' from making an exhibition of herself by standing on her nose. That would have been fatal to our hopes.
"I jumped out and surveyed the damage. With a wrench, a broken-handled hammer, and a round stone, I drew out the tips of the blades so they would at least fan the air in the right direction.
"But misfortunes never come singly. Harold was swinging the prop for a prime with the switch cut to restart the hot engine. He called 'all clear' to me, and I switched on and whirled the booster. One of the hot charges of gasoline caught on the upstroke of the piston, and with a back fire the Wasp kicked. The propeller flew out of Harold's hands, and the blade opposite smacked his shoulder before he could jump clear of the track. He dropped like a log. It was fortunate, to say the least, that it was the flat side of the blade which hit him, though it gave him a bad bruise and a wrenched back. If the prop had been going the other way, he might have been sliced in two.
"Like a major, Harold climbed in as soon as he had recovered his senses, and we took off for Fairbanks. I was cautious as I had ever been on that run along the shifting sands of Solomon beach. Luck was with me, and we got away without misfortune No. 3. I hope we didn't leave it behind for the next bird who lands there!"
The damaged prop was replaced in Fairbanks with a spare obtained from Alaska Airways.
Harold Gatty and Wiley Post, Solomon, Alaska, June 30, 1931.
Lucky Lindy drops in
Two other would-be around-the-world flyers arrived a few weeks later, on August 11, when Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh landed their pontoon-equipped monoplane Sirius on the lagoon at Safety Harbor, twelve miles east of Nome. Larry described their visit:
"When the Lindberghs came thru on their trip to China Mrs Lindbergh was the operator. She was a beginner but sure bitten by the radio bug. They were in Nome 3 days and every day she was up at the station wanting to know more about radio. She was very nice. When they took off and headed toward Siberia I held contact until they reached the Siberian coast and she said 'good bye I'm going to try contacting the Russians.'"
Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Nome radio station, August, 1931.
Rather than seeking new speed records, the Lindberghs were exploring potential air routes to the Orient. They had flown north from New York, taking the "great circle" route, up the west side of Hudson's Bay, then westward along the north coasts of Canada and Alaska before crossing to Asia. After reaching Tokyo, they interrupted their trip to assist the National Flood Relief Commission, flying mercy missions and survey flights over recently flooded areas in China. Unfortunately, the Sirius was damaged and sank at Hankow while being lowered into the Yangtze River from the British aircraft carrier Hermes. The Sirius was raised and carried to Shanghai on the deck of the Hermes, then shipped to the Lockheed Aircraft factory in California for repairs. The Lindberghs also went home by boat.
Rescued flyer brought to Nome
On July 20, 1933 a Russian flying boat piloted by Sigizmund Levanevsky arrived at Nome carrying American pilot Jimmie Mattern, who had crash landed in Siberia several weeks earlier while attempting to break the round-the-world speed record then held by Wiley Post. Earlier that day Post had passed over Nome on his way to breaking his own record.
Russian flying boat at Nome, Alaska, July 20, 1933
Wiley Post was killed two years later, together with author/humorist Will Rogers, in a plane crash near Barrow, Alaska. Sigizmund Levanevsky disappeared in 1937 while attempting a flight from Moscow over the North Pole to California.
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