AUTHOR’S NOTE: Warren Melville Nutter — known by many residents of the Kenai Peninsula as “William” or “Bill” — came to Alaska in 1930 after a rigorous, debilitating service in the U.S. Marine Corps. On the Kenai, he became known as a premiere trapper of coyotes, and a reliable, hard-working mail carrier. But there was more to his story than that. Much more.
Not exactly marital bliss
The 1940 U.S. Census for Hope, Alaska, was actually enumerated in November 1939. It was typical for census counts to start early in rural Alaska because census-takers needed extra time and the proper conditions just to reach remote, often roadless communities and find isolated, sometimes scattered homes.
One of the Hope residents counted on Nov. 16 was Warren Melville Nutter, listed as a West Virginia-born “stage operator” and widower, then living alone. But Nutter had not been widowed. He was divorced, and in less than three weeks he would be married again.
His new bride would be Muriel Marina Witt, who, oddly enough, was also erroneously reported in the 1940 U.S. Census as widowed. She, too, was a divorcee.
But on Dec. 2, 1939, good cheer prevailed as Warren and Muriel were united in marriage under the auspices of U.S. Commissioner A.H. “Fred” Bryant in his Federal Building office in Seward. Seven years later, both would be divorcees again.
Warren Nutter’s previous marriage had occurred June 1, 1922, in Knoxville, Tennessee, when he tied the knot with Marcia Vilette Perkins, daughter of a local doctor. They lived with her parents in Knoxville, where both Nutters were members of the faculty at Knoxville High School. “Professor Nutter,” as he was called in the local newspaper, was head of the science department, while Mrs. Nutter was in charge of “physical training for girls.”
Warren had a master’s degree from the University of Indiana, while Marcia had a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in New York. After their wedding ceremony, the happy couple honeymooned briefly and then departed for New York to take post-graduate summer courses prior to resuming their high school duties in Knoxville.
In December, however, Marcia was replaced in her teaching position because she had become pregnant. In May 1923, she delivered a stillborn daughter. A year later, Marcia, no longer teaching, was coaching a girls basketball team, and her employment prospects continued to be secondary to Warren’s.
In September 1924, Warren left his job at Knoxville High, and the Nutters returned to New York City so he could work as a professor at Columbia. But a few months later, Marcia was back in Knoxville, and local newspapers were reporting on her very busy social calendar. Although the papers still referred to her as “Mrs. Warren Nutter,” Warren himself appeared to be absent.
In November 1925, Warren enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, and the remarks appended to the USMC muster rolls indicated that some change in his marital status was pending. That change occurred May 14, 1926, when Marcia succeeded in obtaining a divorce on the grounds of abandonment.
A lot of time had passed since then. In Hope in 1940, Muriel, the new Mrs. Nutter, could reflect on a very different marital path leading to her own first divorce.
In June 1925 in Wisconsin, 18-year-old Muriel Marina Grunert, a recent high school graduate from Oconto, married Gilbert Frederick Witt, who was nearly 21 and a senior at Ripon College.
Gilbert was training to become a teacher. Muriel, on the other hand, was about to become a full-time mother. Quickly, life presented the Witts with serious challenges.
Their first child, Priscilla, was born in 1926. Early on, it was clear that Priscilla had a disability — probably muscular dystrophy. She was wheelchair bound for most of her short life. When her family moved to Alaska, she stayed behind in a Green Bay nursing home, tended to by nuns. She died there at age 28.
Second child Cynthia, born in 1927, was healthy into adulthood but later developed substance-abuse problems. Next came Judith, in 1929. She died in infancy. The fourth child, born in 1931, was Jacqueline, who remained healthy like Cynthia. Then in 1935 came the twins, John and Joan, both victims of muscular dystrophy.
By about 1936, the Witts were a family of six living on the Kenai Peninsula, and the marriage was disintegrating.
Gilbert was teaching school in Cooper Landing while Muriel cared for the children. Gilbert — evidence suggests that he was rarely satisfied and tended to hold jobs only briefly — appears to have been in and out of the picture.
Muriel, meanwhile, did what she could to get by.
In October 1937, she accepted the position of postmaster for the new Cooper Landing post office, but the facility was shuttered just 15 months later. There would be no permanent post office in Cooper Landing until 1947. Once again, Muriel was forced to adjust.
In February 1939, she moved to Moose Pass. She sent her two oldest daughters to the Moose Pass school, requiring them to walk from their remote cabin 5 miles each way to attend classes. To help feed her family, Muriel went hunting and killed a black bear.
That summer, she temporarily placed Cynthia and Jacqueline in the Jesse Lee Home in Seward while she took her 4-year-old twins to Nuka Bay, out beyond Resurrection Bay, and worked there as a camp cook for a gold-mining operation.
Gilbert had left his family to spend the winter of 1938-39 outside of Alaska. He returned in late March, likely only to arrange for his divorce.
He then moved to Hidalgo County, Texas, where, in June 1940, he remarried. After teaching stints in Texas and South Dakota, Gilbert and his new wife moved to rural Oklahoma in 1944 to work a wheat harvest before he departed purportedly to look for a new job. Instead, on Aug. 9, he parked along the highway in Crosby County, Texas, and used a .22-caliber rifle to shoot himself in the head.
His widow told police that in recent months he had “displayed disturbing peculiarities” and had been acting “queerly.”
It is unclear how and when Muriel Witt became acquainted with Warren Nutter, who was 20 years her senior. Even after their divorce, they would live near each other often and remain friends for many years.
In the months before they wed, Muriel was completing her tenure as camp cook in Nuka Bay, while Warren was busy planning for the life they would share. Two months before the wedding, he leased the Brenner home on 5 acres of land in Hope. By the wedding day, he had purchased the place and begun refurbishing it for his big new family.
By autumn 1940, he had transformed the former four-room Brenner house into an eight-room, two-story home. According to the Moose Pass Miner that September, the home was “modern in every respect.” The log lower floor “gives the house an attractive appearance,” said the paper. “The second-floor ceilings are high, and there is a roomy attic. Mr. Nutter has set in large windows in every part of the house where a window can be useful as well as ornamental. Over all, he has placed a steep, sloping roof with modern-style long overhanging eaves.”
Life for the Nutter clan burgeoned in Hope. During the latter part of World War II, Warren built a 120-by-20-foot chicken house, from which he and Muriel sold poultry to the U.S. Army troops stationed in Seward. At various times, they each operated the mail route between Hope and Seward. And in 1943, Muriel and Warren welcomed a new child — a son they named David Warren Nutter.
In January 1945, Alaska Life magazine published a story about Hope and featured the Nutters in a portion of the article. Noted was Warren’s latest construction effort — a new 12-room house to replace the eight-room family home that had burned to the ground during the previous year.
In 1967, that second home would also burn, taking with it many of Nutter’s mementoes and documents and further clouding his personal history.
Warren and Muriel were divorced by late 1946, when she remarried to Frank Wunder Gwartney, a foreman for a large electrical company. Warren, on the other hand, never remarried, but he did experience something akin to a second shot at fatherhood.
In 1948, the Gwartneys produced a son they named Frank James Cole Gwartney. The elder Frank was friends with Nutter, and the younger Frank grew up having both men around. “Looking back,” said the younger Frank, “it was like having two fathers.”
Despite the kinship he clearly felt with Warren Nutter, Gwartney referred to him then — and still does to this day — as simply “Mister Nutter.”
Photo courtesy of the Nutter Family Collection The former Muriel Grunert had eight children. It is likely that three of them, including John Witt, pictured here, suffered from muscular dystrophy.
Photo courtesy of the Nutter Family Collection Muriel Marina Grunert, pictured here in about 1940 on the Kenai Peninsula —probably when married to Warren Melville Nutter—was a strong, determined woman who worked hard to provide for her large family.
Original photo by Knaffl & Brakebill, 1922 Marcia Vilette Perkins, pictured here on page 19 of the Knoxville Sentinel on June 3, 1922, was the first wife of Warren Melville Nutter. Their marriage was short-lived.
