AUTHOR’S NOTE: Born in Michigan, Keith McCullagh had brief careers in Alaska as a forest ranger, a commercial fisherman and a fox farmer before moving to Washington and settling finally in Southern California. Late in his life, he made two final trips back to Alaska.

After a bankruptcy, a divorce and an 18-year absence from Alaska, Louis Keith McCullagh — who at this time usually went by the nickname “Cliff” — headed north on vacation. His reappearance in Alaska was big enough news in July 1943 to draw the attention of the Anchorage Daily Times.

The former Anchorage and Seldovia resident, noted the newspaper, had first come to Alaska in 1903 and then to Ship Creek in 1911 in the employ of the U.S. Forest Service. In 1912, he had assisted in surveying what became the townsite of Anchorage. For three years, he was a forest ranger headquartered in Ship Creek, and he then went on to success as a commercial fisherman in Cook Inlet and fox farmer in Kachemak Bay.

The occasion for this latest trip to Alaska was a visit to his daughter, June, her husband, Glenn Bullock, and their infant daughter, Glenda. Glenn worked for the Civil Aeronautics Administration in Anchorage. June had taught in the public school in Seldovia, when her mother, Jean (born Nellie Dee Crabb), was living there with her second husband, Thor Hofstad.

At the end of his brief Alaska vacation, McCullagh returned to his bicycle shop in Palm Springs, California. He had opened his shop, which offered sales, rentals and repairs, in about 1935.

He did not wait so long to head north again. In May 1946, just three years after visiting his daughter’s family, McCullagh again returned to Alaska.

On page 31 of the May 2 edition of the Palm Springs Limelight News, there appeared a photograph and an article concerning his next trip. The photo showed a smiling McCullagh — in loose-fitting shorts and shirt, with sandals and socks on his feet, and sunglasses obscuring his eyes — standing next to a bare-chested, smiling man named Harry R. Reed, also in shorts and sunglasses.

Both men were leaning against the front-left fender of a two-and-a-half-ton army panel truck, parked along a street in Palm Springs and hooked to a small house trailer. Parked behind the vehicle and trailer were a second heavy-duty panel truck and another small house trailer. On the door of both trucks was a business sign, “ALASKA PHOTOGRAPHIC EXPEDITION,” identifying Harry Reed as the photographer.

The men and their families — no specifics were given concerning whom that entailed — had departed in this caravan of sorts on the previous day, with the stated goal of driving into Canada, then up the Alcan Highway (built only four years earlier) to Fairbanks and then, somehow, to the Arctic Circle.

The purpose of the expedition, the paper reported, was to “compile an educational as well as recreational, colored 16mm travelogue, also 35mm colored slides, and photographs for magazines and other publications.” Upon their return, Reed hoped to tour the United States, lecturing about the northcountry and showing his pictures.

McCullagh, with his breadth of experience in Alaska, was to be the guide for the expedition, which was expected to take three to six months.

The next published report from the group came in mid-July in a letter from McCullagh to a Southern California newspaper called The Desert Sun. “This interior (Alaska) weather,” McCullagh wrote, “is just about as warm as Palm Springs (was) in May, and we find ourselves wearing the same abbreviated costumes.”

He reported that they had returned recently from Fort Yukon, “where we got some very good photography, including the midnight sun over a long reach of the Yukon River. Went down river for a hundred miles in a rowboat and came back to Circle on the Steamer Yukon. These Yukon flats constitute a big country in which nobody lives and the wolves howl at strangers.”

McCullagh added that they expected to be back in Palm Springs by autumn. When they returned, the local newspaper announced that the six-month expedition had covered 13,000 miles.

By January 1947, Harry Reed had begun his photo-lecture tour, speaking to large crowds. His film, called Alaskan Adventure, showed the Alcan, glaciers, northern game animals, the Yukon River, the midnight sun and “countless other thrilling scenes.”

Unfortunately for Cliff (Keith) McCullagh, his next documented vacation did not end so well.

On June 20, 1951, the Palm Springs News reported that McCullagh had died suddenly at San Gabriel Valley Hospital while en route north to Walnut Creek to visit his sister Caroline. He was 69.

Despite the apparently “sudden” nature of his demise, McCullagh’s death certificate indicates that his health had been declining for some time. Listed as the main cause of death was uremia, a raised level of urea in the bloodstream, brought on, in this case, by arteriosclerosis and advanced arteriolar nephrosclerosis.

His body was cremated in Pasadena, and the ashes were interred in Oakland, where his mother had been buried 14 years earlier.

Postscript

Part of the story concerning the union and disunion of Nellie Crabb and Keith McCullagh necessarily includes the only child they produced together — June Maxine McCullagh, born in Anchorage on Dec. 2, 1918.

June lived her early life mostly in Anchorage and Seldovia, with a few years in the Seattle-Tacoma area. She was only 18 when she received a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Washington. Two years later, she returned to Alaska with a teacher’s diploma and came to work in the public school in Seldovia.

In April 1941, while still a teacher in Seldovia, June was walking the gangplank between the Seldovia dock and the S.S. Cordova when the gangplank slipped and deposited her into the cold waters of the harbor. According to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, “There was such a narrow space between the ship and piling of the dock that the descent of Miss McCullough [sic] without injury to herself was regarded as miraculous.”

She was rescued when an able-bodied seaman from the Cordova dived into the harbor and buoyed her against a piling until a ladder could be lowered from the ship to extract them both.

The incident did nothing to dissuade June from travel, from Alaska or from teaching.

The following year in Seldovia, she married Glenn Bullock and then moved to Anchorage. They had three daughters together. After their divorce, she remarried to Arthur Conrad Linnemeyer and lived with him in Southern California and then Washington until they divorced in 2008.

She enjoyed golf and travel and, like her mother, teaching and continuing her own education. She had received a master’s degree in literature in 1956, and she had remained in the classroom after moving to Torrance, California. For the last 15 years of her career in education, she served as the curriculum coordinator for the school district in Torrance.

Also like her mother, she had a long life, dying in 2011 about three weeks before her 93rd birthday while on vacation in California. A few years earlier, she had moved back to the Pacific Northwest because her two surviving daughters and their families lived in Oregon and Washington. Her third daughter had died previously from breast cancer.

June’s obituary described her in terms that could easily have been applied years earlier to her mother: She was an avid reader who had many friends, and was “intelligent, kind, witty and courageous … a trendsetter … and a strong individual who greatly respected those qualities in others.”

The Palm Springs Limelight-News used this photo in 1946 to announce the start of the Alaska Photographic Expedition, guided by Keith McCullagh (left) for his expedition partner and photographer, Harry Reed.

This photograph of Keith McCullagh (left) and photographer Harry Reed in Palm Springs, California, accompanied an article in the Desert Sun in May 1946 describing the pair’s upcoming Alaska Photographic Expedition.