The Alaska Contractor: Special 60th Anniversary Issue

PH O TO: LA R RY MO O R E & ASSOCIATES
PH OTO: CO U R T E SY O F AN C H O R AG E MU S E U M AT RASMUSON CENTER/BY STEVE MCCU TC H E O N
By Ron Dalby
Point to a major road or paving project in Alaska since the 1950s, and Pete
Casperʼs name is probably connected to it in some way. He paved the Seward
Highway from Anchorage to Girdwood. He led crews in
building fi ve of the seven sections of the Dalton Highway,
then called the Pipeline Haul Road. He was there
on the Parks Highway. He laid down eight miles of the
road out of Cordova leading to the Million-dollar Bridge.
He paved the Juneau Airport Expansion.
All this came from a man who, freshly out of college
with an engineering degree, almost accepted a job offer
from Lockheed Aircraft in the early 1950s.
After applying for and being offered a job by Lockheed,
Casper visited the head of the engineering department
at the university in Ames, Iowa. “He said, ‘I’ve got
lots of jobs,’” Casper recalled.
“Most of them were county engineering jobs, or assistant
county engineering jobs, so I wasn’t much interested
in them. Then he had one from an outfi t called
Green Construction. One of the guys that had graduated
about four or fi ve years ahead of me had called him and
Ariel view of Haul Road at Atigun Pass in Brooks Range, northern Alaska, during
trans-Alaska oil pipeline construction.
Pete Casper
‘There was no question
in our minds which was
best—Atigun’
said they needed two recruits to go to Alaska.
“Well, that sounded kind of interesting, and when I
got home I called and he says to come on down and talk
to us.” Green’s home offi ce was in Des Moines, Iowa.
“I went to work there for about a week in the home
offi ce, and they sent me right to Alaska. I came up here
to go to work here in Anchorage. That was about the
fi rst or second week of 1952, and the job was putting
base course and pavement down on the highway from
4th and Gambell to Girdwood plus Fireweed Lane from
Gambell over to Spenard Road.” All of this was part of a
single contract, according to Casper.
“The equipment was all here,” he continued.” They’d
just fi nished building the international airport—they’d
been working on it for three years and fi nished it the fall
before. All that stuff was parked on Sand Lake Road on
a homestead down there.
Early Alaskan jobs
“They’d just completed the grading
on it [Seward Highway to Girdwood].
They’d been working on it about three
years. What they did was move the railroad
out and build the road on the old
railroad grade.
“We fi nished that job about twothirds
of the way through August and
right after Labor Day they sent me to
Cordova. We got a contract to build the
fi rst segment of the Copper River Highway
that was going to connect Cordova
with the world. It was about an eight- to
10-mile job from the Cordova Airport
out to the Copper River.”
In the 1950s, Casper was working in
Alaska only during the warmer months.
He would spend his winters working for
Green Construction in the Seattle offi ce
or in California. He would not winter
over in Alaska until the early 1960s.
After bouncing back and forth for several
years, Casper was sent to Juneau. “I
8 The Alaska conTrAcTor 60th Anniversary Issue 1948–2008