Seldovia remembers
Seldovia remembers
John Phillip English

John Phillip English

August 14, 1905, Canada — August 15, 1989, Seldovia, Alaska

Buried in Seldovia City Cemetery Plot #595

JOHN PHILLIP ENGLISH, “Jack” was born in Strathroy, Canada in 1905 and came to Seldovia in 1923 to work for Snug Harbor Packing Company. When it closed down for the winter, he decided he didn’t want to be a winter watchman at Tuxedni Bay as he had the previous winter, so he ended up staying in Seldovia during the winter of ’23, ’24. He met Susan Bloch and they were married in December of 1925.

From Larry Reynolds: “Anyway, some fun stories about Jack. Cheryl went over to visit him one rainy, stormy night. We’d been working in the clinic but the power went off, so we decided, “Oh well, that’s the end of that.”

And so she went over to the newsstand, which is next to the post office. That empty room usually now that used to be the newsstand and – and Susan and Jack ran that.

Anyway, they were sitting around in the dark, talking and Jack says to Cheryl, “Well, let’s have some fun with this power outage.” So – so he calls up, and I don’t know who he called but he called somebody.

And said, “Yeah, it was Gladys. She was on a snow machine and she ran over the power cord going up to the TV tower.” He hangs up the phone. He says, “Let’s give it five.”

In other words, how long is it going to take for the story to get back to him in a different form. And it did, too. Five minutes later somebody called and told us it was – it was Helen and – And, anyway, funny story.