Theodore Pedersen, “Ted” was born February 14, 1905 on the Aleutian Island of.,Samalga His father, Christian T. Pedersen, was a Norwegian whaler and fur trader; his Aleut-Russian mother died in 1906, soon after his birth. . He was cared for at the Methodist-run Jesse Lee Home in Unalaska before being sent at age nine to live with a friend of his father in San Francisco. In 1921, Ted was sent to Mount Hermon school in Massachusetts. Eventually he spent winters in San Francisco and summers as cabin boy on his father’s ship.
When he was 21 joined the Lighthouse Service. His first assignments were in the Aleutians, and he dreamed of returning to Alaska. He was working in California when he met his 2nd wife, Elsa.
Self-described “city girl” Elsa Kienitz was born and reared in Salt Lake City, Utah, where her German immigrant parents, converts to Mormonism, had settled. To the consternation of her family, 23-year-old Elsa took an office job in San Francisco in 1938, after her mother died. In the Bay Area she met her future husband Ted Pedersen, a civilian member of the U.S. Lighthouse Service (now Coast Guard), and went with him to live at Oakland Harbor light station and then at Roe Island, where the Sacramento River joins an arm of San Francisco Bay.
The opportunity came via a job with the Forest Service in Ketchikan; the couple soon moved farther north, first to Seward and then to Seldovia. But Ted yearned for wilderness, and there begins this story.
“I had already concluded that there were two types of homesteaders,” Elsa Pedersen writes. “One group came to Alaska as the settlers had gone into the uncivilized American West, to make their homes and fortunes in a place that would eventually develop into a settled part of the country.… The other kind were those who wanted to get away from civilization and not be drawn into it later. They staked their homesteads mainly to protect themselves from people who otherwise might settle too close. … Ted and I fitted into this category….”
Copied with permission from Publisher’s Note in Elsa Pederson’s memoir “Kachemak Bay Years: An Alaska Homesteader’s Memoir”, by Elsa Pedersen. Hardscratch Press, 2001. ISBN: 0-9678989-1-9.