Morris Ponchene was the son of Peter and Lucille CHICHENOFF Bonchene, born on May 4, 1910 in Unga, Alaska. He died on July 4, 1952 and is buried in the Seldovia City Cemetery in Plot #8.
Fred H. Elusaas wrote on 3/16/89 :
When my uncle Morris died we hired Alec Bayou to build a casket for him, and my uncle Alfred says, well, on about the second day, we’d better go up and see how they’re doing and we went up there and here was little Alec, he had a book of matches, and he’d light a match in that tent and Alioisha would saw with a hand saw on this plywood trying to build this casket and we knew they’d never get done so we took everything and we took it home and we had my uncle, Morris, was laid out right there in the kitchen, and we built the casket right alongside of him.
And somebody came up, and I don’t remember who, you know, why are we doing this, because I was sleeping in the bedroom, my grandmother had moved to Bill Smith’s house and Alfred was sleeping upstairs and here Morris was laid out in the kitchen, we had no heat, and it was the fourth or fifth of July, and he died the night of the fourth, or the morning of the fifth, and so Alfred said well, it’s the easiest way to get the measurements right, and jeesh, people heard that around town and thought we were terrible. But what else could we do, we had to get him buried. I had to get back to Kenai to my job, Alfred had to back across to Snug Harbor and my grandmother was 82 really in bad shape, the effect of Morris dying, she fell off the dock onto a tugboat.
But it was–I guess, you know, when you think of it, it must have looked pretty gruesome, building and making this casket there and fixing it up and they him in a wire basket, especially when they brought him up to the house and he’s got these wire marks on his face and we’ve got Mrs. Peterson, who was another old lady, woman, from Kodiak that come up and she worked alcohol on his face and got it all smoothed out and Morris had kind of high cheek bones and she took and pushed his jaw up like that, and then he looked natural. But the problem was, Morris, all his life his nose was either broke either this way or this way from fighting, and when he died it was straight, and they just straightened it out because it was broke, and but we never said anything to our grandmother about it, because she wouldn’t stand for stuff like that, but we had to, we had to do something with him and there was no mortuary or nothing here.