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‘Four Years Below Zero’ by Wilma Knox
KAY CASHMAN Petroleum News
If you are looking for a piece of history from the construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, the recent publication of Wilma Knox’s autobiography is both enjoyable and educational.
For more than 30 years Knox, an Anchorage resident, and her husband Robert, traveled the state as a journalists and photographers for local and national newspapers, including The New York Times.
In 1975, at the age of 55, Wilma got a job as a security guard on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, or TAPS. She was one of 1,000 women who worked on the 800-mile pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to the port of Valdez. It was the first time women had worked in an official capacity on a major wilderness construction project, her husband Robert, now 95, said in a recent press release.
Wilma saw the position as an opportunity and a challenge.
The night patrol While many of the women took jobs in offices, barracks and dining halls, her job was very different. Wilma worked nights patrolling, often outdoors, the brief Arctic summer and the long harsh winter when temperatures dipped as low as 80 degrees below zero and chill winds swept in from the Beaufort Sea.
Despite the rigors of the job - patrolling on foot some 15 miles per night - she managed to keep detailed daily journals and write numerous letters to family and friends.
She also took several hundred photos, which are now in her collection at the Anchorage Museum.
After Wilma retired in 1984, she spent years gathering all of this material and starting work on her autobiography.
In 2011, she suffered a series of strokes and lost her memory. After four years of illness with Alzheimer’s disease, she died on June 10, 2015; just 10 days shy of her 95th birthday.
Finishing the book Two weeks later Robert and two of his friends, Mark Andrews and Kara Naber, began to work on finishing her book.
They named their not-for-profit venture The Tennyson Press for Tennyson Drive, where they all live as neighbors in Deming, New Mexico.
The hardcover book of 220 pages includes eight pages of photos from the Wilma Knox Collection (a few shown here). It was published in a limited edition of 500 copies.
“We don’t plan or expect to sell a large number of copies to the public,” Knox said. “Our main aim is to get it to university libraries, historical museums and societies so it will be available to help tell the story of the far north in the 20th Century.”
The book is available directly from the publishers via this email, [email protected], or from amazon.com, where it is priced at $29.95.
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