The front door is locked this winter morning, but there’s a number posted to call to get someone to open up the house. Before I can finish dialing, across the alley traipses an alert and articulate woman I will learn is Eileen Mork.  It turns out she was born in the Hatton Eielson Museum, a.k.a. the Osking-Eielson house, the boyhood home of Carl Ben Eielson; he was her uncle. She lived there until 1945 when she married the boy (or rather, the airman come home) from across the alley. ("Mother told us not to cross the street!")  She still lives there in the home of her marriage, and as curator, keeps watch across the alley on the old Eielson home, which has been a museum operated by an association in Hatton, N. D., since 1976.

It is unspeakably cool to tour the house with commentary by Mork, including her personal recollections of Eielson. Although she was only eight at the time of his funeral, she remembers his returns to Hatton and the things he brought her--including an ermine cape that she lost on the streets of Grand Forks. (Check your closets, someone likely still has it.)

I need to explain just who Carl Ben Eielson was. (The best source is Hi Drache’s book, Polar Pilot.)  Born in Hatton in 1897, Eielson won international fame (and became a particular hero to Norwegian-Americans) for his exploits as an aviator and explorer. He flew the first airmail route in Alaska; flew nonstop over the North Pole (Point Barrow to Spitzbergen), with George Hubert Wilkins on April 15, 1928; and also accompanied Wilkins to the Antarctic. He died along with his mechanic, Earl Borland, while flying a rescue mission in Siberia in 1929.

As I said, Norwegian-Americans particularly lionized Eielson. A commemorative booklet published in Hatton in 1930 said he was "endowed with a certain spirit of romance and adventure, so typical of a true son of a Viking."

Likewise, North Dakotans counted Eielson a hero and a sort of Nordic martyr. His body was returned to Hatton in a special funeral train and his funeral at St. John’s Lutheran, described at the time as "the most impressive funeral services ever held in this state," was captured in a much-published historical photograph.

Subsequently Eielson’s body and those of his immediate family were relocated to a plot near the east gate of the renamed Carl Ben Eielson Memorial Cemetery north of town along Highway 18. The impressive stone arch with brass legend-plates was built by subscription of the schoolchildren of the state. Mork recounts that the construction moved a little too slowly for the third-graders of Wild Rose, North Dakota, who wrote impatiently that if the Hatton folks weren’t going to get it done, then "please send back our $3.24."

The house contains many original furnishings and a fascinating buffet of prizes and oddities--photos and letters featuring folks like Crown Prince Olaf and Franklin Roosevelt. The thing that takes you right back to the tragic time of Eielson’s death, however, is the map of the work of the "Expedition for inquiry as to American Fliers." This details the excavations by students from Leningrad Polytech who went in for the bodies.

Around the corner are pieces of wreckage that the Russians released in 1992. The North Dakota Air National Guard flew Mork to Alaska to pick them up.

As always in such situations, I pulled out my trusty WPA guide to North Dakota, which informs me that back in the 1930s, they had Eielson’s 1926 Fokker, the Alaskan, on exhibit in the Hatton city hall. It’s not there any more.

No, Mork has it in a semi trailer back of the house! All right now, this is getting unbelievably campy, she’s popping the padlock on the trailer so I can go in and see the Fokker. Shoot, I could climb right into the cockpit.

Feel the canvas fuselage. I would not fly in this thing.