Nearly 40 years ago I stood in a factory parking lot in South Milwaukee, listening to presidential candidate Ronald Reagan address a crowd. Religious radicals in Iran held 52 Americans hostage, and the nation was frustrated and angry thanks in part to a TV show titled: “The Hostage Crisis,” which covered the story daily, even when there was no…
Family tragedies drew me back to Media, Pa., my hometown, for two months. My time out was an education in areas ranging from depression, suicide, and grieving to hospital care, probate and freeway driving. Little of it was fun and most of it was like flossing, a necessary bother. A sizable part of my time was spent navigating family politics,…
Editor’s note: To date, this website has been solely dedicated to my own writing and thinking. But if this medium – the Internet – is good for anything, it must be about supporting free expression and protecting dissenting views. The following opinion piece was written by Libby Bakalar, an elections attorney for the State of Alaska who on her own…
Sorting through my father’s personal affects following his death, I came across a small bible and inside, a lock of black hair, tied with a ribbon. The bible once belonged to my grandmother, but there were no clues to the origin of the lock. Was it hers? Had she sent it off with my grandfather, inside the bible, as he…
Life imitates art, they say. Take the Jan. 22 story in the Anchorage Daily News headlined, “Handgun Fired Accidentally in Coffee Shop Injures Woman.” The story said a group of friends met at a Kaladi Brothers coffee shop in Soldotna Jan. 20 and one of them, a 76-year-old man, pulled out a 9-millimeter pistol he’d brought inside, for reasons the…
“Yes and through this life I’ve wandered, I’ve seen lots of funny men. Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” Woody Guthrie, “Pretty Boy Floyd,” 1939. It’s ironic that 40 years ago, when Earth First! was being vilified for sabotaging development projects, a small group of wealthy people were getting to work…
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy created a ruckus last week with his draconian budget proposal, neatly sparing the oil industry while proposing to decimate Alaska’s public institutions and rain down hell on schools and municipalities. You can call Dunleavy a lot of things – Gov. Mongo, Caribou Trumpie, Wasilla’s Revenge – but don’t call him a liar. Dunleavy promised bigger…
I chatted up former Haines city administrator Tom Healy during a chance meeting on the ferry a couple years back and he got to reminiscing about things he appreciated about Haines. Healy had gone on to work many years as the municipal manager of Palmer, Alaska. The Haines barter economy, Healy said, was one of the interesting facets about the…
After five weeks out, I returned to Alaska with a pocketful of Cape May diamonds* and a new appreciation for family and the people from my childhood. We are patching things back together following the death of my father, as all families do. Siblings take on new roles to fill the gap. Life goes on. My dad was good, a…
I’m back in Media, Pa., my hometown, promoted without irony as “Everybody’s Hometown.” Media has a picturesque main street lined with storefronts, featuring a trolley car and a grand theater and few stone buildings any one of which, placed in Haines, Alaska, would be crowned as an architectural wonder. Miniaturized in plastic, it’s the kind of place assembled alongside toy…