Chatter Marks EP 136 Anchorage history in fragments with David Reamer

Anchorage Historian David Reamer has spent years digging through archives, newspapers, and forgotten corners, recovering stories that might otherwise disappear. From his early days of sharing historical stories on social media to his long-running Histories of Alaska column in the Anchorage Daily News, he’s documented everything from vanished neighborhoods and local legends to racial covenants, labor struggles, oddball characters, and the everyday moments that shaped Alaska's largest city. His work reminds us that history doesn’t just live in textbooks or monuments. It survives in fragments — rumors, newspaper clippings, photographs, old advertisements, property records, fading memories, and oral histories. Through those fragments, he explores what Anchorage's past reveals about its present and what it means to preserve the memory of a city that has spent much of its life reinventing itself.

Anchorage is difficult to define because it never stops changing. It was founded in 1915 as a railroad tent city—a place of laborers, opportunists, and people eager to get in on the ground floor. More than a century later, that spirit of reinvention remains. The challenge in seeing the full picture, David says, is that we rarely see the present clearly while we're living through it. Only with distance do the patterns emerge. So, he’s skeptical of the neat narratives that often follow official histories because, for him, history is messy. And he embraces that messiness, challenging conventional wisdom and uncovering histories that are both profound and absurd.  Like Anchorage's brief obsession with raising chinchillas.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
So much of settler Alaska, and this is, as you were saying, this is a sort of distinction I

(00:16):
have to make often to say Anchorage. I'm not talking about the Dena'ina, I'm not talking
about the fishing camp, the Hicock, I'm not talking about a Kalutna, I'm not talking about
Kamsat, I'm not talking about the old village of Kanik, I'm not talking about any of that. In
Anchorage, a shocking amount of the settler history is attempts to import what they were

(00:39):
familiar with, what they liked about life outside. Like, I mentioned this in a recent article, when
the people come up, 1915, they're trying to build a railroad, railroad people get here,
they're upset that all these people are tented out in a little city where they want to put all
their stuff. They have, there's a waffle house, there's the two girls waffle house, they have

(01:06):
the sign on the outside that says two girls waffle house, I love it. There are sex workers,
they're importing the things that are important to them, and there's baseball.
Like they're carving out, they're having to carve from raw forest
and build a place, but they still take the time to build a baseball field.

(01:29):
Like, they weren't building an Alaska sport, they were importing.
That was Anchorage historian David Reamer, and he spent years digging through archives,
archives, newspapers, and forgotten corners, recovering stories that might otherwise disappear.

(01:52):
From his early days of sharing historical stories on social media,
to his long running histories of Alaska column in the Anchorage Daily News.
He's documented everything from vanished neighborhoods and local legends, to racial
covenants, labor struggles, oddball characters, and the everyday moments that shaped Alaska's

(02:17):
largest city. His work reminds us that history doesn't just live in textbooks or monuments,
it survives in fragments, rumors, newspaper clippings, photographs, old advertisements,
property records, fading memories, and oral histories.

(02:40):
Through those fragments, he explores what Anchorage's past reveals about its present,
and what it means to preserve the memory of a city that has spent much of its life reinventing itself.
David says that Anchorage is difficult to define because it never stops changing.

(03:04):
It was founded in 1915 as a railroad tent city, a place of laborers, opportunists,
and people eager to get in on the ground floor. More than a century later, that spirit of
reinvention remains. The challenge in seeing the full picture, David says, is that we rarely see

(03:27):
the present clearly while we're living through it. Only with distance do the patterns emerge.
So, he's skeptical of the neat narratives that often follow official histories,
because for him, history is messy, and he embraces that messiness,

(03:48):
challenging conventional wisdom, and uncovering histories that are both profound and absurd.
Like Anchorage's brief obsession with raising chinchillas.
So, here he is, David Reamer.
Welcome to Chatter Marks, a podcast of the Anchorage Museum, dedicated to exploring Alaska

(04:14):
and the circumpolar north through the creative and critical thinking of ideas, past, present,
and future. My name is Cody Liske, and I'll be your host for today's podcast.
After spending so much time studying Anchorage, do you think the city has a distinct personality?

(04:47):
No, I don't. The city is constantly evolving, constantly changing. Who the city consists of
has been constantly evolving. Who's been allowed to live here, to wink at the older, darker history,
has been constantly evolving. Why the city exists has been constantly evolving, from railroad

(05:11):
to construction and the base, to federal spending, to oil, to sort of being the commercial logistics
center of the state, the population center, sort of existing on that basis to a certain extent alone.
So, Anchorage is always, like, what character or personality you think it has is much like

(05:37):
taking for what you think, your perspective on the world, and at best capturing a fleeting moment.
So, it's almost like to have a personality, if, say, I said it had a personality, that might be a reflection of my own values, my own interests, things like that.

(06:00):
Anchorage is so much, it's so broad, so diverse that any declaration, any sort of firm statement is
as much personally telling, if not more, than it is of Anchorage.
You know, we'll understand better in a few years, once we have a chance to let the facts settle down,

(06:21):
once we're not so personally affected by the city of the moment. We can look back and say,
oh, this city of 10, 20, 30 years ago was like this, a touch more accurately.
Yeah, yeah. So, only in the future can we look back and say, oh, the, you know, 1990s to the early 2000s,

(06:47):
Anchorage was this, but we can't really do that for the present day Anchorage because we're living in it.
Yeah, not very well. It's hard to describe the water when you're drowning.
It's the same way when people, I mean, even when we're describing the past,
we're still beholding to our grudges, our biases, our, you know, agendas.

(07:13):
Yeah.
Everything I write, like actually publish, has to have some aspect of it, some significant aspect
that's new. Either I'm bringing it into the public for the first time, it's a story that
hasn't been told in decades, or it's a story that's never been told before, or I'm correcting
a narrative, or I'm adding to a narrative. It has to be new in some way. And I don't

(07:37):
state this explicitly, but what I'm constantly doing and slipping into these things, and I
hope people picking up, I've just had a short conversation about this on social media with
someone, because as regards, say, like original Anchorage, 1915, I'm always talking about the mud
and the smells, just ever-present mud, because they just came in, clear-cut all these trees,

(07:59):
ripped it up to the earth. So it's fresh-churned earth getting run over by thousands of people,
and carts, and equipment, and railroads. So it's just churned into mud, and that becomes one of the
inescapable aspects of Anchorage for many, many years. But you go back and you read about

(08:21):
1915 Anchorage, most people aren't going to mention that. They're not going to mention,
oh, the homeless were here in the 80s. People then knew about it, and experienced it, and had
very strong opinions about it. They knew about it and had very strong opinions about the crime-riddled
strip bars in downtown. But it's not as good a story to talk about it now, unless you're like me.

(08:51):
Narratives tend to become simpler. They tend to become cleaner over time. The 1964 earthquake is
a great, great example. For most people, the 1964 earthquake is extremely simple. The town was wrecked.
We all came together. It was super nice and lovely.
The voice on the radio that we all listened to as we pulled together as a city,

(09:15):
triumph over adversity. A beautiful, simple narrative. Sounds wonderful. It's real easy
to understand why people like this narrative. It self-aggrandizes. It's heroic. Again,
just makes us sound good. The reality was only certain parts of the town were wrecked,

(09:37):
and those areas, in direct contrast to how it usually goes in disasters, were the areas where
the richest, most affluent people lived. You're talking Turnagin. You're talking Bootlegger Cove,
that end of downtown. The Black people in town, they had a nickname for the earthquake.

(10:00):
They called it the Passover. They weren't allowed to live in Turnagin. They weren't
allowed to live in Bootlegger Cove. They were generally barred from a lot of the businesses
on 4th Avenue. The Black homes and the Black businesses, Eastchester Flats and what's now
Fairview or further east than that even, they did just fine. But bringing that up

(10:25):
confronts those narratives. I've gotten a death threat once in my life.
Really?
And it's because I wrote about this side of the earthquake story. I talked about,
here's a Black lawyer. She had an office on 15th and Fairview. She did just fine. The house shook.
It shook for a long damn time, but she was fine. The house was still standing. It wasn't torn

(10:48):
apart. It didn't fall into a chasm. It wasn't that image that you will see over and over again.
When people talk, the 64 quake of Turnagin of downtown. I talked about a Black real estate
guy. He had an office on the other side of 15th. A ceiling tile fell. Oh no.

(11:09):
The Black church in Fairview, greater friendship.
Yeah.
They shook. They got cracks in the buildings. They had a wedding that weekend. The wedding happened.
The town was not destroyed. It wasn't this massive recovery.
The real interesting bit, even beyond that, is that the white people didn't trust the white people.

(11:35):
Because again, it goes against that narrative that we were all nice, that we all came together.
There were a lot of nice people. There were a lot of people working hard. There was the
YMCA downtown, which was until last week, the Willow Wall. People volunteering and working
every hour of the day to provide shelter for people who lost their homes or people who were

(12:00):
stranded here from traveling, airplane crews that had nowhere to go, handing out drinks and
refreshments and food such as they could access throughout the recovery period. There are heroic
tells in there. But the first official response you see immediately after the earthquake is
the police deputizing people and handing out guns,

(12:24):
ripping up sheets into white armbands to identify that you're a member of the in-group
because they think there's going to be looting. They didn't trust the people. Not really.
Hmm. Such as that, this was their initial reaction. They realized after a little while

(12:45):
that they hadn't even got the names of the people that they had handed out guns and deputized.
Okay. And when they show the pictures of the earthquake, they also don't tend to show that when
the army took over patrolling the district after the earthquake, they did so with bayonets affixed
on their rifles. Hmm. They were very showy saying,

(13:10):
you don't do that unless you are not trusting the people. Yeah.
Why do you think people were not trusting each other?
And certain moments, again, this goes back to you reveal your biases. These people thought
the worst of people. Hmm. The police officers thought the worst of people. This, again,

(13:34):
did not happen. There was no rioting. The same thing happens after the great Fairbanks flood.
A few years later, the mayor authorizes people with rifles to go up and act as snipers.
He was very proud about this, Red Boucher. And nothing happened, but he was very proud of this
story forever. Hmm. They thought something bad was going to happen. You could probably

(13:58):
guess something about these individuals' characters if this is where they leapt to.
Have you ever uncovered a story that you felt was almost completely lost?
Oh, many of the stories are lost or, you know, they were spoken up and then lost for decades.

(14:19):
They were a thing maybe in 1950 or something like they were never really put together into a story.
My wife's favorite story I ever did, and it's one of my favorites, but it didn't do well.
Someone recently told me it was one of their favorites. So they're now my eternal friend,
and I will work for them for free because that's the way it is if you're a historian.
If you're nice to us, I told you before we got started, you were the first person to interview

(14:44):
me. You were interested in me from way back. So for years now, if Cody asks for something,
I do something for Cody. Oh, that's great. I love that. Thank you. I appreciate it.
But my wife's favorite story is chinchillas. Okay. And it was this
1940s, 1950s investment fad where people thought they were going to get rich by investing in

(15:08):
chinchillas. The idea that eventually, because eventually there would be a market for the fur.
There wasn't at the time, but that eventually there would be a market for chinchilla fur
and that it was going to be very expensive. And the idea was everyone thought, I can do it.
I will buy a couple of chinchillas. That would cost thousands of dollars in then money

(15:32):
without even adjusting. And then they would breed because they were rodents of a sort.
Yeah. They bred very well. Actually, the whole investing thing actually saved chinchillas as a
species. Really? Yes. It's one of the reasons chinchilla, it's the primary reason chinchilla
survived because they're a South American Andes mountain creature originally. But they got

(15:56):
smuggled into the U.S. in the twenties and it just sort of exploded from there.
That market collapses in the early fifties. There's finally an option.
Nobody really wants to buy chinchillas. They're small, very gated colors. So you're going to
really struggle to build a coat that doesn't look like a, you know, like you've maybe seen

(16:17):
a rabbit fur coat where it's all different colors. You get a nice uniform, expensive coat
is going to be laboriously expensive. So the market just collapses. But for a while it was
the thing. It was invest in this. Like there have been crazy, silly fads since then.

(16:38):
It was madder than beanie babies. This was the sort of thing that
everybody knew about. People made jokes about it in the day. There are people,
there are jokes I found as I was researching this. People in the day saying, oh, I shall pay
you as soon as my chinchilla farm starts paying out. Like, wink, wink. As soon as the chinchillas

(17:00):
come home, I shall pay you postage. And it then becomes a sort of like, even after the market
collapses, it's a scam for a while. Like invest in chinchillas. It's a new thing. In the past,
there have been people who've done this with emus. This is the same thing that happened with
some of the investment you see in comic books. Oh, there's so much of this during high COVID,

(17:24):
where people went mad for collectibles, and then the market dropped after because people
went back to their lives to a large extent. This is also when chinchillas became pets,
once they realized they couldn't make furs from them. But I learned this story in the most
horrific way possible. I was working on Black history. I was researching housing discrimination.

(17:50):
And I was going through the papers bit by bit, the local papers and going through the classifieds.
And I was looking for instances of whites only housing, no Blacks allowed,
no natives, no dogs, that sort of thing. So these were rife in 1950s. And I'm looking at this and
I'm documenting it. And I wrote some very serious histories. I collaborated on very

(18:13):
serious histories about this with Ian Hartman. And at the same time, I'm starting to notice
these other things in the classifieds, like right next to it. Because it would be for sale and for
rent, right next to each other on the page. No Blacks allowed, Spenard. And right next to it would

(18:34):
be, we'll sell entire chinchilla herd for good offer. And I go, and this is literally how it
happened to me. The first time I went, huh, that's weird. And then I went on because I had very
serious history work to do. And I was researching housing discrimination, hard history. And then I
keep going. Then I see another one, we'll trade chinchilla herd for good truck and running order

(18:59):
from someone else, a different person. Different chinchilla herd. And you do talk of chinchillas
and herds and raising them as chinchilla farms. And this time I go, okay, very weird. And I make
a little note of it. My desktop is covered in little like research notes, like here's a document

(19:21):
started. Maybe I'll come back to this. Maybe I won't, but it helps make myself aware of it,
writing it down. Okay. I'm going to keep an eye on this for the future. I keep going. And finally,
there's a third one. We'll sell chinchilla herd for anything of value. Now, all of these are
coming as I would later find out after the market has crashed and like nobody's spending thousands

(19:42):
of dollars on chinchillas anymore, which seems insane. Like the fact that's not even adjusted.
There was a chinchilla called Prince. He wasn't even a breeder. He was sterile. He was a little
chinchilla named Prince. He was stolen from Fairview and taken down to Oregon. And the
cops hunted this person down. Chinchillas were valuable. And like, you do not have to spend

(20:08):
thousands to get a chinchilla now. But after that third time, I stopped what I'm doing. I'm like,
okay, I will not rest now until I understand what the hell is going on with chinchillas.
And there is no serious history of chinchilla, this whole chinchilla investment fad. It's barely
documented. And I wrote an article about this early on. I've included it in talks. It remains

(20:33):
one of my joys that I dug this out. The downtown courthouse is named after the guy who brought
chinchillas into Alaska. All sorts of people at all sorts of lots of life thought they were going
to make their fortunes and secure family wealth for the rest of their lives via chinchillas.

(20:55):
This also says something about the era. This is post-World War II. After a period of inflation,
after the war, it starts to become good times economically for a lot of people. People start
having disposable income. And they are like, what if I use this disposable income in a way that will
safeguard my family long-term financially? And a lot of these people became very susceptible to

(21:21):
cons or to things that were not if explicitly cons, then things they should have seen through
really quickly, like investing in chinchillas. And I love this story. This is the thing that
was all over the country. But the fact that it's in Alaska, there was a Fairview farm on 15th Avenue

(21:43):
in Ingra. There was a chinchilla feed store in Fairview. There are multiple chinchilla places,
places would advertise, come see, come to the furniture store and see a live chinchilla.
Good Lord. Maybe double digit, maybe triple digit people in Alaska had even seen a chinchilla at
any point in their lives by that point. Most barely larger than that had ever heard of it.

(22:07):
Just come see the exotic. And if you've never held a chinchilla, it is a lovely experience.
Yeah. They're soft, right? Indescribably soft. Yes. Indescribably soft. Soft is too nice a word
or not nice enough a word to describe how wonderful it feels to hold a chinchilla.
Yeah. Yeah. It really feels like, I don't know, something more modern like NFTs.

(22:33):
Yes. It's exactly that. The idea of like the NFT, like, oh, you now own this image. Well,
that seems sus, a logical person would say. The same person dropped into like 1948 Anchorage go,
like, oh, these chinchillas are worth thousands. They breed really quickly. You could have dozens
and dozens soon. And like, well, that seems suspicious that they could still be worth

(22:58):
thousands if they breed like rodents. I'm suspect. And there's no mark. And you're telling me there's
no established market for this yet? How wonderful. Take my money. It really sounds like history and
specifically historical research on your part is like an adventure. Oh, yeah.

(23:27):
And these are the two sides of me. There is that is the two things that drive me as a historian.
There are the stories that anger me. And then there are stories that just make me giggle.
And I try and cover both, like I try and talk about here's nasty things. Here's
here's the way they've treated women historically in Alaska. Here's the historic things that have

(23:48):
happened racially in Alaska from threatening to kill every Mexican and wrangle to driving out
the Chinese from Juneau to the many adventures of being black in Alaska over the decades.
But on the other side, like. Among the articles I've either just written or I'm working on in
the past week to the next week is breeding yaks and cattle and the experiment failing.

(24:14):
So you feed them to students to using snow machines as crime accessories, as getaway
vehicles and robberies. Those are the the the dual forces driving me. Yeah.
You know, your columns are so deeply researched, but they also feel accessible and conversational,

(24:39):
almost like, you know, I'm talking to you right now. Has there been a piece of history that was
so complicated and also obscure that you struggled to find a way to write about it?
There are those that I worry are too obscure.
In some cases, I've written about them anyway. Use a silly example. There is I have a little

(25:03):
jar of them right to my right. I'm now holding one for a thing that was called a bullet pencil.
And these were pencils. They look like a bullet. And then you pull off the cartridge at the tip
and you have a pencil. OK, and then you can say, OK, I'm going to write about it.
OK, and then you can set it back. It looks like a teeny tiny, like a golf pencil.

(25:25):
Then you can put it back in the rest of the shell and you have a longer pencil.
And I wrote an article about this and this was obscure.
I forced it to work in Alaska, but really it was an awkward thing and it was pushing the
bounds of my allowances as far as delivering to an audience. And there are some subjects that

(25:48):
racial passing, for example, that is one from experience. I've learned that people
have a lot of trouble understanding racial passing the impetus for it.
Too many people think it's hiding or tricking people.
Not understanding the cost. For example, in Anchorage, the first fire chief, a guy who

(26:11):
co-created the Ferrandi, was Tom Bevers. Black man, black ancestry. He was light enough skin
that he could pass as white and he chose to pass as white in Anchorage.
OK, that is how he got to be fire chief and city council member in a time when Anchorage had
less than 10 black people and was overwhelmingly white.

(26:36):
As late as 1960, Anchorage, I was just looking at this stat, Anchorage was like 92% white,
Spenard was 98% white. That's after the base is open, after you've gotten a rush of new people,
still. So it was a whole other world in the 20s and 30s that were his heyday in the 40s.
And talking about racial passing, the fact that he obviously did not have the

(27:03):
the fact that he obviously did this because he saw it as the only way to make a way for himself
in this world. And it's not trickery. To a certain extent, he's letting people think
what they want to think. But there is a cost that he couldn't have family visit.

(27:25):
According to the legend, one of the ways people really found out is when he died suddenly
and darker skin sister showed up for the funeral. OK, and everybody went, oh.
He couldn't have people he knew growing up.
He couldn't talk about aspects of his life being the son of a sharecropper.

(27:48):
In the Deep South, yeah, he had to. He was.
Akin to a spy, the pressures and tensions he felt every day, he had to safeguard what he could say
and how honest he could be about himself to others. Otherwise, there would have been repercussions.

(28:08):
How close do you feel to these people that you research and you learn so much about their lives?
That's an interesting question. I explicitly told myself that I'm, again, only getting to know
aspects of their lives. I'm getting to know a certain bit. I'm getting to know public personas.

(28:32):
In most cases, I don't get to know how they really felt about this. I don't know how they
thought about the world. I don't know what they thought about society. So I'm always cautioning
myself that I only know, at any given time, a part of a picture. There are people I still love
more than others because of that, but I'm always cautioning myself. That's a less fun thing to talk

(28:58):
about. I have to be skeptical of my own knowledge to be a good historian. I have to be skeptical
of everything else. I have to be skeptical of my own biases.
I have to be self-aware of the limitations of my knowledge. I can't pretend that I know
everything, even though it sounds like I'm trying to, as I speak authoritatively on subjects.

(29:22):
I think humility is good, though. I think that humility comes
with knowledge. The more you know, the more you realize you don't know.
You've heard maybe of the Dunning-Kruger scale. When you don't know anything about a subject,
you feel like you know everything about it. Then the more you learn, suddenly you feel like a

(29:43):
complete idiot. I am constantly humbled at the level and quality of stories in Alaska that have
never been uncovered, that I've never heard about. I'm constantly humbled at the level and quality
of stories in Alaska that have never been uncovered, that I've never heard about.
To be fair, in most cases, that means most people haven't heard about it, like the Chinchillas.

(30:10):
I will never run out of stories. There's so much more history to be found. There were times in the
past, when I was younger and newer to the history game, when I thought, oh, there's only so many
stories to be told, or that I'm running out of stories. I have multiple long lists of to-do
stories. I'm constantly discovering new things. Well, oh, well, this hasn't been talked about

(30:34):
since 1918. Let's talk about it. Is there a place, maybe it's a library,
maybe it's a museum, or even a private historical collection that you'd like to spend time with?
In Alaska?

(30:54):
I've traveled around Alaska, even when I was an undergrad student at UA. I remember,
I got a couple of small grants, little travel grants that helped me go as far as UAF. Massive
for a poor undergrad history student, who's obviously not going to know what money is like
for the rest of his life. Gone to Juneau multiple times, just so I could do research.

(31:17):
Actually, Valdez, I've never been to Valdez. I've never had a reason to.
I've always been just out of the way. I don't know anyone there. There's never been a history
conference in a year that I was interested in going. They have a couple of resources,
including a very specific book they want to get into. That's the way I look at all of these places.

(31:38):
There are things for me to glean from everywhere. I'll be going to Seattle in a little bit, and I'm
hoping I find time to go to this one university holding, so I can find a logging magazine from
the 70s that talks about filming of a movie in Southeast. All of these places have bits and pieces.

(31:59):
Some will have more, some have less, but I don't tend to think of favorite as just
they're all on my list of places to visit and revisit.

(33:14):
But like a journal or some type of maybe oral history that was written down,
and maybe there's only one copy out there. Is there some type of

(33:34):
things that you've come across in your research? I'm going to take this note about this journal.
I'd love to track down this journal, or this book, or this painting, or fill in the blank.
There is a specific one I can think of. There's a journal. It was kept by a man who lived in Sitka

(33:56):
in the 1940s and 1950s. From all of the samples that were shared,
in the limited way they were shared, it is very, very earthy. It gets into grand detail about sex
workers and aspects of life that usually aren't covered. Unfortunately, this one, because most

(34:22):
people aren't that honest. I'm currently also working on a book that was written in the 70s
about Seward that was disgustingly honest. Really?
His daughter actually was also, a guy named John Paul Steiner wrote a book about the sinful city
on Resurrection Bay because he had lived there since the teens. He was going to tell the real

(34:44):
story. He names names. Really? Okay.
He says that. He's giving their real names. I'll be writing about this in this talk with you.
He's talking to the death of like, well, this guy was corrupt. He would go and meet with the sex
workers and the sex workers were this. Like most people back in Alaska then, he was neutral to

(35:05):
positive about sex workers. They fill a role in our society. We let them be here. Who would be
rude to a sex worker? That's just gross. He would say things like, well, this father at the church
is the foremost ass patter in town. That's the word, the phrasing he used. He collected asses.

(35:27):
He says he collected posteriors. He did use the term ass patter, that he collected posteriors
and he was known to walk the ladies down to the dock and that all of this ended when his sister
came to live with him and that there was a difference between family and just congregation.
Yeah. But there's this one journal, it's written by someone who was in Sitka during the 40s,

(35:50):
during the war, giving a civilian perspective of the war as well. Things that are just catnip for
me. I'm getting excited. Earnest, earthy, honest tellings of what life with sex workers was like
in Sitka. But it's being held by a rare bookseller and I can't remember exactly, but they want,

(36:10):
I don't know, $1,500, $2,000 for it. And they're of course not going to give me access to plunder
it for everything and share it publicly, reducing the value of their rare tome.
Because they want to sell it. And I am a humble historian, loathe to spend

(36:32):
thousand or more dollars on a rare journal, however much I want it.
Do you encounter that a lot where you find these pieces that are being sold and the sellers are
essentially a gatekeeper to history? The worst are pickers, self-described pickers,

(36:55):
people who, you know, who rife estate sales or hunt things like that. There's been a huge amount
of historical scrapbooks and photo albums, often with detailed annotations and descriptions
written into it. And what they'll do is they'll part it out. Here's some old photos I've known

(37:19):
where they've just ripped the photos out or ripped the pages out. There's one on eBay right now.
I can pull it up real quick. He, which includes some very rare photos from the Klondike Gold Rush
of this company from California. They call themselves the California Bears.
They came up here and of course did poorly like most Klondike Gold Rushers. That's another aspect

(37:42):
I'm always trying to hit people over the head with. The Gold Rush? That, so yeah, that it was
a horrible experience for the far, far majority of the people. They starved. They got exotic
diseases like scurvy that normal people don't experience. You have to be living a certain way

(38:03):
to get scurvy, even in 1898. But these people, they came up here and,
for example, they found a tree that was the hanging tree outside of Valdez.
And there they are. He wanted $600 for a single page, including this picture of this tree that

(38:25):
had been the hanging tree for one of the actual few examples in Alaska of frontier justice.
Guy got angry about money owed, killed a guy in, they, without any input from law enforcement,
which was rare to non-existent, depending on where you were in Alaska at that time.
And hung him from this tree. Oh, okay. And I would love to have this photo. Yeah. What would

(38:50):
you do with the photo? Well, I would write a whole article about it. I would share it.
That is my way. I share. I give. I have that belief in the utility of history is that
it has no value unless you share it. That's another reason why I've shied away from academia.
My wife's an academic. Everyone I know who I like almost is an academic.

(39:12):
But I saw too much of academic history being sort of in this tight little circle.
Like academics would write a history. A few academics would read that history.
They would comment on that history, and it would be this little bitty circle.
And I don't see the joy or the joy in sharing it. I don't see the joy in sharing it.

(39:37):
Or there's a value in that, but there's greater value in trying to teach as many people as
possible. I once gave this in a lecture to a group of historians at a conference.
It didn't go over well. What did they say? Since historians were my audience. I was telling them
like most journal articles are read by precisely the authors and the editor and no one else.

(40:00):
I've written and co-written journal articles. I have the reading stats. This is a highly
documented fact. Even the best journals you're talking, unless you're like some
massive impactful article, like hundreds. And I find that sad, like academic books,
like an academic history, shockingly rare. Okay, that album that person was selling with just the

(40:27):
tree. He had been selling a page for 600. It didn't sell. So now he is trying to sell the
entire album for $10,000. It's on eBay right now. I'm staring at the, yep, I'm looking at the
listing right now. Wow. He doesn't know the history of it. He doesn't actually know what
historical photos are worth. There are people like this almost every day. I'm searching eBay,

(40:48):
by the way, because a lot of this stuff, you search eBay, you look at the auction houses,
a lot of very interesting material will just sort of pop up briefly into the public
and then disappear again, back into like private hands.
Like museums, archives, they only have a fraction of the documentation that exists.

(41:08):
They're just findable, but this stuff I have to search every single day.
Otherwise I miss things. So in your experience, where does that price come from? Are they just
making it up? This is not what these photos go for. I mean, there are examples of rare history.
If he found another picture of Billy the Kid, I don't know the exact number, but it's less than

(41:32):
five pictures of Billy the Kid in existence, maybe two, three. When a new photo is found of
Billy the Kid, that is a bidding war. Pictures of a tree in Alaska minus the context, pictures of
random prospectors in the gold rush when there were quite a few prospectors and many, many trees,

(41:53):
that is not going to excite people beyond a historian and such as our ability to craft a
story around it. Intrinsically, there's little value other than the history you can derive from
it. It's just a picture. I'm looking at the picture now. I can send it to you in a sec.

(42:16):
It's just a picture of a tree in Alaska, which glory be.
But if I told the story of Doc Tanner, if I told a story about frontier justice,
that's a tale. That's didactic. It's entertaining. That's wonderful. That has some value.

(42:37):
The picture of a tree doesn't have much. Yeah. I think your work often reveals that
history survives in fragments. Old ads, property disputes, obituaries, rumors, photographs.
What is piecing those fragments together teach you about how a city or a state remembers itself?

(43:06):
Oh, that one that is difficult to remember yourself. There's a surprising number of instances
where a historical artifact survived only because someone retrieved it from the trash.
Really? Okay.
That has happened many a time. Also, sometimes writing an article is really, really good for

(43:27):
making these things pop up. Like, oh, you just wrote about this. You would have loved this source
I have in my home that no one else has. Of course I would have. How would I know that exists?
The only reason I knew about it, because I got friendly with the guy on social media,
he had a map that had a design for the runway channel that connects Lake Spenard and Lake Hood

(43:52):
in Anchorage. It was an early, early design blueprint map. He only had it because someone
threw it out at DOT, and he recovered it from the trash. I only knew about it because he was
kind enough to reach out, and he only knew of me because I was posting
like a mad person on social media trying to teach history like a fool.

(44:17):
These sort of things, like, history is left in the wake not in a solid stream of source material,
but in a debris. We are the wreckage from an airplane crash. We are trying to find bits and
pieces, some blown to the winds, some destroyed entirely, some scattered, some picked up by people

(44:39):
as souvenirs and taken around the world. If you had unlimited funds, what would you do?
If I had unlimited funds, well, I would, I've talked about, this isn't exactly what you asked,
but I'm going to say it this way. If I had unlimited funds, I would still do history,

(45:00):
because it is vocation and hobby all I want. I would still do history. I would do a lot more
fun history, and I would definitely feel untethered enough to speak about more uncomfortable topics.
There are topics that I still dare not approach, where I'm worried about the repercussions upon my

(45:20):
little unprotected life, and that I would also pursue the silliest of topics. I would buy that
journal, and I would write multiple treatises. I would give lectures. I'm shocked how much I've
grown to like giving lectures. Really? Okay. About history. Yeah, I'm shocked how much I like that,
because I remember when you, as we were just talking about, when you first interviewed me,

(45:43):
the first person to interview me, I sweated through my shirt. I was so nervous.
Huge, ugly, damp spots, just covered in wet, asking, did I do good? I'm shocked how much I
like doing that now. Yeah, I didn't notice. I was so interested in what you were saying.
You're nice. Not everybody is nice, but I would do the silliest talk. I would write

(46:08):
lectures and multiple articles about sex workers in 1940s Sitka, because it interests me,
and there's some value, but also, I would be having the most fun getting to dive into this.
How often do you step back from your work, especially at this point, you know, after you've

(46:31):
done so much, and you think, you know, I'm doing something really important right now?
Well, I don't, there are histories that are important.
Like, if anyone asks me to talk about housing discrimination, I immediately offer

(46:56):
the entirety of my research, offer to talk, offer to share anything, because it's important.
I tend not to, well, I definitely don't think of myself as important.
I think of revealing some of these facts as important, but I also know that it is not the

(47:18):
fullest rationale for the existence of history work. So, even if I'm writing something, and I
think, like, this bit is important, I try to include other bits. This was actually a critique
in that conference when I was critiquing historians to historians, like a genius.

(47:38):
I talked about that most historians don't consider the audience when they're crafting history,
which I think is egoism run amok. You're just thinking of the art of history. You're thinking
of this, you're not thinking about, well, someone actually has to read this for this to have any
value. So, I'm not a great writer. Certainly not. But what I can try and do, what I try to do is

(48:07):
what I try to do is try and present in as gentle and easy going a way as possible that I can slip
in entertaining, actually have it be entertaining, but then slip in facts about the reality of the
world. Darker facts. I recall I once wrote about an event in the 1970s where parents got really

(48:33):
mad about a dictionary that was in schools, libraries, because this dictionary was a little
hip, and it included slang meanings of words like ball, as in not just a bouncing toy ball.
A ball is a part of the body located, you know, things like this. And they were like,
oh my gosh, think of the children. And they actually had a dictionary banned from some

(48:58):
school libraries in Anchorage. That's the foremost book banning event in Anchorage history.
Really? Okay.
Yeah. We've got a lot more banned books coming, probably. But in that same article,
I'm writing obviously about, like, it's telling, it's a rough story about book banning,
but it's also a book about like a dictionary that people got upset because it said what a ball also

(49:21):
was. Like, so I'm obviously leading into the silliness of it. But then at the end of the
article, I worked in the whole like, well, what did the parents do next once their ire was done
with the balls? And then they were upset about Sylvia Plath, the author Sylvia Plath, and a play

(49:41):
based on her work. And then they were mad that there was a teacher in Government Hill who was
a lesbian, who they eventually ran out of town. Really?
Yes. Completely ran her out of town. They wanted her fired. She eventually, she wasn't fired.
She was removed from teaching. She was made to work in just the administrative offices. And then

(50:08):
she just, Anchorage had been ruined for her and she moved away. So working that in to the picture,
things like that are important to me. They tell a fuller story, a fuller context. Like the people
weren't just fighting silly dictionaries. Like this was the state of culture. And people can

(50:30):
take that lesson if they want, or they can just have fun because I can't control people. And I
know some people are going to just take the fun out of it. So I just put these bits in there because
I hope some learn. Some. Yeah. Which I think is as, like, that's the best possible outcome.
Some people are just going to have a great story, hopefully, about a dictionary being banned.

(50:52):
That this was the height of the culture wars for a year in Anchorage. That's grand. That's perfect.
How much of Alaska history, and here I'm talking about after Contact, how much of it feels
uniquely Alaskan and how much feels like American history wearing different clothes?

(51:17):
Oh, that's very well put. So much of settler Alaska. And this is a, as you were saying,
this is a sort of distinction I have to make. I often have to say Anchorage. I'm not talking
about the Dena'ina. I'm not talking about the fishing camp, the Highcock. I'm not talking
about Oklutna. I'm not talking about Kamsat, Warrensoff. I'm not talking about the old

(51:37):
village of Kanik. I'm not talking about any of that. In Anchorage, a shocking amount of the
settler history is attempts to import what they were familiar with, what they liked about life
outside. Like, I mentioned this in a recent article. When the people come up, 1915, they're

(51:57):
trying to build a railroad. Railroad people get here. They're upset that all these people are
tented out in a little city where they want to put all their stuff.
They have, there's a Waffle House. There's the Two Girls Waffle House. They have the sign on the
outside that says Two Girls Waffle House. I love it. There are sex workers. They're importing the

(52:22):
things that are important to them. And there's baseball. Like, they're carving out, they're
having to carve from raw forest and build a place. But they still take the time to build a baseball
field. Like, they weren't building an Alaska sport. They were importing. As soon as they could,

(52:46):
they started building movie theaters. As soon as they could, they wanted the books from outside.
They wanted the music from outside. One of the earliest complaints in Anchorage is you can find,
well, like, people would come visit and they're like, first off, this is just a mud hole. Because
again, that churned up earthly, it's just mud. That's a person called it a mud hole in one of

(53:08):
their earliest visits, a direct quote. Then they would go, well, this just looks like every other
town. People were like, oh, I want to see this new Alaskan town, this new gonna be metropolis
in the far, far north, in this place of myth and legend. Let me see what this actually looks like.
And they got here and they found, oh my goodness, a city of grids and little blocks and streets and

(53:31):
sidewalks. How original. So you find these quotes, you can find them in the 19-teens, you can find
them in the 1970s, you can find them now. They're like, well, they built Columbus, Ohio, but in
Alaska. Like, wow. There are some aspects where Alaskans make a difference. There is an experiential

(53:55):
difference. It's the way I often put it. I was in a discussion once with a Texan columnist,
and he was interested in the differences between Texas and Alaska. And I lived in Texas
for many years. I lived in Austin and Amarillo, which if you know Texas, that is
distant poles of Texas culture. That's very different worlds.

(54:20):
And I told him that what you don't see in Alaska as you would in Texas, you don't go everywhere
and you don't see, oh, this is an Alaska size portion. It's big because we are big in Alaska.
Everything's big in Alaska. You do see that in Texas. You see that everywhere in Texas.
Got to have that Texas big. Alaska, more than twice as big as Texas. You think that

(54:44):
would be a thing. A Texan would think that was a thing. And I'm like, no, not really.
Instead, it's experiential. Okay, you've survived a winter.
Like, you've gone through a winter. You've gone through the potholes.
Mm-hmm.
There's that aspect of the culture. You've gone through a freeze. You've gone through a melt.

(55:08):
You've gone through a breakup. You've gone through the difficulties of the shops,
you know, not having what you want because we're at a distant end of supply chains.
You've dealt with the shared experience of higher cost of being so isolated geographically from
everyone else. Before moving to Alaska, a thing like, oh, we're going shopping in Seattle,

(55:33):
that sounds like madness to someone in the lower 48.
It's real.
My first class in the lower 48, yes, I mean, for a certain class of people,
I saved up so I could take a vacation to go shopping in Seattle. Mad people.
We have a perfectly good Costco. But my first class at UAA, I grew up poor in the South.

(56:01):
I was not born in Alaska, to be honest. My first class at UAA, the teacher was talking
about something. She mentions Hawaii and she said, and you know, you've all been to Hawaii, right?
And I thought, what the hell are you talking about?
Madam, I was born in Alabama.
Yeah.
For damn sure, I have not seen any Hawaii. I'm lucky to be in Alaska.

(56:26):
And other people around me were nodding like, oh yeah, we've made that flight down to Hawaii.
It's grand. You know, you just want to escape winter. And I'm looking at them like,
you are a different people.
Have you read or heard about this fascination with Taco Bell? So I have a lot of family
that live in Juneau and there used to be a Taco Bell in Juneau, but there's no longer a Taco Bell

(56:53):
in Juneau. And so every time that my brother, Derek, for instance, comes to Anchorage, he always
just gets this enormous Taco Bell order, a bunch of Taco Bell hot sauces and brings it back home
to Juneau and we'll kind of squirrel it away. You know, he'll have like a soft taco and a bean

(57:16):
burrito or something like that and then put it in the refrigerator or I don't think he puts it in
the freezer. I think he might eat it faster than that, but. You're eating it long after you would
normally eat Taco Bell. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You're saving it because this is a delicacy.
Yeah. Normal thing is you eat Taco Bell immediately.
Yeah. Fast food is a fantastic example. That is a perfect example. You bring up fast food to

(57:43):
longtime Alaskans, they say, oh, you'll get the attitude of it's fast food. Come on. We can do
better with our local restaurants. You know, we don't need that in Alaska, but every time a fast
food place is open in Alaska, people have lost their minds. Yeah. All of them. When McDonald's,
all of them, when McDonald's, the first McDonald's opened here, I believe it was 1970.

(58:07):
The location, not the same building, but the location at Northern Lights and Arctic.
That was the biggest and most productive McDonald's in the nation.
Wow. They immediately had a second one in operation
later that year, further down, the one further down Northern Lights.
Then the biggest one in operation.

(58:31):
Just as recently, people camped outside of Krispy Kreme when it opened here in Anchorage.
Yeah. I remember I wanted to go to Sonic when it opened here. I was like, oh, do they still,
does ocean water still taste the same? I had this mad thought in my mind.
Does it taste the same as when I was a child? Yeah. I mean, I tried to go there, but that road

(58:52):
was jam packed. The line went out onto the road. I had pictures of it.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I won't go there, and then I forgot about it because my life moved on.
The madness of, they had to expand Old Seward when Kmart opened. Kmart was here before Walmart.
Kmart was across the street, is in that shopping center where Old Seward and Diamond

(59:17):
on the other side of the street from where Walmart is.
Okay. Yeah.
And when Kmart opened, they had to expand Old Seward, and Kmart partially paid for it.
So many people were going there. When someone recently asked me about Juno when their first
Walmart opened, they had a Kmart first as well. They had a Kmart many years before they got a

(59:42):
Walmart. And when the Kmart opened the doors, an old-timer ran in, grabbed a manager, and said,
quote, give them hell. Because he thought, as is and was a popular attitude, it was that the
locally owned shops were price-gounding. Okay. Okay. Okay.
So he was like, give them hell, you Kmart. Crush those local places.

(01:00:08):
He was an old sourdough type. He looked like an old sourdough type. He looked like he could
read you poetry off the hop about the gold rush. But he's like, give them hell, Kmart.
Yeah.
Yeah. Fast food and the chains are revelatory about how people actually think. As always,
the actions speak louder than any declarations of individuality or uniqueness.

(01:00:34):
Anchorage always seems caught between instability and reinvention. And I feel like this goes all
the way back to its origins, you know, that we were talking about earlier as a makeshift
railroad camp that became a city. What do you think of that?

(01:00:56):
It's a great question. I think it's a great question. I think it's a great question.
It's true. Anchorage has boomed and busted. There's a period I really want to write about
Anchorage history that I've only referenced so far, and that's the late 80s. 85, oil prices crash,

(01:01:19):
and the city just, a large part of the city just dies. There's a massive population
outmigration. Multiple banks close, which, like I'm a historian, but even to me, the idea of
multiple banks failing, many banks failing, sounds like Great Depression era material, not
Reagan America. But that is what happened here. And you found newer housing developments, just

(01:01:48):
quiet whispers of the wind and groaned wheeze as all these people have moved in at high tide,
but couldn't sustain the payments when the low came. That's a period I want to write about badly.
I just haven't gotten around to it yet. That instability goes to, it's a good way to illustrate

(01:02:10):
that don't trust anyone who tells you what future is going to hold for Anchorage.
Because Anchorage could have been very well skipped over by the railroad in 1914 when they
were picking a location that did not exist after all. Other towns wanted to be the headquarters,
like Seward and Kinnick, which was on the other side of the water, sort of the tail end of KGB

(01:02:33):
Road. Anchorage could have been skipped over by the Army in 1939 when they were picking military
sites. Other places were under consideration. Other towns wanted it badly, like Seward and
Valdez. They wanted to be the Army base. I think about this, one of my pet peeves is futurists,

(01:02:58):
people who think that you can derive the future from the past and current events.
Every single time, it's a con and just a projection of supposed intelligence. It's not actual.
People who tell you they know what is happening is lying. They're pushing an agenda or they're just,

(01:03:18):
again, projecting their broader perspective of society.
That's my lesson from this instability, that we do not know what will happen.
Do you think that that instability and reinvention still defines Anchorage?
To a certain extent.

(01:03:39):
You definitely see it in our educational system.
You see it in a decline in our building stock. So much of our building stock was built in booms.
Our building stock ages in massive clusters.
That will be a long-term impact. There was once a couple of researchers up here,

(01:04:02):
and they wanted to use Anchorage to study the lifespan of building stock, of housing,
of the actual structures. They looked around, and eventually they took me on a tour to point
out what they saw. They hated Anchorage. They said it was pretty here, the views are lovely,

(01:04:26):
love the mountains. We hate the buildings. We would never buy a house here. We most especially
would never buy a house on the hillside. We would never buy a house in Eagle River.
They took me, for example, to Sand Lake and showed me, look at everything settling in these
former wetlands. Sure enough, you can go out to some of these areas of Anchorage and see just

(01:04:49):
driveways askew from parking garages. You see fences that are in waves when that's not how
they were built. They're in waves now because of the land shifting. You go out to the hillside
where they're beyond some of the building codes, and you see windows stacked upon windows with no
solid structure that will collapse worse than matchsticks in the case of a violent earthquake.

(01:05:16):
In one case, we could see a house being built. We could see inside it,
and we could see these massive, you see those homes out on the hillside are just walls of glass.
There's a structural cost to doing that, or there should be if you want it to be stable,
and not all these homes are doing that. In some cases, this one house we could see being built up

(01:05:37):
there, this wall of glass was above a garage. Not sufficient. They were like,
dear God, I would never buy this house. That is asking to collapse.
Are there any parts of present-day Anchorage that you're looking forward to researching

(01:06:02):
in the future? Something that's happening right now that you don't have the benefit of
time yet because not enough time has passed in order to research it because it's still unfolding.
A couple things come to mind. They're not the best examples, but they come to mind. One is

(01:06:28):
trailer parks and their slow decay. There's that trailer park being eliminated in Midtown.
Back in the 1950s, 1940s, Anchorage was booming from a ton of 4,000 people to,
it was just under 4,000 in 1939 when the census was conducted for 1940.

(01:06:52):
For the 1950 census, it's like 32,000 in the Anchorage area
because it had gone so far past the city limits. You can't just say city of Anchorage population.
You end up with a lot of temporary homes, people living in tents again, a lot of trailer parks.
Trailer parks make a huge percentage of the housing stock by the late 1950s.

(01:07:16):
And then they start to disappear as they age out.
There are cultural thoughts about people who live in trailers. I've lived in a trailer.
I've heard them. I didn't live in a trailer in Anchorage, but I've lived in a trailer.
But there are parks that used to be trailer homes.

(01:07:40):
La Honda off of Northern Lights in Turnagin. I believe it's Northwoods Park in Spenard.
You can actually, if you look at Northwoods, there's a lake and then there's spots and you
can actually make out from the satellite image, well, okay, that's where trailer homes were.
There's the little lots because they've been eliminated as that stock ages and it ages like

(01:08:03):
milk, the stock of trailer homes. They're not built to endure in winters for centuries,
to say the least. So I'm interested in that. I'm interested in that outcome.
I'm interested in the city turning back. It's back on what it once was. It's one of those

(01:08:25):
things where people, again, don't talk about that it were so many trailer parks.
And they'd be very, there's that large part of the population would be very happy to continue
to turn their back on them and have them disappear and have what are to them nice,
pretty homes or new businesses, commercial districts to drive through.

(01:08:46):
You've written about how names shape identity, neighborhoods, landmarks, businesses, parks.
Why do names matter so much in Anchorage?
One of my hottest history takes is that I don't think we should name things after people

(01:09:10):
because I don't think we can be grown up about the discussions.
Hmm. I think like there are way too many examples of what happens when people talked about names.
I have made a legislature turn, legislator turn red and shut off my microphone while
mentioning that an army officer was found guilty in court martial court for the war

(01:09:33):
crime of torturing prisoners. And that was Edwin Glenn that the Glenn is named for.
Hmm. Okay.
Oh, he turned furious and then he had a whole thing. Yes. And the only reason we know about
the things he did is because his other soldiers were very unsettled by the torture. People got
upset when they wanted to change the name of East High because people are very emotionally

(01:09:56):
tied to the Cardinal directions. They have strong feelings about the word East.
Names matter in that they reflect who we
are. In a certain way, they reflect who we find important enough to be honored, to be remembered,
because that's the idea of naming a place after someone is that, oh, we will remember them.

(01:10:20):
This also goes to my hot take that we shouldn't name things after people because it doesn't work.
Like the next person who's able to tell me something actually instructive about
Willard Bowman, who Bowman school is named after. Yeah. Will be the first. They remember
that name, but they have known nothing about the person. It didn't work to preserve that

(01:10:42):
person and their legacy. I'm not even going to describe it because let someone come prove me
wrong. The other side of it is for all as much rage as can sometimes happen when people change
name. It's not a new thing. There used to be another road called the Glenn in Anchorage.
There was a Glenn Street and it was in Mountain View and it was perpendicular to the highway.

(01:11:06):
So there was literally a corner of Glenn and Glenn. And this is, that's really bad planning.
That's the sort of thing, like as a plant, like in planning, like these things have to go,
there's a review. You have to suggest names for developers that to suggest names that they have
to be approved. And usually you avoid things like the corner of Glenn and Glenn. And so they

(01:11:29):
just say, we're going to change the name of the street. And people protest it because like,
I live on Glenn. And people are like, which Glenn? You know, you send out emergency services.
You have to go to Glenn, which Glenn that has legitimately caused issues in the past. For
example, now we still have in Fairview, there are two parks. There's Fairview Park and there

(01:11:50):
are Fairview Lions Park. Those are completely different parks. And there has literally been
issues about directing emergency services. The other thing names reveal is again,
how sloppy we can be as a people. There are too many cases where we'll just go with that

(01:12:14):
sort of attitude. Well, someone called it this, so we're going to keep calling it that. And then
you become emotionally attached to it as like the word East, which is a very holy cardinal direction.
It's very important to all of us, the word East. You get like a lot of the streets, especially in
Southern Anchorage are named after homesteaders because they lived there. And you were like,

(01:12:39):
oh, that's Abbott. You know why it's called Abbott? Because Cecil Abbott had a homestead out there.
And the road kind of led to his homestead. Cecil Abbott was just an insurance salesman.
He wasn't a famous person about town. He wasn't a city leader. He didn't fund Little League baseball
or help establish the museum or anything like that. You know, he didn't save people during a war. He

(01:13:05):
was an insurance salesman. He had a little shop downtown that had a Dion sign. But you called it
Abbott because he was there and why not? Spenard Road, Joe Spenard lived in Anchorage for about 20
months. He was a criminal who ran a taxi service, illegally cut a road out to the lake through what

(01:13:28):
was then National Forest Land. He built a little dance hall club. It burned down. He leaves town
in around 20 months in Anchorage total. And people for decades later were like, eh,
it's the road out to Spenard Lake. So it's the Lake Spenard Road. It's Spenard. Let's
just call it Spenard. O'Malley was one of the homesteaders. Julie O'Malley, the granddaughter,

(01:13:57):
the great food writer, she has written about the only reason it's called O'Malley Road is because
her grandfather, the old Doc O'Malley, was the first on the petition to build a road there.
I mean, after all, we are in a city called Anchorage, which is just a word for a safe
place to park a ship. Yeah. There's a certain laziness to names and then we become invested

(01:14:20):
and emotional about it. Like East, please do never touch a word like that sacred like East again.
If Anchorage disappeared tomorrow and only your columns survived.
Sarcastic cheering from Palmer.
What kind of city do you think readers would imagine Anchorage to have been?

(01:14:45):
Well, that's interesting. That makes me think I've been too negative
because now I think like, well, they would think there was if they were only going from what I
wrote, like I'm trying to deal with the existing knowledge and existing perceptions in a certain
way. If they went just from what I wrote, maybe they would only think Anchorage was a wild place

(01:15:08):
full of bars and murders where, shockingly, women weren't safe, rife with discrimination. So,
yes, they would be accurate to great lengths. It actually makes me think I should write more
triumphant positive stories. As I try and think of like a literature of a town only being influenced

(01:15:29):
by me, maybe I should write happier stories. Now that I know that you have issues with futurism,
I actually thought about not asking you this, but I'm interested to hear what you have to say.
So, considering what you know about its past, what do you think the future of Anchorage

(01:15:55):
might look like? Oh, probably unfulfilling, but the short answer is I don't know. More people,
by the way, should be comfortable saying that. This is a very specific thing that I worked on
for myself because I am a historian. It's my identity. It's my hobby. It's my job, profession,

(01:16:16):
vocation. And so, you want to be an authority at all times, of course, but I've worked really hard
to try and be better at saying I just don't know about certain things. I can try to find out.
Right now, I don't know. That's the short answer. The longer answer is, again,
I don't know, and that means no one else really does either, not with any sort of certainty,

(01:16:41):
and that anyone who does say they know what Alaska is going to be like, you should be
suspicious about them. You should be skeptical. They're peddling to you. They're trying to sell
you something. They're trying to convince you without facts. Like, I feel like I failed if I
say I don't know to a certain extent within my soul. I feel like, oh, I suck as a historian. I

(01:17:06):
don't know the answer to every single question about history that exists in the world at a
single moment off the top of my head, which sounds stupid, but that is indeed how I feel, that I
failed, and I was not good at this once upon a time, and I've tried to get better, and it's
actually done wonders for humility. I even think it can make what I produce more engaging, that

(01:17:30):
sort of honesty, but then I do know there are people who will be, well, I don't want to learn
from an expert who says he doesn't know something, so I have to deal with that reality, but again,
I would prefer to be honest. Yeah. Yeah, I think honesty is the best policy, right? Yeah.

(01:17:58):
Well, David, those are all the questions I have for you. I want to thank you for your time and
for the care and the curiosity you bring to documenting Anchorage and everything that
shaped it. Thank you. I appreciate that.

(01:18:27):
Thank you.
For more information about the Anchorage Museum, visit anchoragemuseum.org.
This podcast was produced by me, Cody Liska, for the Anchorage Museum,

(01:18:51):
with additional help from Julie Decker.
Chatter Mark's music is produced by Keys Open Doors.

(01:19:20):
This podcast was produced by me, Cody Liska, for the Anchorage Museum, with additional help from Julie Decker.