Forget-Me-Nots

Neva Eagan was a young mother in 1958 when the senate approved statehood for Alaska.

Married to the man that would become Alaska’s first governor, she was in Washington watching the senate as the vote neared.

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Willie Hensley wasn’t even in the state just before statehood.

An Inupiat from Kotzebue, he was at a private prep school on the East Coast.

During his four years there he could only afford one trip home.

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Edward Itta was 13 when Alaska became a state.

He had just left Barrow for the first time to attend boarding school.

Fifty years later he is Mayor of the North Slope Borough.

He reflects back on what it was like being an Inupiat Eskimo living in the territory of Alaska.

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Emil Notti was a young man when he wrote a letter to a few Natives group suggesting that they get together to Native rights to lands in Alaska.

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In 1963 Ingrid Peterson became the first person to fly a single-engine plane over the North Pole.

She took off from Fairbanks with her husband, Ayna, navigating.

Her Cessna 205 was loaded with 200 gallons of extra fuel.

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Johanna Bouker grew up in Dillingham the daughter of the man who developed the Brooks Camp in what would become the Katmai National Park and Preserve.

The old Malatka Air Service was a family affair with Johanna’s mother running the office.

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Bill Egan became Alaska’s first Governor but not without a fight from Bob Atwood, publisher of the Anchorage Times who had pushed hard for statehood.

Kenneth Atkinson, an anchorage attorney, remembers how his law partner, George McLaughlin, managed the Egan campaign.

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When Susan Bramsted was 16 she went to work at Cordova Air, which later merged with Alaska Airlines.

She still works for Alaska Airlines and remembers the early days – when she got a ride with a neighbor back and forth to work at the Anchorage airport.

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John Enge is a Petersburgh fishermen who remembers that the fish traps set up by processors in Southeast during territorial days tempted many to dip into the captive bounty.

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Johanna Bowker was a bored housewife in Dillingham when she noticed one of the women organizing a class with an interesting instructor for the community.

Then that family left town.

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In 1972, Dave Bouker had just been hired to run the tiny Dillingham Electric Cooperative when the group decided to go into the phone business.

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Dennis Maloney was a young man in law school and working for Alaska’s Senator Mike Gravel as his lead staffer on communications, when Congress was deciding how to divide up the sky.

The competition came down to RCA and Comsat.

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In the early 60’s Diane Carpenter and her family’s homestead on the Kuskokwim became a village. She did everything from running the trading post and post office at Stony River to maintaining the power system – a job that was 24-7.

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Dr. Dan O’Connell was in rural Alaska in time to help clean up after the T.B epidemic in the 60’s … now he worries about the rise of diabetes. He says people were more fit when they had less conveniences.

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In 1970 Hellen Nienhueser was an Anchorage housewife who’d lead girl scout camps when she decided to lead a fight for Senator John Rader’s bill liberalizing Alaska’s abortion laws.

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In 1962 Diane Carpenter who had started the village of Stony River at the site of her family’s homestead on the Kuskokwim was attending a conference in Fairbanks when she heard about a plan by a Japanese company to cut the timber along the river.

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Liz Cheney is an Alaska Native from Kake.

She says Natives were left out of the effort to create a state.

Only one — Frank Peratrovich participated in the constitutional convention.

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Dan O’Connell graduated from med school and headed north to Alaska to work in the Indian Health service in the early 60’s. Unlike many others, he and his family stayed to make a home in rural Alaska. He caught the tail end of a traditional way of life.

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