In early 1916, a Fairbanks grand jury indicted eight men for sexually abusing underage girls. The alleged perps were over 40, the girls under 15. The cases were unrelated except for the nature of the crime. The trials followed one another for weeks. They produced several convictions, several not-guilty verdicts, and Dan Callahan, a long-serving city councilman, was found guilty but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned his conviction.
The evidence horrified many of the 1,300 people in the Fairbanks area. Others felt the men had been framed or set up.
Teen Grace Carey was involved with several of the men, including Callahan. Her name was in the papers, the whole town knew her identity -- and the identity of her parents, a miner and his Native wife. Grace gave no indication Callahan had used coercion; she testified she went to his cabin willingly and received $3. But a schoolgirl's willingness was no defense then, nor is it now.
Grace was 14 when the trials began. She spent her 15th birthday on the witness stand testifying against Callahan.
What became of this girl whom a defense attorney shamelessly vilified as a teen trollop and a newspaper called street trash? I wondered -- especially because we share the same surname.
U.S. Attorney R.F. Roth talked to Grace about reform school. He also mulled sending her to a convent school. I didn't know where she went after the trials, but I guessed she married young -- that has been the age-old solution, imposed by males, of course, on young women whose sexual misadventures threaten social order. Get her a husband and let him straighten her out.
But if she married, her name would change, so how could I find her?
I started to give up.
Until untiring Fairbanks researcher Joan Skilbred located her in Ferndale, Wash., in 1919 -- married. Once I had her married name, I could follow her. By 1930, Grace and her husband, a ship's engineer, were parents of a 5-year-old, living in San Francisco. I am not sure if she remained married, but I know she lived the rest of her life in the Bay Area. The San Francisco Public Library provided me with her death notice in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Grace died Nov. 10, 1967, at age 66 and lies buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, Calif. The funeral was Catholic; the death notice suggests she was deeply involved in the church.
I was in San Francisco several months before she died. It was the end of the Summer of Love. The smell of marijuana was in the air but I preferred getting high on the music of '67. I can remember the first time I heard Cream. Eric Clapton's limpid guitar mesmerized me. Dressed in hippie garb, I had come a long way from the Fairbanks of my childhood and the sourdough miners whose cabins I visited with my dad, trapper Fabian Carey. Grace Carey had come a long way too -- possibly from some of those same cabins, built in her childhood, along the Chena River.
Last week, I called Hoogasian Flowers in San Francisco and ordered a bouquet for Grace's grave. I am not sure why, beyond a feeling that, after more than 90 years of indifference, somebody from Fairbanks should show her respect.
Harold Hoogasian, the shop owner, was most obliging, delivering flowers to Holy Cross Cemetery the same day. Harold loves to talk politics. He told me about running for mayor of San Francisco as a Republican -- a quixotic adventure -- and recalled what he called the unfair, incompetent press coverage of his campaign. "People don't believe it when I tell them San Francisco used to have a Republican mayor, George Christopher," Harold said. I told him I believed it because I have written about George's brother, Johnny, a construction worker slain in an Anchorage shootout. Johnny died long ago, when Grace was one of George's constituents.
After Harold's photo of the grave arrived by e-mail, I began asking myself: What did Grace remember about Fairbanks? Did she remember old Second Avenue? Dan Callahan's face? The musty smell of willows along the Chena? Did she tell her daughter and granddaughter something about their roots in the Gold Rush -- her father had been in the Yukon before Fairbanks -- or did she prefer to forget? If she tried to forget, did Fairbanks return to her in dreams?
It's too late to answer these questions. I had my chance in 1967 when Grace and I were blocks apart in San Francisco. But what would a dying woman say to a green-as-grass young man with a head full of Cream? I am only left to guess -- and to send lilies to her grave.
Michael Carey is the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News. He can be reached at mcarey@adn.com.
MICHAEL CAREY COMMENT