Historians, writers and others with a passion for Alaska history have been vigorously discussing the role of the Cold War in shaping the territory and later the state. I was born at the opening of the Cold War and experienced it from the perspective of a kid curious about the adult world.
My parents abandoned their trap line near Lake Minchumina and moved to Fairbanks in the fall of 1950 so I could begin school. Fabian and Mary believed my younger sister Kathleen and I deserved a proper education -- and to them home schooling by mail with a Calvert course was not a proper education.
After WW II, the military began to withdraw from Fairbanks, and mining reasserted itself as the economic engine of Interior Alaska, accompanied by regional trade. But the Cold War and the outbreak of the Korean conflict touched off a wave of military construction at Ladd Field and Eielson Air Force Base, 26 miles east of Fairbanks, which had opened near the end of World War II. Before long, squadrons of airmen filled barracks old and new at both bases and manned the busy flight lines night and day. Fairbanksans became accustomed to the roar of jet engines as fighter pilots and bomber crews trained for the unthinkable: Nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
Everybody in town, including the kids, knew that if war broke out, Soviet bombers would reduce the bases -- and Fairbanks -- to radioactive rubble.
The house we bought on the banks of the Chena River was a typical example of Cold War Alaska hybrid construction. The bedrooms and kitchen were log, the living room surplus lumber and shingles from Ladd Field. "Surplus" was a euphemism for stolen. The military, hurrying to counter the Soviet threat, wastefully oversupplied the local bases. The temptation to ignore "Property USAF" stenciled on two-by-fours was overwhelming. Construction workers did not regard taking home "surplus" as a sin.
GI payday was the most important day of the month for local merchants, especially the bar owners who catered to airmen. When the bars were full at night, the city jail was crowded the following morning. Ted Stevens, who later served four decades in the U.S. Senate, was the federal district attorney in Fairbanks in the mid-1950s. Stevens soon discovered his Harvard law degree had not prepared him for the challenges facing law enforcement in a frontier town where liquor and women were for sale around the clock.
Many airmen were from small Midwestern and southern communities where stern Protestant morality prevailed. These young men, often fresh from basic training, were green-as-grass marks to the young women whom the bars advertised as "beautiful hostesses" -- the b-girls, taxi dancers, strippers and prostitutes who greeted customers inside the dark, smoky clubs. These working girls were not to be trifled with. The local newspaper, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, described a girl firing a pistol at an airman struggling to pull up his trousers as he fled down a bar-lined street. The paper primly attributed the gunfire to "a dispute over personal services."
The bars also were home to dice games, card games, pinball machines, and various wheels of chance, although the bar owners did their best to diminish the role of chance. Drugs were available if you knew whom to ask. In summer, the Golden Heart City has as much as 21 hours of day light. When tipsy airmen left the bars in the wee hours of the morning, they found themselves squinting into the midnight sun, further evidence Fairbanks was no place like home.
Investigators imported from the states to study the nightlife concluded the mayor himself was involved with "beautiful hostesses," noting in passing that he was a sexual athlete who knew "more tricks than a monkey on a six-foot wire."
Fabian dismissed the GIs as "a bunch of dumb kids" and labeled the bar owners, the girls, and the gamblers "the parasites." His dollars came too hard to fool away in the dingy shacks clustered along the edge of town that billed themselves The Club 69, The Club Morocco, The Kasbah, and The Club Zanzibar or in Fairbanks' architectural marvel, The Squadron Club -- a hastily-constructed, frame building attached to the fuselage of a C-46 aircraft.
Fabian was in the clubs only during his short tenure as a territorial highway patrolman, his first job after we reached Fairbanks from Minchumina, and only in response to complaints. These clubs -- and many more like them -- usually had brief lives. If the authorities didn't close them, arsonists, attempting to diminish the competition or defraud an insurance company, did. One arsonist confessed to lawmen that as he and his female partner in crime pulled away from a flaming club, she looked back from their pickup and noted with satisfaction "That mother be gone directly."
Most of my classmates ignored the parasites, although -- let's face facts -- a few adopted them as role models. For me, their raw vitality and contempt for the law made them fascinating. Even a kid could see they played a significant role in the American way of life our troops were defending against communism.
Michael Carey is a Dispatch News columnist.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, e-mail commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com