Alaska News

Old Iditarod Gang gets back together to document race's early years

In the early days of the Iditarod, Raine Hall Rawlins, the race's first paid staffer and executive director, barely scraped by.

She remembers writing the Iditarod Runner, one of the organization's first newsletters, on paper by candlelight in the small Yukon River community of Ruby, where she was on the Iditarod Trail Committee's board and a dog handler for champion musher Emmitt Peters. Back then, in the early 1970s, there was no phone, no typewriter, no electricity for light bulbs in the village.

When she later moved to Wasilla, Rawlins went and found the first telephone for the race's first office, using her own money to pay for it.

In those days, Rawlins said in an interview Thursday along with fellow Old Iditarod Gang members Gail Phillips and Frank Flavin, the race had only one veterinarian and a handful of volunteers.

Compare that with today: a staff of 10, 50 to 60 veterinarians lining the trail and perhaps thousands of volunteers. It's a big change, one that the old crew still finds remarkable.

"We got it done," Phillips said of the early days.

"And it was so much fun," Rawlins added, noting that the phone number she registered for the Iditarod Trail Committee is the same main line the race uses to this day.

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Now the Old Iditarod Gang has gotten back together to compile "Iditarod -- The First Ten Years," an anthology coffee-table book documenting the formative years of the race from 1973 to 1983. The "gang" represents an informal group of former mushers, race organizers, volunteers, veterinarians and staffers who all helped during the race's first years.

With Iditarod 43 just around the corner, the 10 years covered in the book represents less than a quarter of the 1,000-mile sled dog races to Nome. But those years shaped the the race moving forward. In sharing memories of the old gang, the idea for a book was born.

Phillips, one of the first race organizers and later elected speaker of the Alaska House, hosted race headquarters in her Spenard home during the early years. With many of the old members of the group either dying or fading, it was important to record the history, she said.

"We had to preserve it or it would all be gone," Phillips said.

The hefty book -- 424 pages and weighing 7 pounds, not including a separate supplement -- contains hundreds of stories, thousands of photographs and plenty of original artwork from longtime race illustrator Jon Van Zyle.

Putting the book together was a five-year process that involved hundreds of people, with just two dedicated to editing the material. The group hosted meetings in Anchorage and Fairbanks, asking for volunteers from the early days to come forward with stories and photos. Phillips said some of the stories were thousands of words long.

With enthusiasm building, the group committed to filling the book with as many stories and photos as they could but that came at a price. Rawlins said the publisher demanded its size be cut in half. That just wasn't an option for the crew.

"We felt the stories needed to be told," Rawlins said.

So instead, the group raised funds to self-publish 5,000 copies at a cost of $219,000.

A Kickstarter campaign helped the group recoup $60,000. Phillips and others noted that everyone involved in the project worked on a volunteer basis. The group plans to donate a portion of the book sale receipts to the Iditarod Trail Race Foundation. So far, they've contributed $4,500 to the organization, with the funds devoted to helping veterinarians and dog care.

The book, which retails for $59.95, will be available for purchase at an unveiling Friday at the Millennium Alaskan Hotel. The book is also available online and at bookstores across Alaska.

Suzanna Caldwell

Suzanna Caldwell is a former reporter for Alaska Dispatch News and Alaska Dispatch. She left the ADN in 2017.

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