Edmund Schuster is the unofficial historian of the long-departed City of Glen Alps, a tiny corner of mountainside Anchorage that was absorbed into the unified municipality in 1975. I discovered this when Edmund sent a commentary to the paper in an ancient envelope bearing the city's return address.
"I have a whole box of papers from the City of Glen Alps," he said. "Frugal as I am -- these envelopes, I thought, why should I throw them away?"
Back then Glen Alps was a "city" of maybe 30-40 people, organized so it could get road maintenance funding from the state, Schuster said. He moved up there from the flatlands of Anchorage in 1972, spending the winter in an A-frame while he built his house. In those days, getting all the way up the mountain "was very, very trying. You had to walk home half the time."
The winter of '74, '75 "was really, really bad," and he decided he could do a better job with the road maintenance. The work didn't always make him popular. The budget was tight, and slow snowplowing produced plenty of gripes.
A carpenter from the mountains of Austria, Schuster says he built most of the houses at Glen Alps. He first came to Alaska in 1964, originally eyeing Fairbanks because it had the state university. When the earthquake hit Anchorage, he saw big potential for work in the rebuilding city, which had a university of its own, then known as Alaska Methodist.
With AMU available, "I had no reason to freeze my (posterior) off to get an education," he said. "The earthquake saved me from Fairbanks." After more schooling in Oregon, he went on to a 20-year career teaching at Anchorage Community College and the local universities.
From his first arrival in Alaska, he thought about becoming a U.S. citizen, but the turmoil of the Vietnam era, along with later political events, left him disillusioned. The election of Barack Obama restored his faith in his adopted land. If that could happen, he said, the country was all right with him. He's now the proud holder of a U.S. passport.
With the termination dust approaching at his exalted elevation, Schuster is preparing for his 38th winter up there. He doesn't regret the passing of his little city.
Unification "was all for the better," he said, "even though Glen Alps got plowed under in the process."
Matt Zencey