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Cricks & Daffodils. To Alaskan oldtimers, even the weather had augured well for statehood. Not since 1912, when Alaska first became an organized territory and won its first real, if tiny, measure of home rule, had the winter been so mild and the breakup so early. Parkas, mukluks, beaver caps and sealskin coats were thankfully stored away. The ice was gone from the Yukon River, and from the Porcupine, the Koyukuk and the Selawick. Out to Woodchopper, to Steel Creek, Poorman and a hundred other placer gold camps, packed the glint-eyed prospectors in search of a glint in the sand and gravel. In the villages of the Panhandle in the southeast, the red salmonberry blossoms fluttered, and the Indians spun out to gather wild celery and Indian rhubarb, came home for feasts of delicate herring eggs (cooked in seal oil, garnished with soy sauce). Spring yawned in the lower valleys, and out popped the arctic poppy, shooting star, lupine and forget-me-not (Alaska's official flower). And now, after a long winter's self-imposed confinement, out lumbered the great Alaskan bears—and with them the sudden sparkle of high military brass from Washington, who, it just so happens, favor the bear season as the best time for Alaskan inspection trips.
School was out, and that meant that once again Eskimo and Indian children in the Alaska Native Service boarding school in the Panhandle were flown home to their villages in Anaktuvuk Pass in the Brooks Range, and to Chukwuktoligamut near the Bering Sea. In the heartland city of Fairbanks (pop. 11,000), fourteen hundred 4-H Club members relieved their mothers of that wintered-in, cabin-fever feeling by piling outside and scurrying to register for their summer activities. Bud Hilton's Thawing Service advertised steam-cleaning service for building exteriors, while out on the Alcan Highway, dust warnings replaced ice-warning signs. On the Fairbanks outskirts moose calves, abandoned by their mothers, bawled like babies, and into a downtown pool hall waddled a full-grown porcupine. It was 80° in the Panhandle's Ketchikan, and 60-lb. salmon flopped through the water in search of fishermen. Farther up the Panhandle, in the capital city of Juneau (pop. 7,200), gardens danced with lilacs and daffodils, and folks admired the new paint job that glistened on the twelve-story Mendenhall apartment building (preparation, some gossiped, for the filming of Edna Ferber's Ice Palace). In a cocktail lounge a jukebox played Squaws Along the Yukon ("Oogah, oogah, oogah, which means I love you, won't you be my honey so I can oogah, oogah, you?").
Nickels & Peanuts. On the coast of Baranof Island, Sitka, last capital of Russian America* was bustling with the clack and crunch of a new $55.5 million pulp mill abuilding. Up to the north, Nome's Sah Yung Ah Tim Mini Chapter (Eskimo talk for "strength gone from the body") of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis was busy pressing its immunization drive, and Bush Pilot Neal Foster, 41, reported that Nome (pop. 2,000) was having a pleasant day at 45° and that "a bunch of people are getting their boats in the water here now, mostly for seal hunting."