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Opulence & Elements. Alaska has already made a running start with the resource of people. Anchorage, near the Kenai Peninsula, vibrates with a population of 35,000, has an opulent subdivision of $35,000 homes built by enterprising Wally Hickel. Two tall apartment houses peak the skyline, a glassed-in, year-round swimming pool ripples within sight of icy mountains, and fashionably dressed men and women frequent the Westward Hotel's spiffy cocktail lounge. Juneau still straggles with dingy, narrow streets from the roaring gold-rush times. Local phone service ends twelve miles from town, electricity 19 miles, the road 26 miles. In Juneau too, as if insulated from the rest of the territory by the mountains, are those who are most vocal against immediate statehood, led by the Juneau Empire's Publisher William Prescott ("Alamo"') Allen, a former Texan.
Fairbanks was once a settlement quilted with sod-chinked log cabins. Today, livelier than ever, it still has many cabins, but the city has good utilities, the University of Alaska (on-campus enrollment: 700), a handsome Professional Building, and an urban redevelopment program that is chewing up the old cabins once inhabited by the bawds of "the line" to make room for more acceptable businesses.
Alaska has a stir and a throb that reaches far beyond the cities, into the tundra, across the forbidding mountains and glaciers, into the valleys. For most Alaskans, each day is a dare, each night a doubtful victory. Territorial Police Superintendent Bob Brandt's meager force of uniformed police and U.S. deputy marshals patrol the vastnesses in planes, helicopters and on dog sleds, alert for signs of old trappers who sometimes die on the trail and are eaten by their dogs; for pillagers who ransack the remote cabins, where a food cache is a guarantee of life for the inhabitant; for the hardy men who are inexplicably swallowed up in the unmapped oblivion.
Dynamic Chemistry. The airplane, operated by scheduled airlines as well as by oldtime bush pilots and private owners, is the tie to the cities for the thousands who live in wilderness villages. Airlines touch Point Barrow in the far north on the Arctic Ocean, Kotzebue on Kotzebue Sound, Attu in the Aleutians. Bush Pilot Don Sheldon, 36, hauls Indians and Eskimos, dog teams, pregnant women, dynamite and lumber, drops his handy craft onto a slippery strip in Umiat or on crags high in the mountain ranges. He brings groceries to Schoolteacher Charlie Richmond (home town: Tuxedo Park, N.Y.), who lives in Sleetmute (pop. 120) on the Kuskokwim River, where English-speaking Eskimos still attend Sleetmute's Russian Orthodox Church. Pilots transport Fairbanks Attorney Ed Merdes, 32, head of the Alaskan Junior Chamber of Commerce, who periodically visits club chapters in such places as Metlakahtla, south of Ketchikan. And they see, day after day, the strengthened heart of a people willing to challenge new frontiers.
"I tell you this," says John Butrovich, with the special kind of awe that seems to flourish in Alaskans, "a dynamic chemistry is working here." That chemistry is a passion for life and growth. To Mike Stepovich and the rest of Alaska's leaders, statehood is a birthright, and they have etched that declaration on the skylines of the cities and on the cold, unyielding glaciers of their land.