50th Anniversary of Statehood

Today is the Big Day for Alaska - President Eisenhower signed the statehood bill into law on this day in 1959. Happy birthday to us!

There's a very interesting article in the paper, written by a half-dozen long-timers, about what Alaska might be like if it had never become a state. The "good old days" weren't so good, with outside interests being more-or-less free to plunder the natural resources & return little or nothing to the Territory.

There's still a rumbling, now and again, about how Alaska might be better off if it were an independent country. I've mentioned this before, but the bottom line is that we don't have the population base necessary to operate or safeguard our 587,000 square miles on our own.

The paper offers an estimate that perhaps as much as 1/3 of our household incomes are provided by federal dollars in one form or another.

I strongly suspect that if we were a separate country, there would be a rapidly corresponding loss of services and infrastructure. This would quite probably create an exodus of people who moved here knowing that Alaska - at least in the case of the larger cities - is not really "frontier" anymore. It's just another state, in many respects. Our climate is more of a barrier, for many, than our infrastructure.

There are many of the old-timers still living, however, who talk about the opening of the first grocery store, or when they first saw a loaf of sliced bread for sale in that store. It wasn't that long ago that you either did for yourself, and made do, or you didn't survive here. They lived by the New England Yankee saying, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without." I'm proud to say that my dad's family is originally from the Vermont area, but that's another topic.

The rapid expansion of services here during WWII, and in the next 40 years thereafter, both from federal and oil sources, have made Alaska a much more civilised place.

Yes, we still have moose, bears, wolves, etc., and people die from those & weather-related causes all the time. But we also have paved roads, modern airports and seaports, electricity, and all those other services that 21st century Americans take for granted. (Again, this does not include all of Alaska's towns and villages. For many of them, life is still a daily struggle, and not even electric power or heat are guaranteed.)

But life in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau would be very familiar to most in the Lower 48, excepting the absence of many major chain stores.

Weather: It's -19 at the weather station near home, this morning, as we continue about 30 degrees below normal. Accu-Hunch is now alleging that we could be close to normal by the end of next week, with more snow on the way. They've been saying that for a week now, and yet today is the coldest day so far. No one is surprised.

This weather can make a normal outing to stores a bit of a challenge. In addition to the heavier clothes, the frost is harder to scrape. I'll drive my truck today; it hasn't been run since Wednesday, and that's not a good thing in these temperatures.

Y'all have a great day.