Word: caroll
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...know, we were all strangers that I morning," recalled Carol Sik, 47, as she leafed through an album of yellowing newspaper clippings. She was sitting with her husband Marino, 57, in the airy living room of their log house on the west bank of the Susitna River, about 100 miles north of Anchorage on the way to Fairbanks. The morning she refers to was March 5, 1959, when Carol, a wan, pretty girl of 22, left Detroit with her lean, plain-spoken husband and their eight-month-old daughter Lindy Lou for a new life. Their companions were some...
...such, they were among the last of America's homesteaders, joining a tradition of pioneers who for a century had been building log cabins and clearing a little of the remaining wilderness in exchange for 160 acres of free federal land. For Carol and Marino, it seemed a risk worth taking. "Nothing belonged to us in Detroit," Carol recalls. "We had a trailer on a lot that belonged to somebody else. Marino was a repairman for the gas company in the daytime and a policeman at a drive-in at night, and I never saw him." Like the others...
...Susitna. Today the Siks figure there are about 1,500, stretched over a wide area, and there is a town, or rather a cluster of highway businesses, a post office, a police station, a school and four churches, known as Trapper Creek. "We thought of calling it Bradleyville," says Carol. "We thought of Little Michigan. But that idea was dropped right away. After all, this is Alaska, not Michigan. But most of us lived on Trapper Creek, so that's the name we settled on." Despite Shorty's prediction, very little of the land is currently under cultivation...
After doing odd jobs at first, Marino Sik worked for the state highway department for twelve years. In 1971, with so much traffic passing their door every day, he and Carol started a highway business that included a grocery, Laundromat and showers. They sold it in 1977, tired of working 18-hour days. A few months later, just as they were finishing their new three-bedroom house, they again got wanderlust. With their daughter and the two boys who had been born in Alaska, they moved to Las Vegas, where Marino ran a gas station. "We wanted to show...
...Carol M. Corbin