Word: frans
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Outside, Pepe's is not much to look at; inside, you could be in Nuevo Laredo: serapes, sombreros, paintings of matadors, Mexican waiters. Open 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., it has three dining rooms, 234 seats, and it is usually jammed. Fran plans to expand...
...Fran Tate is cut of similar cloth. Beside her yearbook picture from her high school in Auburn, Wash., where she held down a newspaper route and set pins in a bowling alley, was written, "By the work one knows the workman." Fran thought this sketch of her character "was awful. Everyone else's said, 'To the best-looking girl in school,' that sort of thing. I thought what a dud I was." Today she owns a sewage-disposal service in Barrow, as well as a water-delivery service, as well as Pepe...
...times it seems everyone is soused. "People come up here and make money and destroy themselves," says Fran, who practices moderation. "They either drink or drug it all away." Two airlines service Barrow. Their cargo bays are filled with booze. The town is dry-it used to be wet, with a package store that deposited $4,000 a day in earnings in the Alaska National Bank of the North, the only bank in town, but people were getting drunk, staggering off on the tundra and freezing to death, so it was voted dry. Now the only...
Last year one of Fran's trucks was bashed three times in two weeks by drunken drivers. "There is nothing you can do," she says. "Nobody has any insurance. But I love the place. Nowhere in the Lower 48 do you have this much opportunity...
...Fran Tate sells ice cubes to Eskimos for $3 a bag and sells out frequently. If she has her way, one day there will be a skating rink in Barrow. For now, Pepe's thrives. (Mervin Setoyant, for instance, eats there four times a week. "It's something different," he says with a bored shrug, contemplating his usual order...