Word: matanuska
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Richard Nixon likes to recall how for six weeks in 1958 he bounced around the country in a propeller-driven plane, a Vice President exhorting the faithful in Nebraska, tramping through Alaska's Matanuska Valley (even though Alaska was not yet a state) and thundering his hopes in Michigan, labor's stronghold. Ike, wisely, had decided to stay in the White House. "The roof fell in," Nixon remembers with a melancholy laugh. "We lost 47 seats in the House...
...straightaway. The course, however, spiraled up and around the rugged peaks of the Alaska Range at elevations of 3,300 ft. or more. Bone-chilling winds gusted to 70 m.p.h., and the snowmobilers became more concerned with survival than speed. Worse yet, the winds screaming down from the Matanuska Glacier swept the snow cover off long stretches of the road ways, and the gravelly pavement destroyed many of the steel skis. Repairs were all but impossible in the sub-zero weather, since the flesh of the snowmobilers' hands tended to freeze to the metal of their machines. Several snow...
...nurse in Michigan before he and his wife moved to the valley, now harvests about 14 tons of potatoes per acre (v. average U.S. yield of eight tons per acre), grows cabbages the size of medicine balls. Another farmer, Wyoming-born Victor Falk, 64, owns 900 acres on the Matanuska River, is raising hogs (1959 target: 700), the first hog yield to be fed on grain stored in the new elevator of the booming ($6,000,000 a year) Matanuska Valley Farmers Cooperating Association. Says Falk: "You can make a living here with the line of least resistance...
...last week the New Deal's dream valley (est. pop. 4,000), brimming with prosperity, was Alaska's biggest farming region. In the 23 years of colonization, Matanuska's feeble 1,000 acres has grown to about 13,000 acres of cropland worth some $6,000,000, accounts for 55% of Alaska's salable agriculture (1957 share: $1,854,000 in dairying, potatoes, berries, green vegetables). For a total outlay of about $5,400,000, the Matanuska experiment, says Anchorage Times Publisher Bob Atwood, is "one of the best investments Uncle Sam ever made...
Last week the prosperous Matanuska farmers had finished their harvest and contractors completed a new $400,000 blacktop road through the valley town of Palmer. The valley was growing faster than the wildest dreamers had hoped, seemed destined to be even more prosperous under statehood, since growing Alaska still imports about 90% of all its food. For the 40 or so original Matanuska colonists-out of the original 900-who had looked for the promised land and found hard work, the promise suddenly seemed close at hand...