Author of the Aunt Phil’s Trunk Series
LB: The lady on the cover of the book, my Aunt Phyllis
WOTRG: What’s your name?
LB:I am Laurel Bill, Laura Downing Bill , Bill being my maiden name, Bill Being my husbands name
I inherited the writings of my aunt from Alaska and I’m a third generation Alaskan; so when I saw what she had done…Many of the stories in the book she wrote for national magazines and newspapers.
WOTRG: Why does she have a man’s name?
LB: You know your about the third person to ask me about the spelling. We never really noticed that it was spelled like a man. But we women in Alaska are rather rugged, so I guess it fits right in. I saw her writings and knew I couldn’t throw them in the garbage. so I ended up going back to college, got a degree in journalism, with a minor in history.
WOTRG: But your not too rugged when you…need to be less rugged ,right?
LB: I can polish off the rough edges when I need too…
Each of the books share a different era of Alaska’s history. They are all short stories, done in a story telling manner, so it’s not dense history; and I went through thousands of photographs at museums.
WOTRG: Yeah, I can see there’s lots of pictures.
LB: Each book has about 350 historical photographs.
WOTRG: Who’ this lady here, is this your Aunt in the dance hall girl outfit?
LB: No, that was Klondike Kate. She was a notorious dance hall girl.
she was very adept at mining the miners. (Laughs)
So each of the books covers a different era. This one goes up to and includes the Klondike Gold Rush. The blue one covers how many of Alaska’s towns were born. The Iditarod Trail was blazed in 1907, when they discovered Gold in the Iditarod region. and it goes on to include early law and order, or should I say, lack there of. The first deputy marshal turned out to be a wanted murderer from Oklahoma. His story is in there. The green one includes the building of the Alaska Railroad, early Anchorage, early aviation, and how the Matanuska Valley was settled during the Great Depression by farmers from the Middle of America, that was one of Roosevelt’s New Deal plans. So we had 202 families , I believe come up from Minnesota and Iowa; go into the wilderness and chop down all the trees and develop an agricultural industry, which was incredible.
WOTRG: That is incredible, some of them went north and a lot of them came to the Valley too.
Is that right?
LB: Yeah about 1910 when the railroad came, then they could ship out products and citrus and so on and they had some irrigation systems, a lot of the Valley started getting irrigated. Big land rush here. A lot of farmers from Iowa and the Midwest came down. It was the same sort of thing in Alaska during the Great Depression.
(We talked more with Laurel on different subjects. There is a lot of background noise for the audio.)
She is a delightful and intelligent lady. You can find out more about the book and grab a copy here
