David Ulfers News Today

Misfortune was written across the recent history of the Arlon Elwood “Jackson” Ball family

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Misfortune was written across the recent history of the Arlon Elwood “Jackson” Ball family. Ball’s father had been struck and killed by lightning in Connecticut in 1935. One of his sisters had served time in at least two reformatories in the 1930s and 1940s; another sister’s house had burned to the ground on the Kenai Peninsula in 1952. A younger brother had died in a one-car accident near Soldotna in 1958. Ten years later, it was Jackson’s turn...

The Lancashire sisters came as children with their parents to homestead in Ridgeway in 1948

Rusty Lancashire hadn’t allowed her first impressions of Kenai in 1948 to deter her from making the central Kenai Peninsula her home

In the 1950s, Lori Lancashire and her sisters, Martha and Abby, had glimpsed brief but tantalizing views of the possibilities and opportunities outside of Alaska

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In late 1948, after six months of homestead living on the central Kenai Peninsula, Rusty Lancashire wrote home to her folks in Illinois. She noted that some people who had arrived at about the same time they had were already pulling up stakes. She and husband Larry, however, were in it for the long haul: “Larry and I may be dopes to live like this,” she wrote, “but we love it.” They lived on their homestead for the next five decades.