Growing Up Alaskan

Growing Up Alaskan recounts, with love, humor and poignancy, what it was like to grow up in the remote community of Auke Bay, Alaska, during the 1950s. The story starts when the author's parents, Bill and Velma Stilley, children of the Depression, one a runaway and the other an orphan, find each other and, together with their growing family, climb the bootstrap, armed only with fierce determination, an infinite capacity for hard work, and a belief in the American dream. The bootstrap begins in New Mexico but quickly takes the family to Alaska, where in 1950 they settle in the remote community of Auke Bay. There, under near-frontier conditions, they make their home in the wilderness, without the benefit of paved roads, water, sewage, or telephones.The conditions in that small, remote, wilderness community bred a fierce independence combined with a deep sense of communal responsibility. It also bred do-it-yourself solutions that gave rise to a host of hilarious, ironic, heart-warming and occasionally frightening experiences.The story is told through the eyes of their older daughter. The reader will take away a palpable sense of what it meant to grow up so far from the American mainstream.

• | Author: Ronda Stilley Kotelchuck
• | Publisher: Independently Published
• | Publication Date: Apr 05, 2019
• | Number of Pages: 170 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1092748768
• | ISBN-13: 9781092748766