TERRITORIES: Promised Land

• Share

(3 of 7)

The old gold camp of Fairbanks in the interior also enjoys a boomlet. Most of its streets are lanes of thick dust; a third of its homes are sagging log cabins; caribou wander disconsolately in its outskirts. But 7,500 people have jammed in where 3,500 lived before, and more are coming every day.

Fairbanks is wide open. Gambling flourishes in back rooms. Nobody in Fairbanks was surprised at the arrival of an air express package marked simply: "One magnet, dice, and electrical attachments." Alaska still views the old-fashioned brothel with sympathetic tolerance. Fairbanks authorities have sternly resisted attempts to close down blonde Big Babe, and the rest of the girls who keep open house along the "line." Alaskan liquor stores sell a clear, malevolent fluid called Spirits of Peoria, a 190-proof potion calculated to make the mildest man click his heels and bay like a malemute.

But, despite its reckless attitudes, its raw wildernesses, its enormous distances, Alaska is also a country of homes, automobiles, electric stoves, housewives, grocery clerks, schools. It has two golf courses, a college (the University of Alaska at Fairbanks), and 14 chambers of commerce. The old order and the new clash; Alaska is racked by growing pains, wild adolescent dreams, horrible adolescent doubts, stirring memories, confusion and controversy.

The Governor. To Alaskans who pine for the old order, and to those who long for something new, one man symbolizes the Territory's turbulent stirrings. Throughout his 7½ years in office, chunky, jug-eared Dr. Ernest Gruening, 60, Alaska's New Dealish Territorial Governor, has been an advocate of change and a figure of controversy. He has been during most of his career.

Governor Gruening (pronounced greening) was born (1887) in New York City. His father, Dr. Emil Gruening, a famous physician, wanted his only son to be a doctor. At Connecticut's Hotchkiss School, and later at Harvard, Ernest Gruening had agreed wholeheartedly. But during three years at Harvard Medical School he developed an overwhelming curiosity about social and political developments and an itch to become a newspaperman.

During his senior year, young Gruening got a temporary job on William Randolph Hearst's Boston American, stayed for a year. To please his father, he took his M.D. degree, but he returned, immediately, to journalism. To the perplexity of his fellow reporters, all of whom thought it would be wonderful to be a rich doctor, Gruening preferred writing editorials for the Boston Herald at $27 a week.

After a fight with Boston's notorious Mayor Curley, Gruening was forced to resign as managing editor of the Boston Traveller. Then he edited the failing Boston Journal. Later he went to Manhattan to find out what was the matter with Frank Munsey's New York Sun. His findings were not appreciated; he decided that Munsey was causing all the trouble.

In 1914 Gruening took time out to marry Dorothy Elizabeth Smith of Norwood, Mass. Of their three sons one, Ernest, is dead.