Brooklynite Mary L. Penney seemed to know that she was not ready to settle into middle age and sedately grow old.
Despite Mary’s dreams and the newspaper’s low-brow assessment of her experience, the culmination of her journey was decidedly anti-climactic.
The Kings County Mining Company had hiked through the mountain benchlands at the advent of winter, hoping to reach the gold-mining areas of Hope and Sunrise.
They cruised around a bit and then returned to Homer on Oct. 10 after “a most tranquil and pleasant passage.”
The three-masted ship called the Agate was a reliable 30-year ocean veteran when it entered Cook Inlet in mid-October 1898.
The Penney clan experienced a few weeks fraught with the possibility that Mary might never be returning home.
The Brooklyn investors in the mining venture ran into trouble from the beginning.
When Mary was 14, she found herself in the company of a “young matron” who was about to give birth.
I have been chasing the facts of this adventure for 35 years.
Two distinct versions of Cecil “Greasy” Miller received the most publicity during his brief tenure on the southern Kenai Peninsula.
There are several theories concerning the origin of Cecil Miller’s nickname “Greasy.”
By the late 1970s, Poopdeck was already investing in stocks and bonds.
Poopdeck Platt was nearly 80 when he decided to retire from commercial fishing.
Clarence Hiram “Poopdeck” Platt had already experienced two bad years in a row, when misfortune struck again in 1967.
In 1947, their correspondence led to wedding bells, and the magazine subscription led them to make a new home in the Territory of Alaska.
“For a while,” said Poopdeck, “we were eating guinea pigs.”
The story of Poopdeck Platt, who lived in Homer for nearly half a century, began in the American Northwest.