I need to go back about 80 years for this story, but as I recall, this is what happened. You’ve probably been unfortunate enough to find yourself reading bits of my ancient history, and I hate to burden you with more of the same, but, here it is. At that time, in the mid to late 1940s, the McClellan family was residing in Douglas, Alaska.
There were six of us, including my parents, Dad, Mom, my elder brother Lowell, myself and our two younger sisters, Elizabeth and Doris Ann. We lived in a ramshackle two-bedroom home on the north end of Fifth Street, in Douglas. (Douglas is now an adjunct to Juneau, the capital of Alaska.
) By 1947, Dad’s painting business, (home painting, decorating and sign painting) had grown considerably — as had our family. It was becoming more and more difficult to cram all of us into those four rooms. There was no way to expand the home, so Dad and Mom kept their eyes open for some place with more potential for our family.
There weren’t a lot of options in the Juneau area at the time. The distance from our home to the farthest driving point north was about 13 miles. At the end of that drive was Auk Bay and Mendenhall Glacier, a popular tourist and picnic spot, and a few miles south of that picturesque place was Sunny Point (might be a misnomer, in an area that receives over 90 inches of precipitation per year).
It was a beautiful little point of land that jutted out into the Gastineau Bay. We drove past some of t.