E. O. Sawyer: "Who's Who in the Fishing World," Canadian Fisherman, January 1919, 8, Internet Archive. 

Grace Bostwick: "Washington Women Who Do Things," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 21, 1908, 10, Seattle Public Library, Seattle, WA.

Join us for a Cook Inlet Historical Society lecture series event.

Where: In person at the Anchorage Museum Auditorium or online via Crowdcast.

To register for the online event, click here. No registration required if attending in person.

Free and open to the public. Please use the museum’s 7th Avenue entrance.

Speaker: Rick Goodfellow

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Two journalists. One male and one female. Each from northwest Washington. Each successful in the contiguous United States. Each came to Alaska in 1913 seeking greater notoriety by covering the Chisana gold stampede. Although Chisana ultimately proved a disappointment, Bostwick and Sawyer tried to build a future in Alaska. Both were gifted self promoters but, ultimately, the fame they sought proved as scant and ethereal as Chisana gold.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Rick Goodfellow is the owner and founder of KLEF, Anchorage’s classical music radio station. He also created and led Ghost Tours of Anchorage for twenty years. In his younger days, Rick would have ridiculed  anyone who suggested this would consume the majority of his life. Instead, he imagined he would be a journalist. And so he was, for one day at the Anchorage Times. He pocketed his $25 paycheck and never returned to newspapering. But many years later, the journalism bug got the better of him. While doing historical research on the “ghosts” of Anchorage, he kept running across references to two Alaskan journalists of the early twentieth century. Their intertwined careers reveal long forgotten, but disturbingly pertinent insight into the ideas which drew America’s imagination northwards and many years later, provided the lyrics to a hit song by Devo.