AUTHOR’S NOTE: Trouble seemed to find Arlon Elwood “Jackson” Ball — from the time he lost his father to a lightning strike to the intense fighting in which he engaged as a serviceman in World War II, from the death of his younger brother in a traffic accident in 1958 to his own violent death in a North Kenai bar in 1968. But summing up such a life — any life, for that matter — is never easy. There is always, it seems, more to the story.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: In late 1948, after six months of homestead living on the central Kenai Peninsula, Rusty Lancashire wrote home to her folks in Illinois. She noted that some people who had arrived at about the same time they had were already pulling up stakes. She and husband Larry, however, were in it for the long haul: “Larry and I may be dopes to live like this,” she wrote, “but we love it.” They lived on their homestead for the next five decades.