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.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: A full decade would pass after the Lancashire family’s arrival on the central Kenai Peninsula before the area got its first resident physician. In 1958, Dr. Marian Goble established a practice in Kenai. In 1960, Soldotna got its first resident doctor and dentist when Drs. Paul Isaak and Calvin Fair came to town. Before this time, however, health care — especially emergency care — could be difficult to come by.