During the late 1920s, the gold rush town of Fairbanks made a surprising comeback. Construction of the Alaska Railroad had produced an unexpected bonus in the creation of the Fairbanks Exploration Co. Norman Stines, later its general manager, bought up hundreds of small, ill-paying, or defunct placer operations, raising capital to attract dredging operations big enough to make them pay. He also promoted the building of the Davidson Ditch, a seemingly impossible engineering feat which transported water ninety miles to run the operation. FE hired some 1,000 men and its annual payroll averaged between $1 and $2 million.¹ There were no new gold kings, but with so many men in town on steady wages, the Fairbanks Line once again became a major economic force, one the community relied on more and more.

"The ladies of the church and the home could not speak to the ladies of the Row, but when there was an emergency of any kind, a drive to raise funds for a hospital or a library, or relief for a destitute or 'burnt-out' family, they gladly accepted donations from the Row," recalled Margaret Murie, "and if one of the cabins on the Row burned down, the respectable ladies would contribute clothing and funds to the unfortunate one. There was a good deal of live-and-let-live, a good deal of gossip, but of a rather humorous, casual, unmalicious kind. We were all far away from the rest of the world; we had to depend on one another."²

One prostitute operated what was the forerunner of a beauty parlor, patronized by many respectable matrons including Mrs. LaDessa Nordale, who later became a judge.³ Once each year, high and low society mingled when the inmates of the Line threw a ball at the Moose Hall, inviting the mayor and everyone else in town. "One of the mayor's duties was to be available to dance with any one of the ladies of the evening," recalled Bob Casey, who drove taxi for girls on the Line. "You can imagine every lady in town wanted to see what they were like."⁴

Millionaire developer Austin Lathrop, who offered a special, after-hours movie showing for prostitutes, was quick to grasp their economic importance. "She might be a whore on Fourth Avenue, but by God on Fifth Avenue she better be treated like a lady," he told employees.⁵

At a time when the average woman expected to pay from six to eleven dollars for a dress, Fairbanks clothing stores featured $110 dresses. Prostitutes were such favored customers that store owners gave them after-hours showings or even took merchandise to their cribs if a special occasion was coming up.⁶ The Line was the most sought-after route in town for paper boys because residents tipped so well.⁷ Nor did mothers worry when their sons delivered, for Fairbanks prostitutes were very careful in dealing with youngsters.

Chuck Herbert remembered being young, broke, and pretty green, coming into town from gold camp at Christmastime with a friend who suggested they visit Patsy Berke. "She was in her late forties. Nice looking. Busy entertaining a group of coal miners but she let us have some drinks with them and we both got stewed," he recalled with a chuckle. "I woke up the next morning in a nice bed [alone] and found a five-dollar bill in my pocket."⁸

The Fairbanks population rose to 2,101 in 1930 and to 3,455 in 1939 as residents weathered the Depression in style. While other cities across the nation were sponsoring bread lines, Fairbanks paved its streets, and the town's financial institutions stayed open during the National Bank Holiday. "Well, we didn't hear about that vacation until it was too late," Ed Stroecker of First National Bank explained.⁹

Early in 1940, Lawrence Bayer and Wayne Drayton, two University of Alaska students, researched the Fairbanks red light district for a paper for a class in contemporary society. Prostitution ranked high among the top ten of the city's industries, they discovered, grossing in excess of $100,000 annually. The Line had grown dilapidated, but twenty-six cribs were in operation, valued at between $1,500 and $3,500 each. One informant said only six of the cribs were owner-occupied; another put the total at seventeen. Rents ranged from forty-five to sixty dollars a month. A girl could make from $3,500 to $15,000 in a season, and many went Outside in the winter. Income was generated by the sale of alcohol at fifty cents per drink and coitus: three dollars for a single act and twenty for an evening.¹⁰

The students estimated between fifty and sixty professional prostitutes were in town. They were required to register with the police, to turn up for a medical exam once every two weeks, and to submit blood for testing every three months.

"No figures but opinions coincided in the belief a 'good number' of the girls owned fine cases of tertiary and secondary syphilis," they reported. "Gonorrhea is more rare and promptly stepped on by city authorities, as are primary cases of syphilis."¹¹

Bayer and Drayton found the Fairbanks Line different from the average red light district in two respects. "Restrictions . . . have eliminated many of the problems occurring in older, vastly larger and perhaps more respectable communities," they observed. "The vocation of pimping, for instance, has been blitzkrieged into a pastime by the cooperative city fathers. Gang rule, protection payments, and other customary sources of overhead do not annoy the prostitutes of Fairbanks."¹²

More unusual was the fact that very few of the prostitutes were below the age of forty; most were between forty-five and fifty-five, and several were in their sixties. Bayer and Drayton tactfully described "Texas Rose" as "a lady of damaged appearance believed to be sixty-eight."

Some of the older women had been widowed by early sourdoughs, the researchers noted. Many had as customers single miners with whom they'd had relationships for decades, much like long-established marriages.

For some of these women, any thought of retirement vanished with the October 1943 robbery of ninety safe deposit boxes at the Fairbanks Agency, an insurance company many women on the Line used instead of a bank. Whores dealt in cash and most were not anxious to have anyone, especially local bankers and the Internal Revenue Service, know their worth. Realizing this, thieves moved into the basement of a building adjoining the Fairbanks Agency and over a weekend tunneled through, taking time to explore the boxes. Their take was estimated at $57,000 in cash and $7,500 in jewelry, but the real total was probably much higher.¹³

The only item ever recovered was one woman's $400 Russian-dyed ermine coat, found in the possession of Louise Allred, the agency's office manager. Allred was subsequently indicted on eight counts of embezzlement and four counts of larceny, and served time in federal prison without mentioning accomplices.¹⁴ Some believed the robbery was an inside job involving at least one high-ranking police official, but no evidence ever materialized.¹⁵

Fortunately for the good time girls with heavy losses, the robbery coincided with the biggest boom yet. At the start of World War II, the U.S. government had begun building two large military bases in Fairbanks, another in neighboring Delta, and a major highway south to Dawson Creek, B.C. Gold-mining was officially shut down, but suddenly thousands of construction men and soldiers were in town.

Every available whore was needed and appreciated, even those who were pushing sixty! Newspaper boys of that era recall fifty or sixty men waiting patiently in a queue extending out of the Line on paydays, and as more men arrived, the queue extended to the post office, more than a block away.¹⁶ Crib rents soared to $200 a month when the going rate in town was $35, but even when they later escalated to $600 a month, there were no vacancies. Business was just too good.¹⁷

Carol "Tex" Erwin, a veteran madam who moved in from Kodiak, recalled there were 40,000 soldiers in town. "Every house on the Line did a rushing business of course," she recalled in her unusual autobiography, The Orderly Disorderly House. "All the madams had agreed that we'd accept only enlisted men, no officers. Officers were only trouble—they'd think they rated special treatment, and they pulled rank on the enlisted men, and they got drunk and disorderly. . . . The privates and corporals and sergeants were nice fellows and we had no trouble with them at all.

"And they were getting a good deal too. They'd never seen a Line run like this one in Fairbanks. They weren't rolled, they could leave their paycheck with the madam when they got drunk and be sure it was safe and returned to them when they sobered up. And they never got any venereal diseases. Of course, some of the girls on the Line were sixty years old. But they didn't seem to mind that."¹⁸

The good times lasted long after the end of World War II, because Fairbanks military establishments were enlarged to serve as Cold War bases. Iris Woodcock, a photographer who drove north promoting a motor home in 1948, discovered prostitutes could average $3,000 a month while paying $700 for rent and equally high rates for utilities.¹⁹

Ambitious girls supplemented this income by flying on the "Connie," a regularly scheduled Constellation, to Seward when the Navy docked there; although the little port had its own Line, it was not nearly big enough to handle the massive shore leave. Realtor Earl Cook, noticing that a prostitute named Lillian looked unusually wan after one of these lucrative coastal excursions, inquired after her well-being. Lillian was one of his better clients, investing every dime she could save in property, which she would later use to escape the trade, and she was used to confiding in Cook.

"Oh, Earl," she said earnestly. "It was so busy in Seward yesterday, I said, 'Guys, if you're not ready, don't stand in line!'"²⁰

The bonanza began to self-destruct when federal law enforcement agencies at last focused on the Far North. In 1952, Wrangell's compact red light district, housed in half of a large apartment building next to the Elks Club and the local movie theater, burned along with half the town. It was never rebuilt, for word was out that the government was moving to shut down prostitution throughout the territory.²¹

"Every year they'd send someone from Washington, D. C., who said, 'You'd better close down the Line,'" recalled Bernie Hulk, who headed the Juneau police force during this period. "He'd come again the next year and say the same thing and it went on and on. But finally [in 1956] he said 'I'm here again and this time you're going to close the Line before I leave and if you don't you're headed for McNeil Federal Prison.'"

Hulk went to see the local district attorney, who told him not to worry about it, but Hulk's freedom was at stake and he followed the federal official's orders. When the mayor reversed the action, reopening the Line, Hulk's resignation made headlines. And soon most Juneau prostitutes left town or entered other fields.²²

The pattern was repeated throughout the territory. Towns that resisted, like Ketchikan, found themselves facing messy federal investigations and charges of police corruption. Like it or not, it was the end of an era . . . ended not by Alaskans but by the federal government, which many Alaskans thought was pretty far removed from the realities of the frontier.

The situation was perhaps best handled in Seward, where the good time girls were still a large percentage of the small population, and were loved well beyond the physical sense of the word. When it became clear a federal vendetta against prostitution was inevitable, the local marshal shrewdly arrested all the girls, fined each of them one dollar, and sent them on their way—thus protecting them from serious federal prosecution on the grounds of double jeopardy.²³

Fairbanks residents ignored federal warnings until, doomed by its own success, the Line became even more crowded. Evelyn Benson, a perennial known as "Panama Hattie," ran the largest and roughest house on the Line, working about nine girls instead of going solo as was general practice. Old-timers claim she was "grandfathered" in by the city council. She had arrived about 1910 from Panama after her lover had been killed,²⁴ and she considered herself different from the other women, perhaps a bit of an outcast.²⁵ Her prices were higher than others' and her reputation was such that some cab drivers refused to recommend her house to would-be cus-tomers.²⁶ When a military man was found murdered on the Line, it was rumored to have been at Hattie's place, despite a very hush-hush investigation that resulted in no arrests.²⁷

But the problem wasn't just Hattie. Newcomers had arrived, including prostitutes who had worked at Mamie Stover's in Hawaii. The new girls were out to make a fast buck, ignoring the rules. Customers grew less inclined to leave their pokes and their paychecks with the girls, and seldom did a customer spend the night.²⁸ From a window near his office in the Federal Building, the marshal could look right down on the Line, making surveillance with field glasses quite simple. But trying to control outsiders who refused to register with the city and worked out of bars was a much bigger job than the office was staffed for. Robbery became common and, worst of all, the outsiders brought venereal disease to the Line.²⁹

"The new girls let their pimps move right into the houses with them and that created an awful situation. A lot of the pimps were dopeheads and they began to peddle the stuff to soldiers," Tex Erwin recalled. "There were several unsolved murders, all related to dope. So finally the army just had to declare the whole Line off limits."³⁰

The town fought it, for the Line was almost as big an economic boon to the community as military spending, and the idea of trying to cope with so many servicemen without it made old-timers shudder. But in January of 1952 undercover investigators for the American Social Hygiene Association, billed as a thirty-five-year-old organization devoted to "promoting the highest ideals of American family life," moved into Fairbanks. According to its report, aired before the city council and Brigadier General Donald B. Smith, commanding officer of Ladd Air Force Base, Fairbanks had fifteen houses of prostitution, plus a large number of prostitutes plying their trade openly at local bars. C.O. Smith reminded city officials of the very sharp increase in venereal disease among servicemen and also the increase in robberies and burglaries.³¹

The credentials of the American Social Hygiene Association were never publicly established, nor would Fairbanks ever hear of the organization again. Off the record, however, military commanders told city fathers they would place the whole town of Fairbanks off limits if the Line was not closed down.³² Not only did a territorial law prohibit prostitution, but the newly passed Truman Anti-Crib Act also made it illegal. Ultimately city officials had no choice but to comply.

Those women who wanted to stay in business dispersed throughout town, facing zealous federal marshals, the underworld's demands of protection payoffs, and a 300 percent increase in venereal disease.³³ Some prostitutes tried working out of their cars, forcing Judge LaDessa Nordale to rule on whether or not a Cadillac could be classed as a whorehouse. Drawing on a precedent-setting case in Wisconsin in which a judge had ruled that a horse and buggy could be a whorehouse, Judge Nordale ruled that the Cadillac could be one, too—weathering a lot of kidding because she drove one herself.³⁴

A friend of Bob Redding, homesteading at Tok Cutoff, came to town unaware that the Line had been closed and wondered why folks were grinning at him as he knocked on doors without success.³⁵ A well-founded rumor claimed that a Safeway food market was to be built on the site. Redding and his friends preferred things the way they had been, but the idea gave a chuckle to those "who knew there was never a real way safe way."³⁶

Transient prostitutes quickly abandoned the Fourth Avenue district, but the Line had been home for several decades to old-timers who had "bought in." The federal government offered to purchase their houses for a fraction of their former value, and some of these women could not afford to move.

"I gotta put a padlock on the door," a deputy told Carol Erwin.

"You put it on the front door if you want to, but not on this side door to my apartment. You can close the joint, but you can't dispossess me out of my home, by God," she told him.³⁷

One seasoned veteran, mustering the courage that had brought her north in pioneering days, stood defiantly in the path of a bulldozer dispatched by the city for "urban renewal." Eventually the women fought closure in federal court, won a slightly higher sale price for their houses, but ultimately were forced to vacate. A softhearted state trooper allowed a couple of the older "girls" to move their cribs to his homestead just outside of town, for they literally had no place to go and no money to purchase land.³⁸

The dozen or so little houses that remained—long bare of paint, with shingles flapping in the wind—were bulldozed under to build a new shopping plaza that included not only a Safeway but also an ultra-modern J.C. Penney's store.

The closing of quasi-legal red light districts did not end prostitution in the Far North. In fact, the industry peaked during the construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline in the 1970s, but it was an entirely different game by then, clandestine and set apart from mainstream society.

In the golden era, the good time girls had been a recognized part of the community and had contributed to it. "A blind man could have sensed their constant presence and their influence," noted a physician who lived through the early stampedes.³⁹ They were condoned as a "necessary evil" and, indeed, were as necessary as females are in any civilization. As for their being evil, it is wise not to be too quick to condemn those whores of yore, for they were a breed apart from ordinary prostitutes—and at least one cut above them.

Geologist Alfred Brooks, who covered every major gold rush in the region, argued convincingly that life in the Klondike was a great winnowing process, and that those who succeeded there were something special. "A small percentage failed through lack of moral stamina, for there was ample opportunity to go to the dogs in the northern gold camps," he observed. "On the other hand, many a man who had not developed beyond mediocrity in his own community, tightly bound by tradition and custom, found in Alaska his opportunity and rose to his true level. This last of our frontiers, therefore, has played a part in developing breadth of view and character among our people."⁴⁰

The only recorded view from a working girl came from a conversation Carol Erwin had with a veteran Nome madam near the end of the era.

"When you talk about holding a tight rein on your girls, these hustlers aren't girls—some of them are forty and fifty years old, and every bit as popular as younger ones," the Nome madam noted. "A lot of them marry and settle down. Why, I could name you dozens of social leaders, club and churchwomen in Fairbanks and Anchorage who were once hustlers. Everybody knows it; nobody minds."⁴¹

Today they are all gone, of course, and it is doubtful that their ghosts linger comfortably among the urban renewal projects that displaced them. Nor will you find much trace of them in official histories of this last frontier.

But memories of their golden age can still bring a smile: Violet Raymond with Antone Stander's necklace of diamonds sparkling right down to her knees . . . plucky Grace Robinson packing her fancy Seattle hat over Chilkoot Pass and rescuing it from the wild waters of Lake Bennett . . . Mae Field wickedly flaunting her lingerie and her laundry bill in Dawson court . . . and Corrine B. Gray donning a satin gown by Worth of Paris to wed the son of a merchant prince in the tiny outpost of Rampart.

It is difficult for old-timers to walk down Fourth Avenue in Fairbanks without thinking of the good time girls who made that Line the very best in the West. Girls like little Georgia Lee, who escaped the brutal poverty of her farm via the St. Louis red light district for what she knew could only be a better life in Alaska. Edith Neile, so tall, beautiful, independent, and openhanded. Gracious prostitute Ray Alderman, who became Alaska's first first lady to host a U.S. president. "Lovely One" and Myrtle and Dolly— all in party dresses with rhubarb leaves and pink bows for hats—bursting in on their old neighbor at 6 a.m. Klondike Kate Rockwell and her lilting theme song, "Do not scorn her with words fierce and bitter. . . . "

These unique women and their sisters brought to the Far North the gifts of warmth, laughter, and the lightness of a woman's touch, commodities that were all too scarce before the good time girls gambled their futures to brave our rugged trails.