C.Y. Bourgeois

You know how we make a smooth transition from an old year to a new year?  How, despite the big fuss everybody makes on New Year’s Eve swearing the new one will be better than the last, nothing mind-blowing happens with the changing of the calendar?  How life just marches on tossing things your way, here and there, for better or worse?  Well, on January 1^st as we hung up our shiny new calendar, we looked forward with eager anticipation to a year that had to be better than the last.  After all, we said, it can’t be any worse.  Famous last words...

Even though it started out just like any other year, 1975 turned out to be quite a pivotal time in our lives.  Not due to popular songs or oil pipelines; in part due to the ending of a long and brutal war that killed thousands of fathers, sons, and brothers along with my own, but mostly because of what happened later right here in the sleepy little town of Palmer Alaska.