Commercial fishing towns can be wild.

You have to remember that in the 70s and 80s commercial fishing was one of a few ways left that someone with no education could make a boatload of money. Fish boats pay a percentage of the catch and the 70s and early 80s there were not a whole lot of boats and a whole lot of fish.

Crew shares back then could run into six figures on some of the highliner boats. That was an awful lot of money back then.

There are four things that are found in commercial fishing towns. Bars, gambling, drugs and whores.

The bars were pretty much self-policing as they had liquor licenses to protect. They played by the rules. Any real trouble was dealt with quickly.  While the bars had a reputation for being zoos, there was little real violence in them. The occasional scuffles that broke out were dealt with immediately.

Incidentally I once watched a couple of mutual combatants settle their differences outside once. The police that responded simply let it run on as both antagonists were volunteers. One of the cops bet ten bucks on the guy in the red shirt. I took five of it and lost.

The police overlooked gambling so long as the keeper of the games ran an honest game and played by the unwritten rules. They gave no credit, never cleaned out a guy that had kids to feed and no rough stuff. They generally overlooked an occasional 4-5-6 game that might happen at one of the two bars on Cannery Row.

Once in a blue moon I’d fish out $20 I was willing to lose and enter one of these 4-5-6 games. I’d play until I either went bust or got ahead. When I got way ahead I’d generally drop out. I knew when to quit while I was ahead. My momma didn’t raise no fool.

Drugs were somewhat overlooked so long as the dealers kept it out of the schools, didn’t break legs to enforce debt collection, didn’t advertise and kept it pretty much out of sight. Every now and then they would bust those that advertised and didn’t have enough sense to keep their heads down.

Prostitution was handled in an interesting way. They overlooked a monopoly on it that was held by a woman that had been running it for years before I arrived.

It was an organized brothel that ran between two and four girls at any given time. The mechanics of it that I saw were interesting.

I know nothing of the business end of things. I imagine the madam and the girls split the pie. She provided housing, medical checks and a safe place to do business. She was pretty much given a monopoly by the police department to do business.

The girls were checked for STDs a couple times a week. I know this to be fact as my doctor provided the physicals and actually did it as a public service. I believe he charged little if anything for this.

I have seen many of the girls in the doctor’s office numerous times over the years.

Most of the girls came from Oregon or Washington and the madam was pretty picky. They were fresh looking and not beaten up. They were fairly attractive unlike the beat up looking hookers you see working the streets. Actually some of them were beauticians that decided to make some big, fast money in Alaska.

They behaved themselves in public and never solicited. In a small town everyone knew who was who. They didn’t have to solicit. They’d sit on a barstool and wait to be approached.

I would often walk into a bar and sit next to one if I didn’t want to get dragged into the general ballyhoo that went on. I knew that the hookers would behave themselves. When business was slow I’d play cribbage with a couple of them. They were nothing more or less than a part of the town.

If it looked like a client was entering the bar I’d make myself scarce. All it took from her was a glance.

Incidentally I did a small remodel job for the madam once. I have to admit that the hookers were far better housekeepers than the strippers were. The place was immaculate.

She also paid cash on the nail head at union scale unlike a couple of churches I had worked for did. The wages of sin were not death. They were union scale. At least as far as the madam was concerned.

The madam had a monopoly and defended it like a wildcat. Every now and then a stripper from the club would try and turn a few tricks and she was given one warning. After the warning if even a rumor started involving the stripper she’d be on the next plane south. I think the club manager paid the airfare. He knew the police would hammer him if he let the strippers become whores.

He also knew the madam had clout. She probably had the police chief’s ear.

I was astonished with the intelligence system the madam had. She had ears and eyes everywhere.

The hookers would simply sit at the bar and quietly make their arrangements and leave quietly and alone so as to be discreet. They’d meet up with their ‘dates’ somewhere else.

I’m likely the only one I can recall that was ever seen leaving a bar with a hooker. I walked out of the bar with one on my arm to humiliate the date I had just walked away from. She had just tried to get into my pocket for cocaine and I got up and left her and was seen by all leaving with the hooker following a colorful comment that left my former date humiliated.

All in all it was a pretty smooth, organized operation and it actually benefitted the town.

The girls were constantly checked for STDs, there was no violence, nor were there women running around soliciting in front of the townspeople.

You have to remember that in any commercial fishing town there was going to be prostitution no matter what the police tried to do. The demand and the money were there and there was no fighting it. Having it organized the way they had it was the way to go. The police could keep an eye on it and the girls knew which side their bread was buttered on so they were not shy in tipping the police off to things they found out about.

Alaska draws a lot of fugitives. Most people that moved there were either running from something or looking for something. Every so often the cops would pick up a fugitive on a tip supplied by one of the girls.

Sometime just before I left town the whole enterprise came to a halt because a group of church people raised hell and it’s my guess that they tried to skirt the local police by calling the State police.

My best guess is the State Police told the locals to raid the place or they would but I could be wrong. Anyway the place got raided and closed down. The results were almost immediate and not very nice. Closing the brothel down had been a big mistake.

Of course, it wasn’t the first time the church people ruined things for the rest of us heathens. One of the service clubs (the Lions comes to mind) used to sponsor a raft race with beer stops in the early spring. It was a wonderful time to get wet, hypothermic, mildly drunk and make an idiot of one’s self. In short it was a good time and raised a lot of money for a charity.

The do-gooder church people raised all sorts of hell and got the race stopped. As a result the town was a little less of a fun place to live. The self-righteous jerks seemed to ruin everything they touched. Truth is most of them were more dishonest than the people they griped about.

A number of amateur operators started running little street operations and the STD rate shot up. At that time AIDS was gaining a foothold. It was about this time I left town.

Several years I met a guy that had arrived in town the time I left and he told me that the police were spending a lot of time chasing small time prostitutes. He also told me that one of the big shots in the group that had pressured the police to shut the brothel down had lost a kid to HIV. I found that ironic.

He also told me a few former strippers had ventured into prostitution.

I wasn’t surprised.

 

One of the things I learned in Alaska is that an awful lot of people there were running from something, looking for something or both.

Looking back on it I was running from a Dilbert lifestyle and looking for adventure but I digress.

Shortly after I got there I developed somewhat of a French Foreign Legion attitude toward other people’s backgrounds. If they wanted me to know they’d tell me. If not, I didn’t ask. It was generally none of my business.

A few years before I left I ran into someone from my past. It was a woman I had gone to school with that had left town while I was in junior high school.  I recognized her working in one of the places I did business with from time to time.

When I introduced myself she was polite but not too warm. I do remember she had a child. I believe it was a daughter. I could tell that she seemed a bit uncomfortable meeting someone from her past. I didn’t push for further information and she didn’t offer any. I left it at that.

Looking back on it I’d guess there was a messy divorce in her background because many women that showed up on the rock seemed to have been divorced recently. They came there not because it was the end of the world, but it was close. You could see the end of the world from there.

For many people it was a place to start over. I remember a bartender introducing me to her newly divorced sister and handing me $50 to take her to the Mission (Goodwill type store) and get her outfitted like a local and teaching her how to layer.

She had shown up with heavy coats which were generally pretty useless given Kodiak’s mild climate. Locals layered light clothes as you could add or remove one or more layers as needed. After I outfitted her I gave her the nickel tour of the area starting at the dump where we watched eagles and bears.

When I returned her to the bar and her sister she breathlessly announced that I had taken her to the dump to watch bears and eagles. The whole place cracked up except the bartender who gave me ‘the look’. She knew I did well with newcomer and visiting out-of-town women by showing them wildlife at the dump. I returned ‘the look’ with a look that said I knew she was her sister and therefore off limits and she relaxed.

The woman I had outfitted was friendly toward me but offered no further information as to why she had moved there other than a divorce was involved. It was fine by me.

Incidentally once I had a woman take me to her place to ‘meet someone’. When I arrived she introduced me to her older sister, a recently divorced and fairly attractive woman about six or eight years older than I was that had just arrived in town. She opened her refrigerator to show ample rations for a weekend and several bottles of wine.

“I’m heading to Anchorage for the weekend and turning you two loose on each other,” she announced, leaving us both red-faced. Neither of us had expected anything like this.

Then she left us to our devices.  She returned to a pile of empty wine bottles, an empty refrigerator and rumpled linen. Let’s leave it at that.

Women were a little more likely to keep their pasts under wraps.

Guys were often a little more open but many of them had things to hide. I remember a roommate of sorts that simply disappeared and a couple of weeks later the local police came up to me looking for him. Seems he was wanted for hacking up some go-go girl somewhere in Washington State. That knocked me for a loop. I had been sharing quarters with a fiend and didn’t know it.

A few weeks later the cop told me he had been picked up on the mainland somewhere.

Incidentally for the most part if you had an outstanding warrant somewhere out of state that wasn’t for something major the police generally left you unmolested so long as you behaved yourself. Either they had a clean slate attitude or didn’t want to be bothered with some other department’s small offenses. However, if they found out someone was a military deserter they would pick him up in a heartbeat. I guess a lot of cops were Vietnam vets and didn’t like deserters very much.

My two main running partners had little in their pasts to hide and were pretty candid. They were there because they were looking for something. They were seeking fortune and adventure. Incidentally one of them is surprisingly still alive and I heard from him a few months back. The other is long dead. He was killed in a boating accident.

There were also in inordinate number of Vietnam veterans, many of which had seen extensive combat and wanted to build lives for themselves free of being treated like circus freaks. Until Reagan gave the military back their pride a lot of Vietnam era vets were often mistreated back in the Lower 48. Kodiak was a pretty good place for building or rebuilding a life.

Most people that arrived to start over soon fell into the traps that had brought them there. However, a large number of people there managed to find a new beginning and became a solid part of the community. A small handful of the strippers that arrived actually found straight jobs and blended into the community.

Kodiak was a forgiving place. If you made a few mistakes or did something stupid it was no big thing. It was interesting how many people had shaky pasts. I knew a couple of convicts that had done hard time but never held it against them. One had been convicted of manslaughter after he killed a man in a bar fight somewhere around Anchorage.

One Fourth of July I was having a bottle rocket fight and accidently sent one whistling past a policeman walking downtown. He knew it was an accident and suppressed a smirk as simply told me to fork over the rest them. I did and that ended the incident then and there.

I know of one woman that arrived when my running partner and I offered her a ride north. She was working as a waitress in Seattle when we met. Actually it was funny. The pair of us were in Seattle and were bringing a pickup north. We stumped into one of the taverns for lunch. I looked at the waitress. “I’m the pro from Dover and this here’s the Ghost of Smoky Joe,” I said. “He wants a ham and cheese and a light beer and I want a roast beef and a Heineken and after you serve us you got a half-hour to run home, get your bags packed and into the back of the blue pickup if you want to go to Kodiak with us!”

When she asked us if we were for real, we assured her we were. She served us and quit on the spot and took off and returned with a backpack and medium duffel bag. When we started off she asked us to stop at her bank and grabbed all the cash she had.

I always wondered what she was running from. It had to be pretty bad for her to just hop into a pickup with a couple of strangers. I never asked but years later she told me she was desperate to get out of an abusive relationship. She had ended the relationship but apparently he hadn’t.

Following a memorable trip up the Alaska Highway we hit Homer and hopped on the ferry and arrived on the Rock. She hit the gangway running and for the next few days we helped her out and introduced her around.

About a year later she married a ne’er-do-well and got pregnant. He actually decided to buckle down and make a life for his new family and the last I heard of her she and her husband had a couple more kids and were doing OK.

More than one person arrived with nothing more than a backpack and made a comfortable life for themselves. A lot of college educations were paid for by students groveling in the canneries and fishing during salmon season. I remember one guy went through college and got a Master’s by working salmon seasons on the same boat for about six seasons. He worked another season after he got his Master’s to build up a nest egg.

Some other guys I hung with managed to finance their dreams. One bought a place in Eastern Washington and the other bought a small ranch of some sort in the high desert of New Mexico.

Of course, there were several failures to every success story, but some of the failures are worth mentioning. Many of them paid for following their dreams with their lives. Maybe I’ll do a post on them later.

To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY