“Oh, my God! Chocolate bars!” But then he reflected aloud, cannily. “Well, thank God, everything’ll be in trust.”

12

FROM THE HILL which was the campus of Baranof College you beheld a view to send the soul soaring if (Baranof realists said) it hadn’t been too cold to stand there in the winter; and too mosquito-infested in the summer. From October to April the land, snow-blanketed, sloped away to the river, the great inlet, the mountains. Mount McKinley, king of them all, could be seen for a hundred miles in all directions, and during the brief summer, when the white world changed miraculously to green, he sometimes donned his rare ruby and diamond crown for all to behold. Lovers strolled the roads and paths of the college hill, or sat stifling in their cars, the windows shut tight against the winged stingers. Students taking the summer courses said, “Look! You can see old McKinley as plain as the Ice Palace, almost.”

“How about a movie? Want to go to a movie?”

For throughout the summer months here in Baranof it was daylight all day, it was daylight all night, and sunshine is not favored of lovers. The young moderns preferred the kind gloom of the little bars and the motion-picture theaters and the cloistered privacy of a high-backed bench in a coffee shop.

Ivied walls and cloistered halls and Gothic façades of stone were not characteristic of Baranof College. No gargoyles leered down at the students. Still, the buildings on the hill began to form quite an impressive group. Between two World Wars they had somehow grown to a dozen solid forthright structures whose doorway inscriptions read: School of Mines; School of Engineering; Chemistry and Metallurgy, Business Administration, Agriculture, Geophysics, Home Economics, Arts and Letters. Here, in this sturdy little power plant of learning Alaska youth of incredibly varied background—Scandinavian, German, Polish, Eskimo, Russian, Indian, Negro, American, Canadian—gained knowledge of botany, zoology, political science, history, business, music, anthropology, genetics. Young people in sweaters and ski pants and mukluks trudged the hill and swarmed the classrooms. They studied and skated and skied and danced and courted and parted and married and graduated and found jobs. They behaved like college students.

There was no building called the Kennedy Building in the group on college hill. It was not that Czar Kennedy was opposed to formal education. He believed in it, he had publicly said so many times. Simply, he knew there was no money in it for Kennedy enterprises. Education for learning’s sake was not a good investment.

“College education is a fine thing,” Czar said. “For certain professions, that is. Medicine, law, and so on. I don’t recall that Edison or Ford or Rockefeller had a college education.” Modestly, he did not include his own name.

They came to him, singly and as committees. Thor Storm argued with him, and Bridie Ballantyne argued, and Dr. Glenn Shields and—in later years—the Paul Barnetts, and Matt Berg of the town’s one bookstore, and assorted mothers and fathers of small children who, in ten or twelve years, would be of college age. “Maybe,” these said, “if we could get private donations and benefactions in wills, and so forth—not that we expect anyone to die—goodness no!—but if we make a start maybe the government would grant Alaska some kind of appropriation the way they do for other—that is, for states.”