Foo Photo - Sand Point AK, 1964

Today's Foo Photo was taken sometime in late summer of 1964. How do I know this? Well I'm the blanketed 3-month old bundle being held by my Mother underneath the tail number of that beloved Douglas DC-3!

It's an unusually sunny day in the Shumagin Island group of the Aleutians. Wind is no doubt blowing heavily, as it always does there. The little airstrip, cut in during the wartime effort some twenty years earlier, is unpaved and sided by a shear cliff. This is Alaska of the 1960s, growing slowly into its statehood and still rough around the edges. By the time my Father took this photo, he and Mom had been staffing the Sand Point Chapel for roughly five years.

Darling sisters Jan (contented taller girl to the left) and Karen (sneaky shorter girl to Jan's right) meet the plane at the airstrip as Mom and Grandma Martha (1909 - 2007) arrive back in Sand Point AK on Reeve Aleutian Airways. For the record the plane in the background - Tail Number N19906 - was the very first airplane purchased by Reeve to start his fledgling airline - in 1946 on borrowed money. The conversion estimate from a military C-47 to a commercial DC-3 was more than he paid for the plane, so he did it himself for a fraction of that. Make no mistake; the interior of this plane was still very spartan despite the "civilian refit." Freight, passengers, and sometimes critters shared space inside the cabin on the way out The Chain. The most current photo of this plane has it sitting at the Anchorage International Airport in 2005, under ownership of another airline.

We flew into Sand Point on Reeve Aleutian all the years we lived in the islands, and I still have memories of a growling twin prop engines hauling us at about 180mph over the North Pacific out of Anchorage. Sadly, Reeve Aleutian succumbed to bankruptcy in 2000 due to high fuel costs and increased competition.

It sure is nice to take a photo like this and put the power of the Internet behind it!