American Dreamer

WASILLA — Growing up in the former Yugoslavia, Ned Spaic heard all about the American voyages of his grandfathers.

One of them left for Chicago where he worked for 18 years working in the steel industry off Lake Michigan and the other went looking for his fortune in the Alaskan gold rush only to lose his life somewhere along the way.

The young Spaic was so enraptured by those stories that when his time came to emigrate to America, he landed in Chicago. The year was 1984 and Spaic was 28 years old.

“My father was in construction in my home country. I never fell in love with it, but when I came here, that was what I could do,” said Spaic, who went on to build nearly 300 custom homes in the Chicago area. “At that time, Chicago was a good place to be. It was nice. I don’t know anybody, except there were a lot of immigrants from my country.”

Successes as a builder allowed Spaic to travel and follow in the footsteps of his other grandfather to Alaska.

Touring all around the state, he never found out where or when his grandfather met his demise, but in the Mat-Su Valley he found his own gold mine.

“Hatcher Pass, with the gold mine… I fell in love with that area right away when I got there,” Spaic said. “I wanted to bring my wife, but it took me 12 years to push her into it. We had seven kids; it wasn’t easy.”

Finally, one day in 2002, the Spaics — nine of them in total — climbed into an RV and drove from Chicago to the Valley.

In Palmer, Spaic met Jim Johnson, who ran the United Rentals shop in Wasilla. When United closed up, Spaic and Johnson partnered to open Alaska Pacific Rental in Palmer, where they rented everything from lawn and garden appliances to excavators and indoor rental appliances.

Business has grown so much, that at the start of 2017, they opened a new location at 450 Railroad Ave. in Wasilla, just off Knik-Goose Bay Road and the Parks Highway.

APR’s grand opening celebration of its new location runs through April 15 with an in-store drawing to determine the winner of $500 in in-store credit.

For Spaic, it’s been quite the successful American Dream story, but for his first 15 years in the U.S., he never made it back to his homeland, now known as Bosnia-Herzegovina. He finally did in 1999, shortly after the war that split the land into six different countries.

“When I come back, my sister ended up in one country, another sister in a third country, and then the country where (I grew up),” Spaic said. “I don’t have a passport at that time so they don’t let you enter… So it was pretty bad.”

Now, he says, he travels back to his home country regularly, but is always glad to be back in Alaska.

“It looks a little bit like it,” Spaic said, comparing his old homeland to his new. “But there’s nothing similar (to) Alaska — it’s really something special.”