Bunkers celebrate 50 years in business, 71 years of marriage

WILLOW — If you lived along the road system between Willow and the northern edge of the Mat-Su Borough during the past 50 years, there is a good chance you know Dean and Mazie Bunker and their family.

Dean was 38 and his son, Terry, was 19 when they founded Bunker and Bunker in 1962 to bus students attending schools in Willow, Su Valley, Talkeetna and Trapper Creek.

Six years ago, Dean told his family he was done; he’d signed his last busing contract with the Mat-Su Borough School District. But last year, Terry, now 69, persuaded his 89-year-old dad to sign another five-year contract.

“I’ll be 94 when this one ends,” Dean said over breakfast at Mat-Su Family Restaurant July 13 with wife Mazie and a Frontiersman reporter.

This is a summer of important milestones for the Bunker family.

Not only will Bunker and Bunker celebrate its 50th anniversary this year, but Dean and wife Mazie marked 71 years of marriage on June 28, and on July 28 Dean celebrates his 90th birthday.

A potluck is planned Saturday.

‘It’s a long way to Alaska’

“It’s a long way to Alaska,” reads a headline on the front-page of the June 21, 1960, edition of the Jackson (Mich.) Citizen Patriot. It’s one of several news stories documenting three families’ 4,500-mile journey to homestead in Alaska.

“Alaska here we come — we hope!

“With that philosophy, eight adults, 10 children, two dogs, a horse, a cow and a bull, a group of Jackson area new pioneers set off for Alaska Tuesday,” wrote William Cote, staff of the Citizen Patriot.

Included in the group were adults Dean and Mazie Bunker, his brother and sister-in-law Lawrence and Cecile Bunker, Elvin and Shirley Barton, and Dale Thompson and Phil Stuart.

They drove a caravan of cars and trucks up the highway — including a semi hauling a bulldozer, a Jeep and a tractor, a panel van and a flat bed truck filled to the gills with gear they’d need — like a portable sawmill and a welding outfit. Along the way they camped in two travel trailers they towed behind.

“It’s just too crowded here,” Mazie Bunker told the Citizen Patriot in 1960.

Back then, the Bunker children were ages 17 to 7 — Terry, 17, Bob, 16, Diana, 14, Gloria, 9, and Phyllis, 7.

“We may be miles and miles from any other humans and we’ll have problems in schooling, getting medical aid and many other things,” Mazie Bunker told the Citizen Patriot.

They crossed into Alaska on Aug. 6, 1960. By August 1961, Dean and Mazie had each homesteaded 80 acres, four miles up Willow Fishhook Road and another four miles off the road into the wilderness.

In 1961, Willow Fishhook Road in Willow was as far north out of Wasilla as vehicles could drive. Willow Fishhook was created as a transportation link to connect the mines in Hatcher Pass to the Alaska Railroad, Dean said.

Back in the early 1960s though, it wasn’t much of a road and was often impassable.

“You’d get stuck if it rained,” Mazie recalled recently, saying bad roads are what stand out most vividly about that era.

Beginning of Bunker and Bunker

Dean and Terry formed Bunker and Bunker as an equal partnership after winning a bid in 1962 to transport Mat-Su Borough School District students in the upper end of the borough to school.

Contract in hand, they set about getting buses. But Dean soon discovered there were no used buses worth buying in Alaska, so he began pricing new buses, he said. Eventually, General Motors agreed to finance 100 percent of those first two buses, Dean said.

But Bunker and Bunker couldn’t afford the $2,000 more GM would charge to deliver the buses to Alaska, nor could they afford to fly down to pick them up.

So, father and son set off hitchhiking to Michigan, sleeping on the ground or in vehicles that picked them up.

“Our good credit and honest name is what got us financing,” Dean said.

On the way back, Dean drove the 60-passenger bus and Terry steered a 48-passenger rig.

A couple of bridges were out on the road ahead and authorities were stopping everyone at Fort Nelson, Dean recalled. But the Bunkers got permission to continue as far as Toad River after Dean showed authorities they had a stove, bed, food and other supplies in the two buses and could take care of themselves.

“They’d run out of everything but coffee and pie in Toad River,” Dean said.

After a few hours in Toad River, Dean noticed trucks coming into town from the north and told Terry to prepare to sneak out behind the next one. Soon a truck headed out, and the two buses followed.

When the truck crossed the river at a wide, shallow spot past one broken bridge and then another, the buses followed a mile or so behind.

“We took the buses right through those rivers,” Dean said.

As the road was pushed farther and farther north out of Willow, the company’s route grew with it. In 1963, the road was extended to Montana Creek and the next year a spur road was carved out to Talkeetna. Dean was behind the wheel when the first school bus rolled into Talkeetna, he said.

In those days, students would ride snowmachines or walk for miles carrying guns and knives for protection from moose and bear in the woods, Dean said. They’d leave the weapons with the bus drivers, who would return them at the end of the day.

Students and parents also know Mazie from the many years she worked as a cook at Talkeetna Elementary School and rode the bus as a monitor.

‘Once she got a hold of me she wouldn’t let go’

So much has changed since 1939 when Dean and Mazie met. He was 16 then and she was 12, a fact he wouldn’t discover for several months.

Dean said he always had a trap line growing up in Michigan. In 1939, he used $15 of his trap line savings to buy a 1929 coup.

He was driving his new car through his old neighborhood when he met up with the Rogers brothers and some friends and invited them for a swim at the millpond; he’d drive. So the kids all piled in the car, and somewhere in the group was the Rogers boys’ kid sister, Mazie.

Dean’s father was a mechanic and had his own business before The Great Depression, but when money dried up, he moved the family to a farm where they worked for a share of the crop for four years.

Mazie knew the farm well; it had belonged to her family until they lost it during the Depression.

When Dean’s family moved out, Mazie’s family had returned to the farm as renters.

At the millpond Dean noticed someone in the water in trouble. He jumped in and pulled her out. It was Mazie. She said she couldn’t swim and had stepped in a hole and started to drown.

“She about drowned, but I got her out,” Dean said. “I kidded her that once she got a hold of me she wouldn’t let go.”

They were still just kids when Dean’s mom signed a layaway ticket for a set of rings for her that Christmas. After Mazie turned 14 the next June, the two headed to Ohio to get married.

They got to the courthouse on a Saturday and found the doors locked. But a side door was open and a man inside said he knew the mayor and the license clerk, and he could get them down there if they really wanted to get married.

The Bunkers were married in the mayor’s office with the license clerk and Dean’s brother, Lawrence Bunker, as witnesses.

Family tree grows from 7 to 46

It’s been a good life, Mazie said over breakfast.

In addition to working as a family at Bunker and Bunker, three generations of the Bunker clan have adjoining commercial set net sites across Cook Inlet in Snug Harbor. Dean said he tried drift net fishing first, but switched to set nets 48 years ago to spend more time with his family.

At 89, Dean is again at fish camp this summer, but is returning for his birthday celebration July 28.

“Dad still walks every day, uses a chainsaw and stacks firewood, and many other activities that you wouldn’t expect from someone his age,” said daughter Gloria.

Dean and Mazie live alone, drive themselves, enjoy time with their large family and many friends in the community, and are charter members of the Sunshine Church in Talkeetna.

During the past 71 years, their branch of the Bunker family has grown from seven members to 46, so far.

Descended from Dean and Mazie are children, Terry and Juanita Bunker of Willow; Bob Bunker of Wasilla; Diana and Joe Walker of Trapper Creek; Gloria and Doran Lee of Willow; Phyllis and Tom Symmonds of Longview, Wash.; 15 grandchildren; 23 great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild.

Contact managing editor Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.