Longtime resident, writer looks back on decades of life in the Last Frontier

WASILLA — Lee Fuller has been a writer for a long time.

In 1964, when she and her husband, Jack, left Ohio to teach school in Point Hope, she started keeping a diary.

“I started a journal on the first day that we decided to do this and kept it until the last day that we lived in Point Hope,” Lee said at her Wasilla townhouse.

Lee said she carried those journals around for years and years. People started telling her she should try and turn those diaries into a memoir. So she did. It’s called “A Rocking Chair, a Wig, Two Kids and a Husband,” and it’s out now from Northbooks in Eagle River. Lee will sign copies from 1 to 3 p.m., Saturday at Pandemonium Books on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway.

“People who read it tell me they have enjoyed it,” she said.

The Fullers met at Adrian College in Ohio where they both were studying. It was around the time of World War II. She was fresh off a stint working in an occupational therapy unit with the Women’s Auxiliary Corps. He had just returned from the Pacific campaign where he’d served with distinction on Iwo Jima.

“We met in September and we were married in December and we’ve been married for 64 years,” Lee said.

The couple left for Alaska seeking adventure.

“We just decided that we wanted to do something a little more adventurous than living in suburbia,” she said.

Jack said they came up with two options — moving to the Virgin Islands or to Alaska. He said his wife decided to try Alaska first because she’d always wanted to go there.

“I never got her to the Virgin Islands,” he said.

The title of the book comes from some of the things Lee brought with her to Point Hope. The rocking chair is a family heirloom that belonged to her great-great-grandfather, “the last of the old Methodist circuit riders,” as Lee puts it.

The wig is a whole story in itself. Her sister was a beautician at the time that the Fullers left Ohio. She had an idea that Lee might want to bring a wig along since there was no way of knowing when she’d be able to make it to the beauty shop. It might be nice, her sister suggested, to have something to throw on in a hurry if need be.

So she had a wig done up nice and put on a mannequin head she brought along. Wigs were not as commonplace then as they are now. After some time in Point Hope, word about the wig got out and Lee said she soon found out that curiosity had gotten the better of some of the village girls.

“They were coming in and trying it on when I was at school,” she said.

In the village, Lee said, she and her family made a point of getting out into the community and participating as much as they could. Her husband agreed.

“We took part in everything that was going on in the village,” she said.

Jack backs up that assessment.

“Some teachers just stay back and stay in their quarters,” he said. “I had dogs and hunted for our meat like they did.”

They comprised half of the school’s teaching staff. The other half was the principal and the principal’s wife.

“Point Hope was a very friendly village,” Lee said.

“It’s a very special place as far as I’m concerned,” Jack added.

After Point Hope, the Fullers went to Gambell on St. Lawrence Island. They lived there two years and then the oldest of their two daughters graduated from eighth grade. There were no high schools in the villages then. So they sent her off to boarding school.

“The day I stood on the Gambell airstrip and watched the plane carry her away to boarding school, I knew it would be our last year on the island,” she writes in her book’s epilogue.

They needed to live in a community where the girls could go to high school. Jack wound up deciding which one after he enlisted with the National Guard’s First Eskimo Scout Battalion. He got a job that stationed him in Nome. And the Fullers lived there for 20 years. Jack served eight of those in the state Legislature.

Now, they spend winters in Wasilla and summers in their cabin on the Little Susitna River.

“Me — well, I write a little, paint a little and read a lot,” Lee writes in her epilogue. “And so our love affair with Alaska continues.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.