LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Today is Wednesday, February 5, 2020. We are here at the National Park Service offices for the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve in Nome, Alaska. I’m Leslie McCartney, and we have the pleasure of having Howard Farley here with us today and Katie. And if you’d like to introduce yourself, Katie, and then Howard, and then we can begin.

KATIE CULLEN: Sure. Hi, I’m Katie Cullen. I’m the interpretation and education program manager at Bering Land Bridge National Preserve in Nome, Alaska.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And Howard? HOWARD FARLEY: And I’m Howard Farley. I’ve been a part of this community for -- since 19 -- 1959.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, so how did you arrive here, then? Where are you from originally? HOWARD FARLEY: I actually have been here several times. KATIE CULLEN: Mm.

HOWARD FARLEY: I was born in Detroit, Michigan, and my family moved west right after World War II. And uh, I was just a young teenager, didn’t know exactly where I was gonna go.

I lost my father early -- early on, and we moved around quite a bit. And my mother worked for the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration). LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: In the early days. And so, we moved from station to station, just like other government workers.

And we ended up in Seattle, Washington, as a teenager, and my mother worked for one of the airlines. And she quit her job to take another job, and she got a -- she got a ride on the airplane. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: So she says, "Oh, let’s go to Alaska." So my sister and I and my mother, we made it to Juneau, Alaska. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And that was in 1949.

And I loved it. Oh, it was -- it was fantastic. We went up on a day and came back that same day. KATIE CULLEN: Wow.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: How old were you then, Harold? HOWARD FARLEY: I was -- let’s see, in ’49, I would have been twelve, thirteen, fourteen. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok, yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Right around that age. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And I loved it. And I -- but I thought, I’ll never get back here again, you know. I mean, you know, it’s impossible.

And it was one of those days -- I don’t know how many of you have been in and out of Juneau. It was a day when the sun’s shining. It was gorgeous. And boy, you know, it gave me a false thing, you know.

So anyway, time moved on. I joined the Coast Guard in 1950. I spent part of my time, um, in Los Angeles on weather ships. And I took a weather ship -- we took a ship that had a weather patrol in those days. And we made it to the Bering Sea. KATIE CULLEN: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: And that was in 1952.

And then, I transferred to two other ships. And there’s irony coming. In 1953, I decided to leave the Coast Guard, get discharged. We were anchored off of Nome, Alaska.

I was running -- I was a boatswain, boatswain mate, and I was running boats. And I brought the liberty parties in.

It happened to be the Fourth of July, and the schedule was, they would have a parade on the streets of Nome. And we’ve done that ever since. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: So all of us got together, and we got our uniforms on, our dress blues. And we’re all -- got our rifles, and we’re all ready. We get down here.

We brought the boat in, and we must’ve got mixed up in what the time was. We got there, the parade was already over. KATIE CULLEN: Oh. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, no.

HOWARD FARLEY: So you know, it was kind of disappointing, you know. And so anyway, I went south, and as I traveled south, I kept running into bad deals.

When I left Nome, I got on a flying boxcar with some Air Force guys. And I’m in my dress blues. And I seen the captain wink to the -- to the guy that pushes you out of the plane.

And I seen him wink, and I knew what they were going to do. So what they did is, they said, "You gotta wear a parachute." They put a parachute on me. I never had a parachute on in my life.

They says, "Now when that -- when that light goes green, you gotta jump out." And -- and they thought they had me, you know, and I played along.

Anyway, we got to Fairbanks, and I was wandering around Fairbanks, the only guy in navy, you know, uniform. Mt. Spurr blew. A volcano right outside of Anchorage. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, right. HOWARD FARLEY: And it covered Anchorage with this much (ash) -- oh, and it was horrible. KATIE CULLEN: Gosh. HOWARD FARLEY: I got stuck in -- in Fairbanks for ten days.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: What year was that then, Howard? HOWARD FARLEY: This was, this’d have been ’53. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah.

And you know what they did to clean the fields? LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm? HOWARD FARLEY: They took a jet engine, mounted it on a truck, and used that to blow the -- to blow the dust off the runway so that the planes could take off. KATIE CULLEN: Wow. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah.

So as I moved, I progressed to Anchorage. Then I got to Anchorage and another catastrophe. That year before, a plane had gone down in Anchorage, a Globeboat, Globemaster, it was called. An Air Force plane. Went down with all hands.

And they just found it here a few years ago. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, my. HOWARD FARLEY: And were able to recover it off the glacier. Crashed into a glacier. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Huh.

HOWARD FARLEY: So Alaska was kind of weird for me for a while. So I got down to Seattle and got discharged from the -- and I decided to go to -- go to college.

So I went back, finished high school, went to Washington State, got my degree. And while I was working my way through college, I also had a family.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And what did you get your degree in, Howard? HOWARD FARLEY: Business administration and agriculture. Business administration. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: And it was perfect for what I was going --

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: That on top of having your family at the same time. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yeah. So I had three or four of my first family at the same time.

And -- and as to work my way through college, and this is something I think young children have gotta learn today, you can work your way through college. I had the GI bill, but it wasn’t enough. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: So I actually became a journeyman butcher. I worked for the college veterinarians. The veterinarians usually took care of the butcher work. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh.

HOWARD FARLEY: It’s just a -- and I happened to be there, and somebody said, "How’d you like to work in the butcher shop?" "Oh, fine." KATIE CULLEN: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And I was -- college butcher shop, and I said, "Sure." So then, pretty soon I got pretty good at it, and they wanted me downtown. So then, I -- I worked in a regular professional meat market. KATIE CULLEN: Wow. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: That’s when we said, "Yes, ma’am." LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: "What would you like to have?" "Would you like to have five slices of salami? And how thick would you like it?" And you looked at each person. Those were the good old days for meat -- meat -- meat people.

Well, anyway, small world. One day a traveling salesman came in, and he says, "You know, Northern Commercial Company in Alaska is looking for a butcher." And I said to my wife, I says, "This might be a real opportunity."

They were going to fly me up, and -- and give me housing. And twenty percent discount on my groceries, and they were going to pay me, too.

So I came up. I lasted about two years there, and then I --

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Where in Alaska was that? HOWARD FARLEY: Right here in Nome. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right here in Nome? HOWARD FARLEY: Right here in Nome. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: See, I came back. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Complete circle back to Nome. Irony. There’s irony in everything, and I’m not done with it yet, either.

I went out and I was out, and then one of the other shops in town called me and said -- offered me double the money to come back. So I came back.

And I’ve been here ever since. And I actually ran those meat -- I ran all the meat markets in town at one time.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: How many were there at one time? HOWARD FARLEY: It was three, three at one time. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: I worked at each one of them. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And -- and the tourist business came to me the same way. I had been -- I had a dog team. And that was -- there was irony to that, too.

I was working for the US Mercantile, which was a store down the street here, and one of our fellows that was their driver -- We delivered groceries, just like they do today. They thought that was something new, no. We delivered groceries.

And anyway, he says, "How’d you like to go for a dog team ride?" He says, "It’s going to be a nice night tonight." We went out on a beautiful, moonlit night, and I was hooked.

And after that, the manager at the store says, "You know?" He says, "I think we ought to deliver groceries for kind of a -- by dog team." LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Huh. HOWARD FARLEY: So we did. KATIE CULLEN: Wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: Remember, I don’t have a dog team yet. I’m -- I’m still -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: I’m still -- I love it, and I’m somebody else’s dog team.

So anyway, this went on for a while. Then Alaska Alliance came along and said, "You know, we’re kinda looking for somebody to have a dog team." Well, I knew I had part interest in one because I provided all the scraps and everything for him, see.

So one day he comes to me real solemn-faced, and he says -- he says, "Howard, I’ve got to leave town." And he says, "I’m going to have to get rid of the dogs." And I said, "I'm -- I'm -- " I said, "How much?" And he says, "Would $200 be too much?" Ahh! Dog sled, dogs, harness. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Everything.

HOWARD FARLEY: Everything. And I couldn’t get down to the bank quick enough. And there it was. There it was.

It -- so I -- every -- every lunch time, I would go out and -- we had ’em on wheels for a while in the summer time, and we kinda added a little bit of irony there.

I’m going down the road one day, and not easy to stop on the road with wheels. And I hit a guy’s brand new car that he just got off the boat, off the barge.

And the higher-ups in the company said that, "You know, insurance-wise we think you’re gonna have to go to a demonstration and not be able to give people rides."

Because I would hook up twelve, fifteen dogs. We’d go down the road at twenty miles an hour. There was no brakes on it. You know, there was no brakes on it to stop it, so.

So I said, "That’d be fine." And then we went to just the demonstration, so.

When the Iditarod came along, I was more or less in the business, and it was a natural. It was a natural to -- to go. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And that’s the way a lot of people treated the first one, you know. That’s -- see how this leads?

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: It does. Describe what Nome was like when you first arrived here.

HOWARD FARLEY: When I -- when I first arrived here, we had ten bars. Now we have a few. But that’s where everything was. Remember, we had no television. Only radio we had was Armed Forces Radio. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Which wasn’t that great. They never were good at it.

And -- and we didn’t have TV or cell phones. We were still winding phones up. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And we still had party lines.

And every -- the -- where all the entertainment took place was downtown in the bars. If you wanted to charter an airplane, you went down to the -- the bar where the pilots hung out.

Somebody said to me the other day, "Oh, were they, a buncha drunks?" No, no. That’s where the public was. That’s where their -- their -- their people were. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: You went down there, and you said, "Well, yeah, I -- I can -- "

I worked a lot with the pilots around here, hauling reindeer. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: From the reindeer herds to town here to sell it. I was one of the biggest sellers of reindeer in the history of Nome. Right here.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So you’d butcher it up and then you'd sell it? HOWARD FARLEY: Butcher it up. Yeah. Yeah. Hundred thousand pounds a year. KATIE CULLEN: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: Great food. Fantastic food. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Lean. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yep.

HOWARD FARLEY: And great for people that are on diets. And it was just a fabulous food. And that’s another story that comes out of Nome here. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And so the bars had a lot to do with it, and then, of course, the "Nome Nugget" was -- there was a story going about the "Nome Nugget" that if you wanted to start a story, they would start a story in the "Nome Nugget," and it would go make all the bars and come back to the "Nome Nugget." It wouldn’t be the same story.

So there was a gossip. And what do we got for a gossip now, we got these phones. You see? LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: Ok, one of the ladies that worked for AC (Alaska Commercial Company store) as a cashier, she got a better job. She was the operator for the local telephone company. And you -- you -- you -- they got rid of the wind-ups. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: But you’d pick up the phone and -- and give her a number. It’d be Red 35 or Black 98 or something like that. I could never remember the stupid numbers.

So anyway, I would -- and her name was Fern. One of her sons now runs the bar there. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: The one right across the street. Um, "Breakers."

And her name was Fern. And I’d call, "Fern, I want so-and-so." "This is not allowed." "Come on, Fern." She says, "Ok. I’ll only do this one time."

And she knew who everybody was because she was the operator. So she knew who everybody was. And -- and we know what operators -- they love to get in the middle of things like that, you know.

So anyway, we went towards the dial telephones. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Ok. Dial telephones were started by this TelAlaska here. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And that was run by a local company. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And he was, um, Charlie Reader’s brother, Pete. He owned the telephone company.

So anyway, there was an old gentleman that hung out downtown. His name was Charlie Jones. And he was old. Well, of course I was young. He was old and kinda hard of hearing.

And I was sitting there at the bar time having a drink. And Charlie says to Pete, he says, "When you going to bring me that new-fangled phone up?" He says, "Well," he says, "Charlie, I’ll see if I can get up there this afternoon." So.

He gets up there and he installs the phone. Comes back down to the bar, and Charlie goes home. Next day he comes down to the bar and he says, "I thought you put that phone in my house." He says, "I could’ve swore I did." But he says, "I’ll go up and check on it."

He went up to Charlie’s house. Charlie was a little -- couldn’t see very good, either. And he forgot to turn it around. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: Charlie took one look at it. He -- he didn’t see the dial. And that -- that joke went up and down. And it went around and around and around.

And they had a club here in town called the Arctic Club, in those days. And they had raffles. Oh, they were famous for raffles. They raffled off a Piper. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Airplane? HOWARD FARLEY: Airplane. KATIE CULLEN: Oh, wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yes, I’m telling you. A Piper airplane. I mean, that -- that takes a lot of raffle money. And that was the grand prize. And a pilot won it. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Jeez. KATIE CULLEN: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yeah.

So this town, if you wanted money. Pull tabs came later. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: But in the early days, four, five, six games were going on in every single bar.

And gambling, uh, there was a game that went on at the -- at the -- oh gosh. Used to be the other side of there. Oh God, what was the name of it? It’ll come to me. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: But anyway, there was a game there that went on for -- for thirty years. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Good heavens. HOWARD FARLEY: A gambling game that went on.

People sat in there and -- and -- the whole -- whole Alaska was wide open for gambling in those days. This is before statehood, and shortly thereafter. Remember, the state didn’t get organized, right, at after. I mean, they fumbled around a lot.

And in the meat markets, it was real funny. I talked to the first weight guy that came through for the state. He says, "You won’t believe what people have been weighing meat on." Baby scales, and these produce scales.

And he’d look at the scale, and he says, "That scale’s off ten percent." The guy’d look at him. "Oh, no kidding?"

And the same thing with gasoline. They inspect the gasoline pumps, and they were all screwed up. So statehood didn’t come gracefully. It came like starts and stutters, you know.

And I got right there. Remember Alaska became a state in January of ’59. I arrived here on November of ’59.

Now, let me tell you about my arrival the first time. I had a suit on. In those days, men wore suits. I didn’t wear a hat, but I wore a suit. And all I owned was a summer suit because I didn’t come from the polar regions.

I got to Fairbanks on Pan-American Airways. It was seventy-eight degrees below zero. There was one taxi running, and he only could get about this much -- the defrost on his -- and he kept the car running for twenty-four hours.

So I went to the hotel. Next morning I got up, got on the plane. It was still seventy-eight below. And how they ever flew that airplane, I -- I -- to this day I don’t know. And -- DC-3.

And on the way to Nome, we went through Kotz (Kotzebue). And in Kotz, it was forty-five below. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Warmed up. HOWARD FARLEY: Further south. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And then, we got to Nome, it was thirty below. So I went to the Whaley House. It’s a house up here. It’s a familiar house in town.

AC owned that at that time. Northern Commercial Company, which is AC now, owned that house. And that’s where I stayed, stayed upstairs. And it was a two-family house. And it -- the first night -- I hadn’t brought the family up yet.

The first night, the house on the corner burned. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, jeez. HOWARD FARLEY: I woke up about two o’clock in the morning. All I can see is this flames. KATIE CULLEN: Oh, my goodness.

HOWARD FARLEY: I mean, you don’t fight a fire at thirty below zero very good, you know. And it just went up. It's the one over in the corner from where I live. And, oh my gosh. And that was my beginning in Nome.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: What was your first impressions of Nome after the house fire? What -- what -- HOWARD FARLEY: I thought, oh my God, what am I -- what am I getting myself into? I always had self-doubts.

In those days, we didn’t own cars. We walked everywhere because remember, the town didn’t have Bering View or any of these other places. It was all compact.

The roads were -- there were no roads. At that time, there was one -- two guys that worked for the city. One run the bulldozer. That was Harry. And the other one was -- he ran the grader. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And that’s all we had. Two guys, took care of the roads.

The roads were closed. They didn’t go anywhere. They went to the airport, and that was it.

And the airport was different in those days, too. When I got here, I got here in November, and in December they were -- planes were stalled because of the weather, getting the Christmas stuff in.

So one time, the word went out to the bars, "We need help." So we all went out there with our pickup trucks and company trucks and any -- and we helped haul mail from a -- from an airplane out on the tarmac. We helped load it, and we took it to the post office. I mean, people did this. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. And it was -- it was -- it was something. I’ll tell you, I’d never -- never had been in a place like that.

And, of course, at that time, the gold company was still operating, and gold was the master in this town. Um, in the summer time, they opened it up, and there was hundreds of jobs.

And the King Islanders came. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: In their skin boats. And the Diomeders (from Diomede Island) came in their skin boats, and they came to work. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And they parked it right down here on the other side of the hotel. Right down there. And put their tents up, and guys went to work in the thaw fields.

In order to provide work for the dredge, -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: -- they thawed the ground out with cold water ahead of the dredge. KATIE CULLEN: Oh.

HOWARD FARLEY: And this is where a lot of the young guys in this town and older guys got their first jobs. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: In the thaw-fields, they called it.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So when did your family come up? HOWARD FARLEY: Uh, they came up, uh, within the next month before Christmas.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: What was your wife’s first impressions? HOWARD FARLEY: Not very good. Not very good at all. ’Cause we’d been there twice, and -- and one day --

I might as well tell you the whole story. One day she says, "I’ve had enough." So she -- she took me to court and divorced me and took the kids. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Aww. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. That’s not the end of the story. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Keep going.

HOWARD FARLEY: While I was working down at the US Merc when I was going through this tumultuous thing. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And I won’t mention names or anything. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Nope.

HOWARD FARLEY: But anyway, I’m going through this bad deal, and I met a young lady. And that young lady has now been married to me for fifty-two years. KATIE CULLEN: Wow.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. That’s lovely. And how many children do you have with her? HOWARD FARLEY: We have -- we have five children. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Lovely.

HOWARD FARLEY: She had one child, and I had four, so we have ten. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ten. HOWARD FARLEY: And Mimi is one of a set of twins. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, my. Lovely.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yes. I have six girls and four boys. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So it worked out nice. HOWARD FARLEY: It did. Worked out beautiful.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. And she’s from here? HOWARD FARLEY: Yes. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes. HOWARD FARLEY: She’s from King Island. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Very, very nice. So happy ending story. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s not over yet.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: No. You said fifty-five years? HOWARD FARLEY: Well, let’s see. We had our fiftieth anniversary in -- we were -- we were married in 1967. You know how I remember it? It’s right on the wall. And I let one of the lady friends embroider it. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh nice. KATIE CULLEN: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: And there it sits. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Very nice. HOWARD FARLEY: And I can’t miss it. But I didn’t one year. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: Took a long time to -- you get over that. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: But anyway, that’s --

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: But you’ve been in a lot of businesses? HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, yeah. I’ve -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. So you started off doing butcher work? HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, I -- I ran the meat business in -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: -- in several places.

And also, we used to have a locker club here. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: That rented out locker space. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Cool. HOWARD FARLEY: I managed that for a while.

And uh, right along, we’ve been commercial fishermen. I -- I pioneered commercial fishing in this area, too.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: How long were you a commercial fisherman? HOWARD FARLEY: I’m still a commercial fisherman. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Are you really? HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, yeah. I'm still a commercial fisherman. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm.

HOWARD FARLEY: We got three -- we got three boats. And we got three boats, uh, Bristol Bay boats, aluminum. And we’re in the fishing business. We fish for crab, halibut, cod.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So tell me, so how long have you been doing that, then? HOWARD FARLEY: Uh, I started that in 1962. KATIE CULLEN: Wow.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So from 1962 to now, there must’ve been big changes in the commercial fishing industry. HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, yeah. Yes. Yes. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Can you tell me about that?

HOWARD FARLEY: Ok, what happened now, when we -- when we -- when the state took over fishing from the feds. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: The feds knew that it was coming because, you know, it had been broadcast.

And the federal management of fisheries has been off and on. They were the managers because, you know, of course, we weren’t a state.

And some of the old-time practices, traps and things like that, just weren’t -- weren’t allowed, and when we became a state we changed some things drastically.

And another thing, too, when we became a state, some of the fisheries were in very bad shape. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And what do you do when they’re in bad shape? You stop for a while. And we -- we --

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: They were in bad shape because the stocks were low? HOWARD FARLEY: They were -- No, they were -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: No? HOWARD FARLEY: -- in bad shape. They'd been overfished. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, yeah. That’s -- HOWARD FARLEY: Overfishing. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Overfished is what I meant.

HOWARD FARLEY: Overfishing is the big problem. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm. HOWARD FARLEY: Just about in every fishery. They’re doing the same thing now with the crab. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And that’s serious business. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: What they’re doing is they’re -- they’re fishing on a declining population.

Down in Bristol Bay, in 1979 or ’76, they harvested 230 million pounds of king crab in Bristol Bay. Now it’s down to six million. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: So it’s been declining. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And the -- the other thing we don’t know, we don’t know what effect the Russians are having. Remember, we share those grounds out there with the Russians. There’s a boundary. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And we don’t know what they’re doing. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: ’Cause they don’t volunteer to tell us.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So when the state became -- when the -- when the fisheries was taken over from the feds to the state, you were saying there was a lot of changes. What other changes?

HOWARD FARLEY: Well, another thing, too. We finally started enforcing the -- the -- the high sea pirates that were harvesting salmon. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: On the high seas. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And we got that through Congress. Uh, that went through Congress, actually, to set that up. The North Pacific Management Council was set up.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So where did you fish? Did you go up all around the Seward Peninsula? Was it -- which your area? HOWARD FARLEY: I fished basically in Nome. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Uh-huh.

HOWARD FARLEY: And here’s how it worked. I fished in Nome. We caught too many fish. Fish and Game cut us off.

We went down to Safety. We fished down there. We caught too much fish. They cut us off.

I went to Golovin, took the whole family to Golovin. We fished for several years down there. And then finally by -- oh, by then things started to come back. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: But you want to remember, a lot of these streams were gold mining streams. And gold and fish don’t get along. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: Because what happens is, they mine the -- the very -- the very place where fish tend to -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Spawn. HOWARD FARLEY: Spawn. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And a lot of the rivers were basically fished out and -- and, you know, and they’re just starting. Some of them are just starting to come back now because it takes a long time for rivers to heal. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: And --

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Same as for over-catching. I mean, then -- HOWARD FARLEY: Yep. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: -- you know, you have large fish, and then they start smaller and smaller and smaller until it’s not worth catching. HOWARD FARLEY: That’s -- that’s --

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Are the -- are they coming back in size? HOWARD FARLEY: They’re coming back. They’re coming back.

And another thing, too, Fish and Game has had its ups and downs also.

When -- the way they were counting fish is a clicker. And flying an airplane. Now you can’t tell the variety of a fish. You can by size, but you don’t know whether that’s a silver or chum or a king or what. It’s just click-click-click-click. And sometimes you can’t click fast enough. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: So that was the means they -- that was a good one. It was a good thing.

But now we actually have places the fish flies -- goes through and (clicking noise) it’s counted. KATIE CULLEN: Oh. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hey.

HOWARD FARLEY: Now that's -- that is more accurate. Now we get to see the specie(s), which fish. And before, it -- we thought we were just a thing that had three or four fish. Kings, chums, pinks, silvers.

But now we’re finding out reds are going up some of these streams. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm. HOWARD FARLEY: And we didn’t know that.

Because, another thing, too, that came from state. We found out that you can fertilize a lake, a salmon lake. They fertilized it, and the fish came back. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: It’s a marvelous invention. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah, interesting.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, it is. And so what’s happening, the reds are coming back to Salmon Lake. And guess who they gotta come by to get there? They gotta come by. For us, that was -- that are fishing for chums and other -- other fish.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So over the years, did you change how you fished, for what -- for what species of fish you were fishing for?

HOWARD FARLEY: Now what’s -- chum has always been the big fishery. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And misnomed, misnamed.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: What is it? HOWARD FARLEY: Dogfish. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok. HOWARD FARLEY: Dogfish. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: Fit only for sled dogs. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm. HOWARD FARLEY: Bad reputation. The chum salmon is a beautiful fish. All fish are beautiful fish from my standpoint. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: There’s no fish -- look at what they’re actually eating in the world now. Bait fish. What we would call bait fish. All fish are being utilized. So that’s good because then it doesn’t concentrate.

But anyway, we’ve seen the fish go from nothing to something. And we’ve also seen the price go from nothing to something.

And I used to sell -- in fact, for several years, I had my own markets in Anchorage. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Well, that’s where you -- so where do you sell your fish now? HOWARD FARLEY: To Norton Sound Economic -- (Norton Sound Economic Development Corporation - NSEDC) LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ah, right. HOWARD FARLEY: They’re the -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: They’re the hub? HOWARD FARLEY: They’re the buyer now. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: But I had my own markets. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. And I pioneered a lot of the market.

We had places in Anchorage that wanted fish. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: And Cook Inlet was also down. Bristol Bay almost went broke for a number of years. I mean, they were in horrible shape. And they were having --

I went to -- I fished Bristol Bay one summer. 1980. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: I never worked so hard for so little in my life. But I came back with enough to pay off the mortgage on my house, and uh.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: What about the herring fishery? It doesn’t come up this far, does it? HOWARD FARLEY: It did. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, did it? HOWARD FARLEY: It did, and we fished it.

And -- but the problem with that is that the Japanese, they want a certain size roe. Three hundred grams, that fits into these little wooden boxes, and it’s all the same. And this is a traditional thing. It’s salted, cured.

Our herring here get too big. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. KATIE CULLEN: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: They won’t fit the fishery.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh my. HOWARD FARLEY: And remember, you’re seining ’em or gill-netting ’em. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes.

HOWARD FARLEY: Ok, we started off with two-and-a-half-inch mesh, fishing ’em with -- and I was also in the net-making business. Hanging business. I did that for years. Fact, I still do it. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh.

HOWARD FARLEY: I hang nets. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes. HOWARD FARLEY: Build nets. And I started with 2.5-inch mesh. And it got up to 3-inch mesh. I mean, that’s a half inch. KATIE CULLEN: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And that means it’s a bigger -- it’s a bigger fish. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: And the market, they just aren’t interested. The fish are there. They figure there’s fifty thousand metric tons. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: In -- in, you know, in Norton Sound.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So over the years, I mean, that’s sort of like a -- not a taste has changed, but has people’s taste changed? So have -- was one fish more popular at one time to sell? HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, the king salmon by -- by -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: By far?

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yeah. And the problem is, the attitude of a lot of the villages is that, "Well, my God, this fish has been here forever. My great-great-great-great-great grandparents fished king salmon. We want to fish ’em, too."

Well, what they’ve tended to do? They’ve tended to fish ’em out. And the way they’ve done it, well, with fish wheels for one thing. I mean, that catches everything. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: But the mesh that they’ve been fishing with, up to eight-inch mesh. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: And that means they’re taking the big females. The big females are the fishery. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: They get in the Yukon, that’s the ones that’s gonna go all the way up to Canada. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And spawn. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And they’re gonna spawn in all the streams along the way. And if you catch those big ladies, you’ve got problems because what happens --

So what they’ve done, and it took years to do it, ’cause I was -- I was in the selling business. I worked for Lummi (Lummi Fishery Supplies, founded in 1967 as a storefront commercial fishing gear supplier in Bellingham, Washington, sold web, floats, rope and twine to commercial fisherman and contracted with fishing net hangers. In 1983, they changed their name to LFS, Inc.), one of the fish -- big outfits that sells fishing gear. I was their agent for here.

And they lowered it to seven and a half (inch mesh). And that will save the king salmon, because that’ll mean that the big ones will bounce off. The little ones will go through.

And the seven and a half will catch just the right ones. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. Oh my.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Because the big ones are -- they might be a -- they might be a five or six-year-old fish. And the ones that are too small might be spawning. They don’t all spawn in the same year. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: The jacks, what’s called jacks. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Kings, and that’s a salmon that doesn’t spawn. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And that’s great to catch. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: They’re lean, and they taste just like king salmon, but they don’t have -- they’re not going to spawn, so you’re not hurting anything. We’ve been through all these species. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: I was on the -- I was on the advisory board from this area for years. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: On which -- on the advisory board for the -- HOWARD FARLEY: Fish and Game. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Fish and Game. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: On both. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Uh-huh. HOWARD FARLEY: For years.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So did you -- so that was on the fish side. Did you do the game side, too? HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So can you talk about that?

HOWARD FARLEY: Uh, when we first came here, of course, there was no moose. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: The moose, that’s another story, came later.

The big story was reindeer. Reindeer, there was up to twenty-five thousand reindeer on this peninsula. Reindeer was the prime food of just about everybody.

I’d bring in beef, frozen beef, but reindeer was something that we had.

And it was really strange, when I first opened -- worked over here at AC, the butcher had it hidden underneath the counter, in the freezing -- frozen counter.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Had the beef hidden or the reindeer? HOWARD FARLEY: No, no, the reindeer. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh.

HOWARD FARLEY: And you come up and you want -- most everybody wanted reindeer stew. And -- and then you’d reach under there and he had a pot full of frozen reindeer already cut up for stew. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And you’d put it in a bag, in a paper bag, and that’s how it was handled. And then they would pay you cash at the butcher shop.

Silver dollars were prominent in those days. There’s nothing dirtier in this world than a silver dollar that’s been in everybody’s hands. And I mean, it just -- I mean, I’m a butcher. I’m sanitary. I know what it is, you know.

And -- and you’d see some guy digging in his pockets, and I thought, "Oh, my God." So I put my foot down, and I says --

I said, "We can’t do this anymore." I said, "You’ll have to -- we’ll properly wrap the meat up and tape it like it’s supposed to, and you’ll take care of it up front at the cash register."

And they had the old wind-up cash register. KATIE CULLEN: Oh, wow. HOWARD FARLEY: And some of the girls were -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Poking away? Taking it d -- Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: Then finally we got the electric ones. And couple gals quit ’cause they weren’t quick enough to do it. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: So this is what we had, and it was primitive, I’m telling you.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So what happened when the moose started arriving? HOWARD FARLEY: Ok, here. The way we found out about it, it was just kind of word of mouth.

Um, we had a commander of the Scout -- Scout battalion (297th Infantry, Army National Guard) -- the commander. And he was out on maneuvers, back in -- well, back near the park, where the park is now. Back in there. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: They used to have maneuvers back in there. And uh, shot a moose. And it made the "Nome Nugget." KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, it was a big one, too.

Well, what happened is that they had some bad fires in Fairbanks, and they felt that the moose moved. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ah. HOWARD FARLEY: Moved over here, just slowly. We didn’t even know it. They just moved slowly in here as the reindeer started to decrease.

Reindeer and moose don’t eat the same thing. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So what’s the difference? What do -- HOWARD FARLEY: Moose eat twigs. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Twigs. HOWARD FARLEY: Twigs. They -- bark feeders. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Caribou are lichen. HOWARD FARLEY: Lichens. Two different animals. And so, they can intermingle without too much trouble.

And you want to remember, over the years, I dealt with the reindeer herders privately. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: To buy for the stores.

So anyway, what happened with the -- with the reindeer, they had herders that were actually out there herding. They couldn’t get it -- no. They came from Siberia.

Now the Siberian Eskimos over there, they herd by herding on foot or with animals. And they’ve done that, and that’s why they’re successful.

The guys over here were basically hunters. They weren’t herders. The herding was actually invented over here when they brought the reindeer from over there to over here. And then it became an industry. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: But what happened is, that as it became an industry, it started producing money, you know.

And a lot of the herders were buying snowmobiles, and they were buying this and they were buying that. And they weren’t herding.

And the problem is, if you don’t herd reindeer, they’ll -- they’ll eat too much of one grazing area and not enough of the other. And then, of course, the bears get after them, and the wolves. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And, but when they were herding, they kept the bear population down to -- way down. And the wolf population almost extinct. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: Because when a wolf came on your grazing land, you had the right to kill it. And they did. And if they hadn’t, there wouldn’t have been any reindeer. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: But as the reindeer decreased and the moose population increased, that meant the bears were -- the bears were something to -- and the reindeer herders weren’t killing bears anymore. KATIE CULLEN: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: Larry Davis, one of the most famous herders from this area, he got into it with Fish and Game. He says, "If I see a bear, I’m going to kill it. Because it’s -- it’s going to be killing my -- my living." LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And he says, "I’m not going to even butcher it." He says, "I’m just going to kill it, and if you don’t like it, you know what you can do. " LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: They were his. And he had the grazing rights perfectly within his rights. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: Now as long as you had that, we didn’t have much of a bear population. It was all kept down. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And another thing, when I first came here, there was a seventy-five dollar bounty on wolves. And they never went to waste. They make the most beautiful ruffs you’ve ever seen. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And --

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Has that population gone back up now, the wolf population? HOWARD FARLEY: It's gone -- Yes. Yes, it has because there’s nobody killing ’em. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: And there’s nobody trapping ’em. Trapping is starting to -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And trapping is -- is way down. Um, that was one of the biggest things in the village is that the trappers would go out, you know, at the proper time and trap a certain number of animals. And unless man intercedes and keeps that balance, they’ll -- they’ll slip right in there and take over. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And uh, so another thing, too, is the muskox. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: That’s another subject.

When I was in the Coast Guard, there’s a light on, uh, on the island down there right off of Nunivak. There -- that’s where these -- where they came from, muskox. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes.

HOWARD FARLEY: There’s a light out there. It’s called Cape Mohican. And on a foggy day in 1953, I was in charge of lighting the lights. I was called the wickie, and that was my job. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: To take care of that.

We walked with the force. I had about ten guys with me. We were walking up towards Cape Mohican, and here they were, a whole bunch of these muskox. We’d never seen -- we didn’t have any idea what they even were. Some guy says, "Yeah, I think I seen one in the zoo here." You know. We didn’t know.

And as we walked up, they felt threatened, and they formed a circle, you know, like -- and so we just, you know -- so we kinda worked our way around ’em and got the light lit and took care of business, and got out of there. But that’s the first time I seen ’em.

And then later on, the federal government transplanted them to this area and to some other areas, too. But here they took off because they’re safe here.

And every single year, mama bear sits up on top of Anvil (Anvil Mountain) and looks down at ’em. And just licks her lips.

And so, the herd has grown, and they’ve stayed here. They do wander around a little bit, but they’ve stayed here. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And they’ve been a problem. They’ve been a problem. Especially the old males, the ones that are, you know, the breeders. The man -- They got a chip on their shoulder all the time.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So how have they been a problem? HOWARD FARLEY: They stomp. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: They stomp dogs. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yeah, that’s been a real problem. The people that have dogs just sit home. They gotta protect ’em. Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Huh. I did not realize that. HOWARD FARLEY: Yes. Yes. Because they’re herd animals. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And that’s another thing, too. In the spring when they have their babies, the bears start coming in. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And then, of course, the wolves are out there all the time. And so, the reindeer’s herd is -- the reindeer is almost gone. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: The caribou's more or less absorbed 'em. KATIE CULLEN: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: I haven’t seen a herd in years now. I used to be able to drive down to Safety, and there’d be -- there’d even be on Safety, down there. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm. HOWARD FARLEY: Which is almost an island. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. Huh. HOWARD FARLEY: And you’d see ’em -- you’d see ’em down there.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Now do you fish in the wintertime, too? HOWARD FARLEY: No. No. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Or is it just mostly summertime? HOWARD FARLEY: No.

We started a winter crab fishery. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Did you? HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. And it was -- it was supposed to be just for Nome. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Because we -- we had a cookpot here. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: One of the fishing companies came in and set up a cooking pot fish. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh.

HOWARD FARLEY: And the first year, we caught twenty-five thousand pounds of king crab.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And what year would that have been, Howard? Do you remember? HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, probably -- oh, ’70. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok. HOWARD FARLEY: In the '70’s, probably.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And that went off pretty good for the -- ? HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, it went good.

But what happened is, when Norton Sound Economic came in -- their name is economic, and they’re promoting economics.

And uh, they started forcing -- well, not forcing, but wanting a winter crab fishery. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And then, the crab fishery has expanded.

And the problem with winter crabbing is that crab can only be sold if they’re live. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: When you pull a crab out of the cold water, and he hits that ice, he’s almost dead. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: So you see what -- you see what I mean? LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: Now what they do is they cover their holes with insulation. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok. HOWARD FARLEY: To keep the hole from freezing. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Huh.

HOWARD FARLEY: And they have to put the crab, in the wintertime, into a tote with water in it. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: To keep it alive. HOWARD FARLEY: Salt water. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, to keep it alive. And that’s the problem. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Huh. HOWARD FARLEY: Getting ’em from there to there to the place. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: And then Norton Sound Economic says, "We only want #1 crab."

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And that’s a certain size? HOWARD FARLEY: That’s a certain size, and it’s no -- no -- no legs missing or anything like that. KATIE CULLEN: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: No barnacles. Perfectly clean crab, #1s. And they got a live market for that in the Orient. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh.

HOWARD FARLEY: What happens is, on this international airport at Anchorage? LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: You can -- you can -- you can deliver crab there and have ’em in the Orient within twenty-four hours. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: They put ’em in sawdust. Wet sawdust. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Really? KATIE CULLEN: Wet sawdust? That’s interesting. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Huh. Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And so, what if you pull up crabs that aren’t #1? What happens to them? HOWARD FARLEY: You gotta put ’em back. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So they’re still -- HOWARD FARLEY: Or you can eat ’em. You know, you have ’em for personal use. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And in most fisheries, we do have it where, you know, you can take whatever you want home.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So is the winter -- is the winter crab season been extended a bit more because -- HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, they’ve been extending, and the problem they had last year, the ice went out in April. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh.

HOWARD FARLEY: And it was -- what had happened is, it was -- it was a low ice, a warm winter. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: First time I have ever seen it. And I’ve been here since -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Forever. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: '50’s. Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Forever. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And the ice formed, but it was very weak. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And the wind had been blowing east, which is extraordinary. It’s not a wind that you expect.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: What is the predominant winds here? HOWARD FARLEY: The predominant wind here is north in the winter and around the -- it can vary in the summer. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes. HOWARD FARLEY: Because that’s when there’s changes.

But in the wintertime, the ice normally in the old days would form in October. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok.

HOWARD FARLEY: And by November, the small boat harbor would be closed, and the ice would start to form. And as it -- as it got colder and colder and colder, remember the north wind -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: -- is helping it.

It’s actually extending the slush out. And -- and it doesn’t freeze all in one chunk. This is -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: -- back and forth.

And what it would do is it would freeze in October, and we’d see -- I’ve seen ice five-foot thick in Norton Sound. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yeah.

In fact, let me confirm that. Let’s see, this is pre-Iditarod, when I was working down at the US Merc.

The same guy that I bought the dog team from, he says, "Can I borrow your car that your -- " I had a Camino. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, an El Camino. HOWARD FARLEY: El Camino.

And it’s really not a pickup truck. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: No. HOWARD FARLEY: It’s more of a car. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah, more like a -- HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, it’s a car.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: It’s made fashionable now by Clint Eastwood movies, but yes, I remember El Caminos.

HOWARD FARLEY: Oh God. So anyway, I said, "Yeah, yeah. Take it for the weekend." I thought he was going out and drive around on the roads. And Buffy. Oh God. Buffy, oh gosh, uh, Bufface is their name.

But anyway, he took his pickup out, and he was driving it up and down in front of Nome on the ice. Ice was about that thick. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: So next day I -- I says -- he brought the car back, and I says, "Well, how’d it go?" "Yeah, it went fine," he says. He says, "I drove clear up the Eldorado." I mean, that’s a river.

He drove my El Camino all the way up the Eldorado. That means he had to -- there wasn’t any roads over near. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: No.

HOWARD FARLEY: He got out on the ice, went up to Safety, went onto the bridge. Well, there was no bridge in those days. It was a ferry. And he drove it around there and across -- across the Sound and up the Eldorado. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Good heavens.

HOWARD FARLEY: I -- when he -- when he -- ’cause I had been up there with a dog team, you know. I knew what it was. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And he’s from -- he was from Kobuk, Kobuk area. And, in fact, that’s -- that’s what he told me that day. He decided to go home. And anyway, he drove it up there, and I --

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: But if it had been a year like you said last year -- HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: He wouldn't have been -- but -- had thawed -- HOWARD FARLEY: He wouldn’t have even got out of the -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: No. HOWARD FARLEY: He wouldn’t have even got out of the causeway.

So there -- there is -- and what happened this last year, it was around April. The ice was -- it looked fair. They’d opened the season. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: Some of the ice fish -- ice -- uh, gold miners were working. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And then all of a sudden, wind turned north. And bingo. Out it went. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: The wind went from the north? HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, it turned north. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: It had been east. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: East? Yes. HOWARD FARLEY: Was holding it in there, see. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: And the minute it turned north -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: It was gone? HOWARD FARLEY: It was gone. It had raised up just a little bit and was gone. And then it slushed in and out all year.

Now in all the time I’ve been here, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen that. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: But not this year. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: You can’t say it’s -- it's something that’s going to stay, bec -- Look at the picture. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: It’s all chunk -- oh. HOWARD FARLEY: We got lots of ice. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: And it’s pretty solid. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: ’Cause we’ve had cold weather. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: We’ve had cold weather. We’ve had warm weather. But we’ve had enough cold weather, and it’s been below zero. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: I’ve had twenty below at my house. KATIE CULLEN: Mm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm.

HOWARD FARLEY: So, you know, this -- this is not like last year. I think last year was an anomaly. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And that’s why I’m not a great believer in -- in -- in global warming. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. You've said that. HOWARD FARLEY: Because if you look at -- if you look at it technically, it’s changed one degree. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: I mean, the entire earth, one degree. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm. HOWARD FARLEY: And what difference is that going to make, you know?

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So are they out crabbing already, then, this year? HOWARD FARLEY: There’s a few guys that are doing it to subsistence. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, ok. HOWARD FARLEY: But they have not opened it to my knowledge.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And when do they normally open the crab fishing in the winter? HOWARD FARLEY: It would’ve been open in January. KATIE CULLEN: Mm, hm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, really? Ok. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, it would be closing. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Interesting. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, it would be closing. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: It wouldn’t be for very long, because they don’t have much quota. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: But last summer, because of the warm blob -- I know about the warm blob.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah, talk about the warm blob. HOWARD FARLEY: The warm blob, um, there was a research team from NOAA that was up here. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: They’ve been up here a number of times in the summertime, and they’ve been tracing this.

But what’s happened is that -- which is normally cold, it had sent a glob of warm water up. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Up the coast of -- HOWARD FARLEY: Up the coast into the Northern Bering Sea. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: The Southern Bering Sea has weather that varies, because it’s close to the Pacific and other places. But this up here had had this glob come, and it spread in the Norton Sound. ’Cause Norton Sound is shallow, for one thing. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And last year, we didn’t get crab. KATIE CULLEN: Mm. HOWARD FARLEY: I mean, I had two boats out there. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh.

HOWARD FARLEY: And I mean, we were going to the places we normally go to, and -- you know, through the season. Finally I --

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Is it because it wasn’t cold enough? Or that you couldn’t find ’em? HOWARD FARLEY: Couldn’t find ’em. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Huh.

HOWARD FARLEY: And it wasn’t that we didn’t know how. We’ve been fishing this -- we’ve been fishing these crab for twenty-five, thirty years. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: We had it all on GPS. Every single pot we had ever dropped is in our GPS. So we went to all the places. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Seasonally and otherwise. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. And nothing? HOWARD FARLEY: And there was no crab.

Some guys got ’em forty miles out. But we're not -- this is a small boat fishery. We’re not going forty miles out. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: You know, for crab.

So what I think -- and Norton Sound is shallow. And what I think is that the glob affected Norton Sound more because it’s a sound. It’s not an ocean. KATIE CULLEN: Oh. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: Now you go out into the Bering Sea, the Bering Sea drops off. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: To canyons towards the Russian side. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And so the cold doesn’t affect the crab that hang around there. But as they come up into shallower water, it would definitely have an effect.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. So when you say it’s shallow, how -- what would a reading be? HOWARD FARLEY: A hundred feet of water out here would be -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: That’s all. Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, that’s all. In fact, if you were to take the average out there -- We’ve been all over. I’ve been all over Norton Sound. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Almost every inch of it. And remember, the Yukon flows out. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And it brings all the sediment and -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: All the silt. HOWARD FARLEY: -- and everything. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And if you draw a line from Nome across. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Everything up from there is soft bottom. So it’s good crab.

But then another thing, too, as you get toward Sledge Island. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: It drops off and the current gets stronger, because you’re as deep. Where it goes into the Bering Sea. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: And -- But it’s basically shallow. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: It’s a shallow -- it’s a shallow basin is what it is. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: It has a twelve-hour cra -- a twelve-hour flow of water back and forth. And water coming down out of the Yukon -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: -- would be warm. Fresh water. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes. HOWARD FARLEY: And it revolves this way around the Sound. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: This is the -- this is the set-up. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: When the -- when the -- when the fish come out of the Yukon. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: We get a few of them over here. We’re not supposed to, but we do.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So that blob, that warm blob, sort of really -- it prob -- affected the crab. What about any other fish? Did it -- HOWARD FARLEY: I think it helped salmon. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh.

HOWARD FARLEY: Really. I -- I think it’s good for salmon. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Because salmon are not -- they don’t seem to be -- there’s not much of a temperature thing in their -- in their makeup. It -- ’cause they go up rivers that are ice-cold. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And they go up rivers that are almost boiling. I mean, it doesn’t seem to -- doesn’t seem to matter.

In fact, I think it might be an advantage, because -- another thing, too. One thing that these warm globs, they form, there’s food. It’s good for food growth. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: But there’s other downsides to it, too. They this year, this comes from Pacific Management Council, they will probably close down, if they haven’t already, close down uh, fishing for cod in -- in the -- in the Gulf of Alaska.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And why would that be? HOWARD FARLEY: Warm water. Yeah, warm water.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So the cod really like the cold water? HOWARD FARLEY: They like the cold. They’re a bottom fish. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: They’re a scavenger fish, actually, and they’re moving here. This last year, my crew got a hundred -- hundred cod in their pots.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. And that’s a lot more than what you would normally get? HOWARD FARLEY: That's more -- We used to get one or two, and we’re talking about the big babies. KATIE CULLEN: Oh, really? Wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: We got a picture. Some of the guys use bait bags. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: I mean, big bait bags.

And shows a cod that tried to suck that bait bag up. And he’s hanging there by his mouth with this big -- with this big bag. And I got pictures of some of my crew with cod that are this big.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So the cod are coming up because the water’s colder here? HOWARD FARLEY: That’s right. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: That’s right. In the Bering Sea. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes.

HOWARD FARLEY: And they’re coming in here. Remember they feed. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yep.

HOWARD FARLEY: And the food obviously, they might’ve overfished it in the Gulf. And they tended to move up here.

But the trouble with cod is, it’s not worth anything. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: No, I love cod. HOWARD FARLEY: I mean, it’s a delicious fish. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: It’s delicious. HOWARD FARLEY: In fact, I had cod for dinner. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: For three days. And it’s a great fish. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: But they’re not worth any money. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Just no market for them right now? HOWARD FARLEY: Well, there’s a market. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: But they’re just not -- they just don’t get what salmon do. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: Now the thing with cod is -- another picture that we got, cod with one of those other fish that they fish with the trawlers. Uh, it’s a cod. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. A ling cod? HOWARD FARLEY: No, not the ling cod. There’s one more. KATIE CULLEN: The halibut? HOWARD FARLEY: No. KATIE CULLEN: No. HOWARD FARLEY: No, they’ll take a halibut, too. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, ok.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. The cod’s got a big mouth. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Huge mouth. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Five times bigger than a salmon or halibut mouth. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Really? HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: So, that’s why they can -- and we find ’em with whole fish in ’em. KATIE CULLEN: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. KATIE CULLEN: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: With the tail sticking out. KATIE CULLEN: Wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: Pollock. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Pollock. Pollock, that’s it. Yes. HOWARD FARLEY: Cod feed on pollock. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok.

And pollock like colder water, too? HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah.

So this whole -- and this is -- this blob was not just one year. It was several years. ’Cause we knew it. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: But we just didn’t know what the climax was. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: The climax, I’m saying, was this year. This last year.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So the blob is starting to -- to -- HOWARD FARLEY: Starting to thin out. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: To thin out, yeah? HOWARD FARLEY: Thin out, yeah, I think. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: Now, they’re going to be researching it this summer. And very intense with the trawlers. Several trawlers. KATIE CULLEN: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And it’s real funny. The company that I own -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Farley Marine? HOWARD FARLEY: Farley Marine. We have the pilot boat for all the foreign ships coming. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: We also do crew changes. And we also do any other charter-type work. We work for the city. KATIE CULLEN: Hm.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Do they ask you to keep any instruments on your boat for any measurements and things like that? HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: Anything -- in fact, we do the -- we do the bottom survey down at Cape Nome. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: We do that every -- every couple of years.

The people that are using it have to pay for it. And they charter us. We go down and put their equipment aboard. KATIE CULLEN: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And the same thing when they were doing port work. We did -- we did port work this last year, too, with the Corps of Engineers.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And what -- what did that entail? HOWARD FARLEY: They were getting ready. You know, we’re going to expand the port. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes, the port's gonna hopefully be larger. HOWARD FARLEY: It’s almost there. It's -- We’re getting close. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok.

HOWARD FARLEY: And what they were doing is -- we do all the survey work. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ah. HOWARD FARLEY: For them, too.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And what’s it going to take to increase that -- that port? HOWARD FARLEY: They’re going to make it wider. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. To take in the bigger ships? HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Wider and more places to tie ’em up. And then, it’s going to extend it out further into deeper water.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So it doesn’t have to have a -- it doesn’t have to be dredged, the bottom, to make it deeper? HOWARD FARLEY: Some of it will have to be dredged. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: But right at the mouth is about twenty-five feet. And they want to get it to forty. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: Forty will handle just about anything. And that doesn’t cut us off, because pilots have to bring ships in whether than they anchor 'em or whether they bring them in. I -- my company still takes care of that.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Were you here when the Project Chariot project was being discussed? Or was that after -- did you arrive after that? Remember Project Chariot? HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, oh. The -- up at the -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Up north when they were gonna -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: And they did.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: This was the one when they were gonna blow it up. HOWARD FARLEY: Blow it up with a nuclear -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: You remember that? HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, yes. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: That must have been quite the -- quite the adventure.

HOWARD FARLEY: Well, another thing, too, is you want to remember, Crowley Maritime. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Started right here in Nome. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, did it? HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: I did not know that. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. B&C. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: B&C? HOWARD FARLEY: B&C was the original in Kotzebue. And what happened is that the government was bringing ships up here. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: In ’53 when I was -- I was up here for, uh, about two years. From ’52 to ’53. And I got to see some things.

In fact, I’ve got a picture somewhere. In 1952, we, the US government, let the Japanese back into the Bering Sea. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And it was a big day.

Our ship was the presenting ship. We had the admiral aboard. We had the flags up. KATIE CULLEN: Wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: And we weren’t supposed to take pictures, but I did take a picture. And it showed Marus. I mean, Maru -- you know what a Maru is? That’s a Japanese ship. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: They’re all called Maru. KATIE CULLEN: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: Then they have names and numbers.

And I took a picture, and as far as you could see, there was these Maru fishing boats. Not fishing boats. Fishing ships. KATIE CULLEN: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: That’s when we let them back into the Bering Sea.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And how did that affect the fishery industry? HOWARD FARLEY: It -- it raised hell for a while. And why it did is that after the war -- and even before the war, they were -- they were using gillnets. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: They were illegally fishing.

And the Japanese continued that on for a long, long time. And that’s why the Coast Guard was up here, to do the -- I -- we did the lights. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: But the Coast Guard was also up here. And they’re still up here, trying to get that taken care of. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: Because they were fishing illegally. We could see ’em.

When the herring season first started up here, I was out on the herring field. Every -- And practically all over Norton Sound. And we’d look off in the distance, and there’d be a Maru. And you couldn’t possibly miss it, because they were all painted brightly -- bright colors. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And there they were. And -- but they had to stay out twelve miles. But they were coming in and taking herring. And they were taking salmon. And that’s why the North Pacific Management Council was invented. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: Ted Stevens and uh, it’ll come back to me, were instrumental in getting that going because that meant that we were protecting our fishery internationally. And that we were starting to enforce the 200-mile limit.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Well, I guess it’s similar to today in that with the ice, you know, receding or not coming as far, it’s opening up more shipping lanes. HOWARD FARLEY: Yes. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And so you must be involved in all of those talks? HOWARD FARLEY: We are involved in it. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: Now this last year, the Northwest Passage. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And the East -- there’s two passages. One goes to the east to Murmansk, Murmansk. The other one goes -- goes east into Canada. It opened up early.

But the year before, it didn’t. The Canadian icebreakers came down and opened up the Northwest Passage. We didn’t have to say a word. Nobody knew about it except a handful of us.

We knew about it, because every single ship that goes through the Northwest Passage over Canada has to have an ice navigator. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: They changed it. Not ice -- they were using it -- they have another name for it.

But anyway, they’re ice navigators. They’re guys that know the ice. Ok?

Dutch Harbor’s not a good place to land an airplane. It’s just a horrible place to get in and out of. More of our ice navigators are coming through Nome. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh.

HOWARD FARLEY: And we take ’em out to the ships. And they go through. And then when they come back, we take ’em off. KATIE CULLEN: Huh. HOWARD FARLEY: So that’s another -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: And I’m working with an agent. I work with agents. Shipping agencies. There’s a Canadian shipping agents, which has its headquarters in Texas. And -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Of all places.

HOWARD FARLEY: I’ve been dealing with them for years. I’m one of their pioneers as far as our Northwest Passage. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And what we do, we pick up the pilot up, take him out to the ship. They go through, and then if they come back through, we take ’em off. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: It’s better than going to Dutch Harbor, because Dutch Harbor is isolated. It’s stormy. And they only have small airplanes that go in there. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: And the -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: You’ve got bigger planes here. HOWARD FARLEY: And it’s a long way to Anchorage.

So my selling point down through the years is, get off in Nome. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: We got two jets a day. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. KATIE CULLEN: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Big jets. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And we’ll take you directly to Anchorage, directly to Canada, directly to -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yep. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Anywhere. Right. HOWARD FARLEY: So that’s -- that's what we do also.

And another thing, too, I work for Alaska Maritime Agency. It’s a -- the biggest shipping agency in the state. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And I’ve been working with them for almost forty years. And that goes way, way back.

And how it started, there was a company called A&P. A Japanese company.

And uh, they decided to make a movie, and it’s called "The Alaska Story." And it’s about the first Japanese that came to Alaska. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: And their trials and tribulations.

And I was involved in that movie. And I -- one of my sons is in it.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And when was that made, Howard? HOWARD FARLEY: Hm? LESLIE MCCARTNEY: When was that made? HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, I’d have to think back about that for the year. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok. HOWARD FARLEY: But it was, uh, pre-Iditarod. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Probably in there. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Late '60’s or '7 -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Interesting.

HOWARD FARLEY: And it was one of the biggest movies ever produced. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. In Japan.

And I met a gentleman there who was their interpreter. And that gentleman is now is the president of Alaska Maritime. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And we got our start, personal start, at that time. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. Interesting.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. So like I said when I first came in here, you meet a person, and this person leads you to another person. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: And then, there’s an outcome there, and this goes on. This is the way Alaska -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: It’s the way Alaska has gone. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. Yep.

HOWARD FARLEY: So it’s a history from person to person. Before these phones. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: Now I’m not against the phones. I’ve got one. I run my business from my phone. KATIE CULLEN: Um-hm. Um-hm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: You can do that. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. Yeah.

So but let’s go back to your dog team. You had a dog team that you used to deliver your meat with, both in the summer and in the winter. Did -- did you end up with more teams? Or did you always just -- HOWARD FARLEY: No. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: -- sort of had a one?

HOWARD FARLEY: We always had a dog team. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Now mine was a professional dog team.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So did you go up into BELA (Bering Land Bridge National Preserve) area and any of those areas? Or where did you -- where did you mush? HOWARD FARLEY: No. My biggest runs would be down the coa -- I mostly -- remember, coastal people stay on the coast. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yep.

HOWARD FARLEY: Coastal people don’t go into -- into interior -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Inland. HOWARD FARLEY: -- much. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Because we don’t know the country.

Now the furthest back I would go would back, Kuzitrin. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And Salmon Lake. In fact, I spent -- I spent -- have -- I have -- funny --

This is before -- before Iditarod. I says, "I’ve got to get some country running in." I told my wife, you know. So I says, "I think I’ll go up to Kuzitrin." We always fished Kuzitrin in the fall for whitefish. We’d seine whitefish up there for our dogs. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And, so I fig -- I gotta go up there. So I took the dog team and drove up there. And I -- we lived on rabbits. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And whitefish for -- for almost a month. KATIE CULLEN: Oh, wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: And then, I ran into somebody up there and "Gee," he says, "I got a place -- " I had a place to stay. My brother-in-law’s got a -- had a cabin up there. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And I had a place to stay, and I just stayed up there and shot rabbits and fished under the -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Fished away?

HOWARD FARLEY: Fished under the ice, yeah. Yeah. And it -- it’s just another one of those things.

And we always had that dog team. We had a dog team, probably from ’68 up until, oh, probably in the late '90’s. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, really? HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, we had a dog team for quite a while.

But then the tourists started to go down, and then another thing, too. What -- what -- what really hurt tourism in Alaska is that the phone came along. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: The Internet.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So how did that hurt? HOWARD FARLEY: You can go to the Internet and book a tour anywhere in the world -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes. HOWARD FARLEY: -- without going through -- you can go through the agency, you can do it on your own. There’s booking service. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: There’s all this.

And what happened in the early days, it was mostly, the tour business was basically run by companies. And you worked for the company on a commission. Ok.

What happened when the Internet came, a lot of guys found out they didn’t need the big companies. And the big companies found out they didn’t need the people. You got an Internet address, bingo. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: You’re in it. And that -- that happened.

And that made it really hard on certain types of tour businesses. And the one we had here it just folded up.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: What kind of tour business did you have? HOWARD FARLEY: Ok, they would -- planes would come in. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: From other places and land.

And then, we had a tour that we took them around town. We gave them a dog team demonstration. We panned gold. KATIE CULLEN: Mm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Showed ’em --

Nome has a great history. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: More history than Kotzebue or any other place. Because this is where -- this is where the big things started.

People came here to mine gold. Gold was king. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And it isn’t anymore. But well, that’s another story. It is, but it’s a different story. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok, we’ll come back to that. HOWARD FARLEY: We’ll come back to that. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: But the gold was king in those days. And so what happened is, that the tours got further and further down, and they got in the hole. And one day they came to us and they said, "We’re just not going to be able to do this anymore." LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm.

HOWARD FARLEY: So I held onto the dogs for, you know, a few -- for a little while longer, hoping that things would come back.

In fact, it got so bad that the president of the company’s wife, she held some money out for us so we’d get paid. It got that bad. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Aww. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, it was just bad management. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And they offered to sell it to me, and I said, "No, no, really. I really don’t want to get into that business." LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And I just wanted to work in it. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: And it was a good living, really. I got paid by the head. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: And that was nice, you know.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. Yeah. So come back to how gold was king and now it’s coming back.

HOWARD FARLEY: Um, what’s happened now is that these same places that they found gold at the beginning of the century, there’s still gold there.

The big gold thing came when the guy went down to the beach. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: This is history. He went down to the beach. He had been fired, or he wasn’t happy where he was working for another miner.

Went down to the beach, put a sluice box in, and found gold. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: Right in the beaches of Nome. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yep.

HOWARD FARLEY: And they had a deal. There was no rules. This was when there was no government. There was nothing here.

So what they had a kind of a rule, that you could extend your -- your part of that beach as far as a No. 2 shovel would reach on either side of it. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. So that was your -- they --

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: That's your stake? HOWARD FARLEY: They had agreed on that. And they were finding out, my God -- Remember, gold was only thirty-five -- thirty-five dollars an ounce. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Or less. I’m not exactly sure what it was, but it isn’t what it is today. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Today it’s fifteen -- fifteen hundred dollars an ounce. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Give or take. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. KATIE CULLEN: Oh, wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: So what happened is that, that brought all the guys, the independent guys, down to the beaches. And that was another whole thing. Well, the gold comes down from the moun -- from the inland. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And down through the centuries, there’s these -- these beach lines. They call ’em beach lines. And that’s where the gold stops because it can’t go any further. It’s heavier. It’s heavier than water. That’s why they use sluice boxes. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And so anyway, the gold -- so in 1962, the guys closed down the dredges. It was -- they couldn’t make it anymore. The gold wasn’t moving. KATIE CULLEN: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And it stayed at two hundred -- I think when they closed the big dredges, it was two dollars and fifty cents. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, jeez. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yeah. And that was it.

Now the -- the -- the big dredges were after the fine gold, because the dredge works good for fine gold. The nuggets, they tend to bounce off the back. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: Yes. That’s another story which I’ll get to later.

They tend to bounce off the back. They want the gold that there’s the most of, because the dredges -- I’ve been on a dredge. Oh, my God, it’s a complicated thing. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: They -- these -- these things, and they get it up, and then it goes through the processors down in below. And several of my sons work for ’em. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: You start out, like I said earlier, in the -- in the thaw fields.

And so when it got to the point where they couldn’t mine this gold and make it pay, they closed down the dredges, and there they sit to this day.

And remember, these dredges were -- most of them were -- were not -- they were manufactured in California, and they were brought up here by pieces. They were hauled out to these different places by horses, and they were put together.

And tremendous expense. But remember, this is at early dollars. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Remember, from, uh, World War II this way, we’ve had terrible inflation. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Stuff that --

Well, look at gold. Ok, gold was two-fifty. Now it’s fifteen doll -- fifteen hundred. So those things have changed.

But now, in, I forget the year. But Shell Oil came up and drilled right by the causeway there. That whole area there. They found gold.

And some guys were smart enough to buy those leases from Shell Oil later on. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And have made a bundle off of those leases, because they’ve been peddled and peddled, and they’ve been sectioned off and made into -- and there’s been a --

See, we don’t hear about the gold that -- Now if I catch fish, there’s somebody writing that down. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: And they never let you forget it. But in gold, there’s nobody writing it down.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: They don’t have to go somewhere and -- HOWARD FARLEY: No, no. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: -- say how much they’ve -- HOWARD FARLEY: No. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh? HOWARD FARLEY: No. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Huh. Interesting.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. So ok, here, a perfect example. Two years ago, I had a net out, and one of those -- one of those stupid miners ran over it with his little rinky-dink dredge. And of course, tore it all up. Took off, and I found it.

It happened to be my king salmon net. Worth a -- ok. Who am I gonna go to? LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: I don’t even know the guy. They don’t have to register anywhere. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: See?

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: It’s not like a car accident where you can put a note on the windscreen or something like that. HOWARD FARLEY: No, no. Half of these guys --

Well, another thing, too, they’re supposed to pay to keep those dredges at the port. But some of them don’t keep them at the port. They take 'em home, or they take 'em and park 'em out of the city limits or some other place.

So there’s nobody to police ’em. And it’s all by leases. You lease. You lease -- there’s guys that lease this stuff. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And they probably -- you never know who it is. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: And with fishermen, oh, my God, we’re -- we're there. The government -- the state knows who I am. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And the federal government knows who I am, because I’m involved with them. I’ve filled out their ten pages of -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: -- paperwork, you know. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah, yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: For -- to do what I’m doing.

And so anyway, I called Juneau. Now, prior to that, they’d had somebody up here that had a boat, and they were trying to keep some law and order.

And I told the lady that was in charge, I says, "You gotta get up here and get somebody in charge of this thing." Because I -- I see it every day. These guys are mining in areas that don’t belong to them, because there’s nobody to tell ’em not to. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And I said, "What’s happening is that uh -- " And they just had another lease here recently. And I says, "You gotta do something about this." I says, "They’re running over fish nets and everything."

And I says, "Another thing, too, when -- " When I call a fishermen’s meeting, the fishermen come. They call a meeting, nobody shows up. Because they’re all incognito. I call it incognito. They’re just --

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: You don’t even know who they are? HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Huh.

KATIE CULLEN: So do you see that potentially changing in the future, like from your conversations? HOWARD FARLEY: Well, it’ll be -- what’s happening now is that some guys aren’t going to make it. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: I mean, that’s the way gold mining is. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: Well, and fishing’s the same way. Ten percent of the fishermen catch ninety percent of the fish. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: The rest of them are just changing -- we call it changing dollars.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. So you’ve got three boats out there? HOWARD FARLEY: I’ve got three boats.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. So how much crab -- how many crew do you have then? HOWARD FARLEY: Um, my two sons are captain. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: I -- I -- my captain’s license was up this year, and I didn’t renew it. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Well, you’re eighty-eight. HOWARD FARLEY: I’d have had to go through such a turmoil of -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Medicals and -- HOWARD FARLEY: Medicals. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. Even though you’re in great health. HOWARD FARLEY: I’m in great health. I’d still have to go. I went through the medical five years ago. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: And uh, finally my doctor said, "Yeah, he’s ok." Then, you know, he gave me the ok. But I knew him, and this is five years later. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: So my two sons, they both have captain’s license. Our boats are all licensed and insured. We carry a million dollars liability insurance on them. They’re all insured. And they’re all paid for. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. That’s -- that’s amazing.

And then how many -- how much crew do you need to operate the boats? HOWARD FARLEY: My two sons operate the boats. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Uh-huh. HOWARD FARLEY: And I -- I have a daughter that works for Alaska Airlines. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok. But she’s -- HOWARD FARLEY: She’s part of the crew. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: -- part of the crew? HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: And I get to fly free. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, very good. Very good. That’s great. Wow.

So when do you put your -- when do you start fishing? What’s the season?

HOWARD FARLEY: One thing nice about our company is that we start up when the ice is gone, and we quit when the ice comes back.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So whatever that happens to be every year? HOWARD FARLEY: Whenever that happens.

And, but the trouble is, it doesn’t work that way. The ice went out early last year, and everything commenced just at the regular time. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: Because nobody was told.

How do you tell a shipping company who has made their plans? LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: A five-year plan. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. KATIE CULLEN: Mm. HOWARD FARLEY: That all of a sudden -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: This year’s different. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, no you can’t. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: So that -- that was of no -- of no value to us.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: It’s not like you gained a month or two fishing? HOWARD FARLEY: No. All we did was gain a little extra time to do our maintenance. And -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: And to maybe do some subsistence fishing. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: You know, before.

That’s one thing that we’ve done regularly ever since I got here. We’ve subsistence fishing.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Do you do subsistence hunting at all, too? HOWARD FARLEY: I used to. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: You used to? HOWARD FARLEY: I don’t anymore. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: But, uh, my sons are into it. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: And I have -- we barter. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, we barter. In fact, my wife gets maktak. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: From Barrow. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: She has relatives in Barrow, and then we trade dry fish. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And then we -- I have a friend that catches a lot of cod. And I trade him cod. I trade him silver salmon for cod. And uh, we do it, just like -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: -- like people have always done it. And I’ve -- I’ve -- I do feel you can be successful in Nome if you do it like -- like they always did it, you know. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

And -- and anybody hunting reindeer as much anymore? HOWARD FARLEY: No. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: No? HOWARD FARLEY: They’re counting caribou. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Caribou, because you said the numbers were going down. Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: Well, what’s happened is the caribou have absorbed. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Absorbed. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Absorbed. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And it’s really strange, the last time my sons went out hunting, there was a caribou hunt. They got a couple caribou. They brought ’em home.

Remember, I’m a butcher. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes. HOWARD FARLEY: I cut these two open. They had that much fat on their rumps. And there was no testicles. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Really?

HOWARD FARLEY: And that told me that those two animals -- and I estimated their age. You know, we can estimate their age by the -- the splinter bones that run up the legs here. KATIE CULLEN: Oh.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, ok. What, the larger the bones, the older the animal? HOWARD FARLEY: The -- the -- the small bone, there’s a small bone in there. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Uh-huh. HOWARD FARLEY: And when that’s heavily calcified -- KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: -- you’ll know that that’s an older animal. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Older. Ok.

HOWARD FARLEY: And these two animals, both of them had been castrated. I estimated their age at probably ten to fifteen years. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Because they have long life. They’re like -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: You know, they’ve been fixed. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes.

HOWARD FARLEY: So uh, they were great eating. I aged ’em. Got ’em late in the spring, and I managed -- we have a tin building where we age meat. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: I hung ’em up in the maj -- in our -- our -- our barn there, and man, they were delicious. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, because they were steers. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes, right. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah.

Now, normally, in the old reindeer days, they only butchered steers. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, they didn’t do females at all? HOWARD FARLEY: No. No.

And that was one of the downfalls is, that the younger guys that came in, were too lazy sometimes to go out and get the castrated ones. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: Or keep ’em where they had ’em. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Easy. HOWARD FARLEY: Because they make the best meat. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: I mean, they -- we knew that. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Huh. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Interesting.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, you don’t want to kill the females. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: No. HOWARD FARLEY: Because the females produce one a year. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, so.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Interesting. Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yeah, there’s all kinds of -- I used to like history. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And now I found out I’m part of history.

You know, when you’re around for a quarter -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: -- for three-quarters of a century.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Well, and all you’ve done. HOWARD FARLEY: And things you have to do, you know. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: There’s a thing called living. You know, that -- that drives you to a lot of things. And uh, I’ve done a lot of -- a lot of different things. KATIE CULLEN: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And that's -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: You sure have. HOWARD FARLEY: It's been a great thing.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And now, you go to the grocery store and the meat’s all packaged somewhere else. HOWARD FARLEY: Well -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: You don't -- HOWARD FARLEY: -- and that -- another thing, too. I -- I know what’s happening. I go to East Store here in town, and I measure the meat counter. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: The fresh meat counter. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: It's about this much. Think about it. About this much. Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah.

Everybody -- the madam housewife now is buying the majority of the stuff preserved. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And frozen. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: Yep. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: And it’s too bad, really. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

Change in the way we buy groceries. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yep. Yep. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And a change in the way food processing is.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, I managed grocery stores off and on, too. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And it’s the same story. Yeah, they’re running into the same -- the same thing.

Grocery stores aren’t grocery stores anymore. Well, they -- eat by date. Every time I -- every time I look at that, I just kinda -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: You know. It don’t mean a thing. It’s a tin can. Or it’s froze solid. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: You know, it -- it’s not gonna -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: It’s not gonna spoil like that.

I -- I put meat in my freezer every year. We vacuum pack everything. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: I was one of the first ones to get a vacuum packer. And man, we put stuff in the freezer. And -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yep. HOWARD FARLEY: And it lasts 'til we eat it. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Keeps really good. Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: I got three freezers full. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Do you really? HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. We got a lot of bartering. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Very good. Very good. HOWARD FARLEY: Well, you gotta eat good. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes.

HOWARD FARLEY: That’s the whole key if you’re gonna -- And subsistence, really, it’s starting to die. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

Do you guys do berry picking, too? HOWARD FARLEY: We do everything. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. I -- my daughters -- like I say, I have ten children. And my daughters come to Nome in the summertime and pick berries. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm.

HOWARD FARLEY: We have berries by the gallon. KATIE CULLEN: Hm, mm, mm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: I can imagine, yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And we got berry patches, too. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Do you? Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Your own special places where you go? HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, things -- things become like that. You know, if you stay in a place long enough, you -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: That’s right. HOWARD FARLEY: Everything comes. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: It’s always there, you know. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yep. HOWARD FARLEY: How much you want to -- want to eat. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yep.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, we have silver salmon, chum salmon, pinks. We dry fish. We smoke fish. Halibut.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Do you actually have a fish camp somewhere? HOWARD FARLEY: Farley’s Fish Camp. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Farley’s Fish Camp. HOWARD FARLEY: It’s right down there at the -- you know where it is. KATIE CULLEN: Um-hm. Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Right down there at the -- before it makes the turn. KATIE CULLEN: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And it’s the first -- the first unofficial Nome checkpoint. Farley’s Camp. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: For the -- for the Iditarod? HOWARD FARLEY: That’s where the, uh, the radio stations -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Uh-huh. HOWARD FARLEY: They go down in their spotter vehicle, and they spot the -- as they come across the road. KATIE CULLEN: Mm-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: That means they’re on their way into Nome. And then, they follow them along. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Giving you the updates, minute by minute. And when they get to the dredge, that’s when the siren is run. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ah.

HOWARD FARLEY: Now remember, in the old days when the Nome Kennel Club was running their races, the military -- that’s called Fort Davis down there. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And the military was down there, and they’d shoot a cannon off.

And I asked ’em -- I asked ’em one day for the Iditarod, I says, "Well, what do you want?" "Well, that siren upsets our dogs."

You know that -- you know modern people are -- And I said, "Ok, we’ll go back to shooting a cannon off. How would you like that?"

’Cause I could get the National Guard to do that. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: They’d love to do that, you know. They wouldn’t even have to be told. They’d just ask ’em and they’d be tickled to death to fire one. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: That would be really upsetting to everybody. HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, yeah. So we -- we went through that.

And like I story -- there’s a story to everything. When we first decided to ring the siren, we had an old siren that used to be up on the old grade school. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Which was right across -- right up here.

KATIE CULLEN: Mm, um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And the -- it was up on top, and the fireman, the fire chief, he, "Ok," he says. "I’ll get the damn thing going." He go up there, he -- he had to go up there and kick it a couple times, knock the ice off of it, because they never used the siren in the wintertime.

And they’d try it out, you know, and it -- and then -- then finally, they got onto it and started doing it. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: And now they push a button or down at headquarters, you know. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And it goes off? HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, it goes off. And it goes off.

And what that is, that means you got twenty minutes to get to -- down to Front Street and watch the musher come in.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So just for the purposes of the recording, I’m just going to say that Howard and Joe Redington were the two men responsible for starting the Iditarod. HOWARD FARLEY: Lot of other people, too. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And a lot of other people, too. HOWARD FARLEY: Lot of other people, too. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes.

HOWARD FARLEY: And you know what Joe told me, he says, "Yeah, and by the way, I’ll make you -- put you on the board of directors." He was the board of directors. He had some people in Anchorage that he had convinced the same thing.

And as I went along the trail, in last place a lot of times. Alone. And I’d run into a place, and the guy’d say, "Joe told me that he could charter my airplane or my boat or, you know, my -- " LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: " -- my snowmobile, and -- and you owe me money." I says, "Ok, I’ll take care of your IOU’s, and when I get back, I’ll turn it over to the finance committee." KATIE CULLEN: Mm, mm, mm.

HOWARD FARLEY: That was Joe. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: That was Joe?

HOWARD FARLEY: And for years, it took us -- took a long time to pay this off. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: But what we did is -- Muktuk Marston, you ever hear of him? LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes, yes. HOWARD FARLEY: Muktuk Marston was one of our -- he gave ten thousand dollars to the first Iditarod. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: In fact, he came to town, and he tore his pants. So my wife took him out to the house. Take your pants off! LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Sew ’em up. HOWARD FARLEY: And she sewed his pants.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So the very first Iditarod race was 19 -- HOWARD FARLEY: ’73. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: ’73. KATIE CULLEN: ’73. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. Right. HOWARD FARLEY: And it’s run continuously. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yep.

HOWARD FARLEY: And in the bylaws, the race shall start the first Saturday of March. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. KATIE CULLEN: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: It shall not be canceled or postponed.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So that’s why it’s always started on that day? HOWARD FARLEY: That’s right. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Whether there’s snow or not, they -- HOWARD FARLEY: It doesn’t -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: -- figure it out where to go? HOWARD FARLEY: That -- that’s right.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Because a couple years ago, it had to start from Fairbanks. HOWARD FARLEY: That -- which is fine. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: It just went -- we went down and watched it. HOWARD FARLEY: That’s an alternate. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: It’s an alternate.

HOWARD FARLEY: And that year that they started in Fairbanks, my wife and I were the -- we were the mushers. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, then I probably saw you. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. I was standing out in the -- in the thing there.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So they do the ceremonial start usually in Anchorage. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: On the main street. And then they start actually in Willow? HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And has that always been the -- HOWARD FARLEY: No.

The first race, we went from Tudor Track. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: That’s the sprint racing track in Anchorage. KATIE CULLEN: Mm. Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: We went from there all the way to Nome. KATIE CULLEN: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: And up Cook Inlet. KATIE CULLEN: Oh, wow. HOWARD FARLEY: With thirty-foot tides. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Jeez.

HOWARD FARLEY: If it had come in wrong, it would’ve drowned the whole works. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. KATIE CULLEN: Oh, my goodness. HOWARD FARLEY: It was -- it was incredible. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yeah, I had the longest dog team, the longest sled in the race. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: You had the long -- like, length-wise?

HOWARD FARLEY: Length-wise, yeah. I had a thirteen-foot sled. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: In the first -- that wasn’t my longest one. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And how -- HOWARD FARLEY: I had a sixteen-footer at home.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And how many dogs did you have? HOWARD FARLEY: I went with fifteen. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Uh-huh. HOWARD FARLEY: Most guys would go with sixteen. We had a guy show up with twenty, twenty-five.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Is there a rule on how many you can have? HOWARD FARLEY: Yes, there’s a rule. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: I was going to say, you can’t have fifty dogs.

HOWARD FARLEY: Let me -- let me tell you that story. A musher who just died, uh, just died, oh, just a few weeks ago. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And who was that, Howard? HOWARD FARLEY: Uh, I won’t mention his name. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok. Because of the story? HOWARD FARLEY: Yep. Yeah, it’s part of the story.

Um, he showed up with a twenty-foot sled and twenty-five dogs. And a cage on his sled. KATIE CULLEN: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And I was there at the start. The -- the race marshal was there. We both -- as he came down the line, you know, we -- and -- and I looked, and I looked at the race marshal. He looked back at me, and he went over to the guy.

He had a -- he was wearing a military hat with flaps. He picked one flap up and he says, "Get rid of the cage." So at the next checkpoint, he got rid of the cage.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: What was the purpose of the cage? HOWARD FARLEY: He was going to run twenty dogs at a time and rest five in the cage. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. Oh, my heavens.

HOWARD FARLEY: Then the next year -- a lot of the guys cook their dog food out there, you know. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Uh-huh. HOWARD FARLEY: They would cook the meat and whatever, you know.

The next year he showed up with a stove on his sled. A regular little stove. Now they have stoves now, but they’re -- they’re -- they’re smaller. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes. HOWARD FARLEY: You know, they’re propane.

But he had a stove and you had to put wood in. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Jeez. HOWARD FARLEY: Smoke and stuff. And that -- then I’ll give you the final. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: One year at the race, a guy shows up with a hood over his head. And he talked Russian.

And he said that as soon as he finished the race in Nome, he was going to go back to Russia. By dog team. KATIE CULLEN: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: There’s still people on the Yukon River that believe that. I’ll let it stand there.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, my heavens, that’s funny. So every year you still go down, wish them all to come -- wish them -- ? HOWARD FARLEY: Well, I -- sometimes we go down. There’s good -- there's that -- finally, they got a nice banquet. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Down there, too. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: And that’s where the mushers draw their position out of a mukluk.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Down in -- down in Anchorage? HOWARD FARLEY: Anchorage. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. And that’s a big deal. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a huge thing. And uh, I go down once in a while.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. And then here in Nome, you come -- HOWARD FARLEY: Well, I’ll be at the banquet.

But let me tell you the story of the banquet. Last year -- last year, last March, I went to the banquet. I had a presentation to make. And I made the presentation. I came down off the stage, walked back, sat in my -- sat down in my chair, and I almost passed out. KATIE CULLEN: Oh. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh.

HOWARD FARLEY: My wife looked over at me, and she says, "We gotta go to ER." And I was sitting at the table with the -- the race’s veterinarian. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: There’s your ER.

HOWARD FARLEY: So the veterinarian helps me to the car. My wife takes me to ER, and that was the beginning of me getting a -- a heart valve. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: ’Cause I was having trouble breathing. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And everything was slow.

And so anyway, I kinda laughed, because just one table over was a whole tableful of doctors. I still -- Stu was his name, and I -- last year I got him aside, and I kidded him about that.

I says, "There I was. I’m not having a heart attack, but I’ve having a real -- a real tough time. And who takes me to the -- " LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hospital. The doctors. Very funny. HOWARD FARLEY: The dog doctor. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Gosh. HOWARD FARLEY: He got a big -- he got a big charge out of it.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Well, Howard is there anything else you’d like to talk to us -- ? HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, God, I could talk for hours. Remember, I’m a storyteller.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: I know, and you’re a wonderful storyteller. HOWARD FARLEY: This is what I do -- this is what I do at the museum. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. KATIE CULLEN: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: I’ll be up there. I’m usually up there for five days. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Are you?

HOWARD FARLEY: And I just pick on anybody that happens to wander in. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And you’re just a docent and talks to people? HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: That’s wonderful. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, it’s been -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Well, it’s been a delight.

HOWARD FARLEY: I enjoy it. You know, people been -- you know, they always -- they always want a storyteller to write books and everything, but nah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: It’s different. HOWARD FARLEY: It is different. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: You gotta have all those quotes and -- and you gotta tell the truth all the time, and that’s no fun. That’s no fun at all.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. Yeah. So now that the cruise ships are coming in, do you do some of the tours and follow them (?) all now? HOWARD FARLEY: No, all we’re doing, I’m the meeter-greeter. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok, that’s great.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. We have crewmembers come in from all over the world. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm. HOWARD FARLEY: A lot of them are Filipino. They’re from India. From Russia. There’s -- foreign crews are all mixed crews. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: American crews, of course, they don’t have to -- you know, they -- we don’t have many American cruise ships. In fact, there’s hardly any. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm. HOWARD FARLEY: They’re just on the inland waters. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh.

HOWARD FARLEY: But anythin -- what -- most cruise ships that would -- This next year, we’re going to have fifteen stops. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah, I know, Katie’s got them on her calendar there. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: It’s amazing. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And this is -- What’s happening is that they’ll change crews. They’ll change passengers. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: In Nome. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: In Nome?

HOWARD FARLEY: They’ll fly a whole bunch in. KATIE CULLEN: Um-hm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh. HOWARD FARLEY: And then fly a whole bunch out. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: And that works great, because if they’re -- if they’re anchored out, then we get -- we get some of that work. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: But everyone that anchors or comes to the dock, we have to provide the pilot for. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: I see. Interesting. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So you’re the pilot boats back and forth? HOWARD FARLEY: We’re the pilot boat, yeah. And last year, we had the "World" come. KATIE CULLEN: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: It’s a huge ship. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Really. HOWARD FARLEY: And it travels all over the world. KATIE CULLEN: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: The people that ride in it own it. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: You buy a share in it. KATIE CULLEN: Um-hm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, my heavens. HOWARD FARLEY: And you travel all over the world. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. They go everywhere. It’s just amazing. KATIE CULLEN: That is amazing. Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: That’s the second trip we’ve had with them.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Is it changing the -- the town at all with the cruise ships coming in like this? HOWARD FARLEY: I -- We’re trying -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Or is it -- ? HOWARD FARLEY: We’re trying to get ’em, but, you know, this town has really changed. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: How?

HOWARD FARLEY: Uh, people are moving to the outside. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: They’re not in --

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: You mean, they’re moving to the outskirts of town? HOWARD FARLEY: Outskirts. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And not living down in this -- HOWARD FARLEY: Not living in the core. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok.

HOWARD FARLEY: And remember, I was telling you about the core. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes. HOWARD FARLEY: The core is where people are close together. People know each other. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: When people would come into my meat market, I knew everybody. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: I knew their names. I knew how thick they wanted their salami sliced. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And now, we -- everything is -- is -- there’s no personal thing like that.

And it was really funny. It was February, eh, one of the years I was working over there. It was cold, miserably cold. We haven’t had any real cold weather for a couple of years. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And it was cold. And -- and little old lady comes walking in there. And I says, "We deliver, you know." She says, "I just wanted to see how bad it was." LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Aww. HOWARD FARLEY: She'd walked all the way down.

And everybody had an account. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Everybody had an account. There was cash, but most everybody had an account. They called in on the telephone. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yep.

HOWARD FARLEY: When we got the telephone. Order their groceries, and then the truck would deliver to their house.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And then they’d come in and pay their account off? HOWARD FARLEY: Pay their accounts off once a month. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: And it was all -- this was before credit cards. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right, yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And I -- I -- I’m happy that I was able to live during these -- those times. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes. KATIE CULLEN: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Because they are really different from -- from -- from now. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: My gosh. And another thing, too, when the Iditarod notion got started, Joe and I set up a time, and I say -- He says, "If you’re going to call me, call me at midnight." And I says, "Well, what’s the -- " He had five hundred dogs. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow! KATIE CULLEN: Oh, wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: You know how -- You know how -- why he had five hundred dogs? LESLIE MCCARTNEY: No. HOWARD FARLEY: He had a contract with the US government, the Air Force, to haul out all the military planes that had crashed in Alaska. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Really?

HOWARD FARLEY: So he had set up a -- kind of a small company. And he had this huge number of dogs, and they would go into these remote places and take these airplanes apart and bring ’em back. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: Because remember, in the -- in -- at that time in our history, we were starting to fly. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: We were starting to fly over the pole. We were starting to fly other than amphibious to all parts of the world.

The DC-6 had been invented, and the bigger ship -- planes were coming. And this changed the whole aviation lookout. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: People would be flying over -- Remember, those planes only flew at ten thousand feet. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Lot of people don’t realize that. It was rough, too. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, my gosh, you know. Now you fly at thirty- or forty-thousand people in it, it’s flat. So anyway, he had to go up -- And a lot of these --

We had a lend-lease with Russians. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And there’s a building out here -- There's an old hangar out here, and it’s left over from that era. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Is it? Oh.

HOWARD FARLEY: They would fly the planes here. The Russians would pick ’em up here and fly ’em over to Siberia. KATIE CULLEN: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And the problem is, we gave the Russians the ones we really didn’t like. They gave them the Airacobra. Bell Airacobra, which was a -- is a coffin. (Also known as a P-39.) LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: So they were crashed all over. And a lot of them had -- some were bombers. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: They had those gunsights, those sights for bombing. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yep. HOWARD FARLEY: Which was considered very, very secretive. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes. HOWARD FARLEY: And a lot of them had live ammunition.

And so -- and people'd be flying over at ten thousand feet on a calm day, you can look out there and see a plane that’s crashed. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. KATIE CULLEN: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And so his job was to go out there and bring all this junk in and --

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And then where were they gonna -- they were going to pool it somewhere and then take it out? HOWARD FARLEY: Well, it would be taken to the military. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: ’Cause after the war, the military destroyed a tremendous amount of equipment. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah, they just threw it in the ocean.

Yeah, I was out at Attu. Yeah, I've been threre. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes, you were at Attu? HOWARD FARLEY: I was at Attu.

And Attu, when we came in with the small boat, the dock was 6x6 tractor. These big flatbed trucks. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Really? HOWARD FARLEY: That’s their dock. We came in -- we came in and tied alongside of that.

And then, uh, we were out at a lot of the bases out there. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: At Adak and all these other bases.

And they had orders to destroy all kinds of stuff. KATIE CULLEN: Huh. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: ’Cause when the war was over, it was over. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: I mean, it was declared over.

And we went into Quonset huts out there in the Aleutians where the guys got right up from the table and jumped on a barge and got out of there because the war was over. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. KATIE CULLEN: Interesting.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Yeah. It was tremendous the amount of stuff that -- I mean, my golly, the amount of stuff that was just --

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: And on Attu, there was so much ammunition that was still left that hadn’t exploded. HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, yeah. It was a dangerous place. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. Very dangerous.

HOWARD FARLEY: They had a Coast Guard -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes, they did. HOWARD FARLEY: I was on the "Sweetbrier." "Sweetbrier" was the ship that hauled all of the LORAN equipment into each one of the LORAN stations. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, really. HOWARD FARLEY: Yes. We built the LORAN stations. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh my.

HOWARD FARLEY: One of the big contractors, oh, I can’t think of the name. One of the big contractors built all of the LORAN stations. There was one at Attu. There was one here. There was one down by Sitka.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: One here in Nome? HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Not Nome, but out at Port Clarence. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok.

HOWARD FARLEY: And they built all those, and then our job was to bring the -- the -- the ET’s. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: The technicians in, and the equipment to set up the LORAN stations. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. And the LORAN stations were all shut down. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And that was -- I’ve still got mixed feelings about that, being a mariner. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm.

HOWARD FARLEY: Because at that same time, we were closing down, the Chinese shot a satellite out of the air. And that could very well happen to our -- to our navigation system, too. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: With no backup. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: No on-the-ground backup, so. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. Wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: It -- yeah, the Aleutians was a mess. Yeah, I was in Dutch -- I was in Dutch Harbor. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Just -- Well, I was in Dutch Harbor in ’52. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And the war was -- with the war --

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Not long after the war. HOWARD FARLEY: Not after the war was just barely over. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: And we could still see the -- see all the military -- KATIE CULLEN: Wow. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Gosh.

HOWARD FARLEY: I hit most of the Aleutians. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So Joe needed five hundred dogs? HOWARD FARLEY: Yes, to just -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: To get, just -- HOWARD FARLEY: -- to take care of that. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: That -- wow. HOWARD FARLEY: That -- that problem.

And Joe came to Alaska in 1949. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And they were offering homesteads at that time. He got a homestead.

And he kept the dogs out in the woods, and chained to trees. And each one had a #10 can. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Really? HOWARD FARLEY: Food can. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Nailed to the tree.

And so, Joe had to go out there and feed five hundred dogs, and he -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: No wonder it was midnight. HOWARD FARLEY: ’Cause he’s in town all day doing other stuff. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And so anyway, I says, "Ok. I’ll try and call you at midnight." So I’m calling him at midnight, and pretty soon, he gives me a call and he says, "Howard, your phone bill’s a hundred -- is seven hundred and fifty dollars."

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, my -- ’Cause everything was long distance then? HOWARD FARLEY: Everything was long distance to Anchorage in those days. KATIE CULLEN: Oh, wow. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right.

HOWARD FARLEY: He says, "Mine’s fifteen hundred." We’d been calling each other back and forth on this Iditarod thing.

And that’s when I finally -- finally -- and it took a lot of encouragement for them not go -- the heart was to go to Iditarod. That was -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. And you said, go Iditarod and back to Anchorage.

HOWARD FARLEY: And -- and I told ’em, I says, "By the time you get back to Anchorage, it’s going to be spring. There's nobody interested in dogs in it."

And I says, "Another thing, I looked up Iditarod. There’s nothing there." LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm-um. HOWARD FARLEY: Just a bunch of old buildings. The gold mining there petered out in 1913. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: They got all the gold and they moved out. KATIE CULLEN: Hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: And so, "Well, mm, I don’t know?" And he’s dealing with something that he doesn’t know, and he's -- I’m dealing with something I don’t know. You know.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Wow. So finally you got it to Anchorage to Nome. HOWARD FARLEY: To Nome. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: Well, I told him another thing, too. Nome has the history of dog mushing. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: Remember the serum run in 1925. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yep.

HOWARD FARLEY: His house is right across the street from mine. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mm. HOWARD FARLEY: It was. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Was it? HOWARD FARLEY: Yep. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh my.

HOWARD FARLEY: It burned down a long time ago. That’s that house that burned. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. KATIE CULLEN: Oh, wow.

HOWARD FARLEY: I now live in -- I live in a national historical house. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, which house do you live in now? HOWARD FARLEY: It’s the Berger house. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok. HOWARD FARLEY: Um, Carri -- I'll think about it in a minute. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: I’ve been living there for fifty years. She wrote books. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. Carrigher. Sally Carrigher. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: It’s the Sally Carrigher House. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: House. Oh.

HOWARD FARLEY: And she came to Alaska as a reporter for the "Saturday Evening Post." She wrote articles for them.

She was also in this area for scientific matters. They were investigating the mice. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Mice? HOWARD FARLEY: Yes. Think about it. The mice that go over the cliff. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: They’re not called mice, but you know what I’m talking about. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: No, I don’t. I thought you were talking about actual mice. HOWARD FARLEY: They are a mouse. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: What kind of a mouse? KATIE CULLEN: Um, maybe a, like a lemming? HOWARD FARLEY: Lemmings. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Lemmings? Oh, lemmings.

HOWARD FARLEY: The lemmings had a history of going over cliffs. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. KATIE CULLEN: Mm. HOWARD FARLEY: And everybody would follow them. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes. HOWARD FARLEY: She was up here to investigate lemmings. KATIE CULLEN: Hm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Well, I’ll be.

HOWARD FARLEY: Now another thing, Farley Mowat. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: I know. HOWARD FARLEY: Ok. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yep. HOWARD FARLEY: Farley Mowat had a movie and also had a book. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: About the little lemmings.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. Ok, I’ll have to look that one up. HOWARD FARLEY: Look it up. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: I don’t remember that one. HOWARD FARLEY: Look it up. Yep. Yep. Yep. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok.

HOWARD FARLEY: And here’s the lemming story. When Mrs. Wolf gets pregnant, she cannot run with the pack if the pack is tracking caribou. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Um-hm.

HOWARD FARLEY: ’Cause the pack has to travel with the caribou. That’s the -- KATIE CULLEN: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: -- the way it’s done.

So she has a den, has her babies, and her male will generally stay with her. And what do they feed ’em? LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Lemmings. HOWARD FARLEY: Lemmings. Because that’s the most prevalent meat source. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. Yes. HOWARD FARLEY: And that’s what it’s all about. KATIE CULLEN: Um-hm. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Interesting.

HOWARD FARLEY: And uh, everybody says, "Oh yeah, it’s all about caribou." No, no, no. it’s about a little mouse. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Hm. HOWARD FARLEY: And it’s a -- it’s really strange.

I go out to the camp, and I go out to camp everyday. We were out there just a couple hours ago.

And there’s always a couple of old ravens sitting on telephone wires. And you know what they’re looking for?

That old smart raven will sit up there, and he’ll watch. And he’ll watch the snow. ’Cause these lemmings stay active all winter long, under the -- under the snow.

And once in a while, they’ll pop their head up, and that raven’s going to get ’em. And that’s what -- why ravens are still here. That’s why they’re here.

They’ve learned to live off of us. But they’ve also learned how to live off the land.

And I’ve been out dog mushing a lot of times, absolute -- alone. I wouldn’t let my sons go out alone today on a snowmachine, but I used to go out on a dog team alone. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah.

HOWARD FARLEY: And, but I’ve seen ravens out there, and, you know what -- you know what they’re -- they're -- you know what they’re doing. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Right. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Interesting. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: So very historic. Huh. Howard, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for all your stories. HOWARD FARLEY: I like to talk. KATIE CULLEN: Thank you. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Love your stories so much. HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Thank you so much.

KATIE CULLEN: And you’re -- you’ll be giving presentations during Iditarod, as well? HOWARD FARLEY: Yep. Yeah. KATIE CULLEN: Oh, good. HOWARD FARLEY: I’ll be up at the museum every day. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok. KATIE CULLEN: Ok.

HOWARD FARLEY: I’ll just take people as they come. In fact, one time I was sitting there and -- I’m going to make a deal with the tour company. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Uh-huh. HOWARD FARLEY: They should deliver ’em to me. And I hadn't --

And poor Richard (Beneville), you know, our mayor is -- LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes. HOWARD FARLEY: Mayor's just had a heart attack. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, I did not know that. HOWARD FARLEY: Yes. Yes. He’s had a stroke. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.

HOWARD FARLEY: Yeah. He’s -- he’s -- he’s a tour guide. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes. HOWARD FARLEY: He -- he -- you gotta take a tour with him. You just gotta do it. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok. HOWARD FARLEY: He is -- he is a jewel, I’ll tell you. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yes.

HOWARD FARLEY: And him and I, we’ve been -- oh, we’ve been -- we’ve been friends for a long, long time. And he’s got some real nice insights into tourism. KATIE CULLEN: Um-hm. HOWARD FARLEY: He’s hooked on it, too.

LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Yeah. Yeah. He’s quite a character. Well, I’m going to turn this off now and say thank you very much. HOWARD FARLEY: Oh, you bet. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Thank you, Katie. KATIE CULLEN: Thank you. LESLIE MCCARTNEY: Ok.