Augusta Reimer and Doreen Donald: Boys and their Toys

Growing up as teenagers in Anchorage, just beginning to date and all the girls were hoping to be asked out by one of the studs that cruised downtown. It was all about the boys and their toys—cars—back in the day. Girls didn't ask boys out so we just talked about them a lot and hoped to be asked. There were several car clubs formed in the ’50s and ’60s to suit the differing interests of these guys. . . . Chevys, Fords, even a club called the Swappers that had to have changed the engine from the original, as in a Chevy engine into a Studebaker hot rod. There were the Demons, Arctic Knights, and others. 

In about 1958 a photo of a group of these studs was taken at one of the car club's garage. The occasion is long forgotten and also quite a few of the names to accompany the faces.

  

Fast forward to 2013 and a group of those teenage girls, now in their late sixties, is having their summer get-together. One of the girls brought an original photo of the 1958 Arctic Knights car club with the task of trying to identify as many faces as possible for her brother, who is in the photo and hoped all the girls could help with the names. This group of girls has been getting together about every two or three years for an afternoon of remembering the wonderful lives we had back when Anchorage was just growing up itself. Some of the group were born in Alaska and some came as young children with families to the Last Frontier.

Our group of girls married right out of high school; that's what a lot of girls did then. Some of us have already celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversaries and some divorced from marriages that just did not have a chance from the very beginning. But none of the girls regret our chance at such wonderful lifelong friendships and know how wonderful it was to grow up in Anchorage and especially to raise our children here. It's heartwarming to have such long friendships and to have shared growing-up times in such a special place: Anchorage, Alaska.

We are: Maureen (Dunne) Clayton, Doreen (Dunnigan) Donald, Susie (Smith) Ericsen, Bonnie (Maxwell) Heffentrager, Barbara (Maxwell) Hollenbeck, and Augusta Reimer. We have fairly regular reunions when the ones living outside of Alaska are able to be in Anchorage, usually bringing along old pictures and yearbooks and having lots of laughs at our teen antics when life was much more simple and innocent than it is now.

We’re hoping anyone seeing our story might be able to put names to the faces of the Arctic Knights car club and/or to confirm the ones we identified. Contact can be made to Augusta.R (at) gci.net or Doreen_Donald (at) msn.com. The picture is below and we would appreciate any help in identifying the STUDS of 1958. Also below is a photo of the Swappers business card. 

Names of boys known to be in the photo are: David "Stretch" Mendel, Hank Sykes, Bob Donald, Jerry Burkes, Dave Towne, Ray Niemi, Willie Miles, John "Sonnie" Reimer, George Cline,  Dennis Hanrahan, Ron Eveleigh, Jim Moore, Zeke Zuniga, Dean Allen, George Jarrells, Mike Rogers, Don Nelson, Joe Alban, Wayne Jack, Gary (Oakie) Harrold, Larry Brill. Other suggested possible names: Clarence Lemay, Ray Tygart, Ron Eveleigh, Leif Strand, Ronnie Roberts, Duane Hallback, Marty Bell, Jerry Mosely and Roy Lee Hopkins.