Doris Rhodes: North Star School

Our family came to Alaska in the summer of 1955 with two daughters of school age. Karen Sue was in fourth grade. North Star Elementary School on Fireweed Lane in Anchorage was her school. We lived on Fairbanks Street, approximately half a mile from the school. At that time the school district buses did not serve anyone living within a mile of their school. So I drove a pickup truck and took Karen Sue and other children to school in the open back of the truck. Either that or she walked.

North Star’s principal was Mr. Norton, who was widely recognized as an excellent teacher. The school itself was built without a gymnasium. There was also no food service. I remember Mr. Norton insisted that the school should have lunch service. He had a hall closet equipped with a Dutch door and arranged for daily delivery of sack lunches, consisting of a sandwich, cookie, an apple or some other fruit, and a drink. I can’t remember for sure, but I think the drink was Matanuska Maid milk. The lunch sacks were dispensed at the hall closet door, and the children ate at their desks.

Mr. Norton decided his kids needed exercise and that they needed an ice rink. He proposed groundwork be done for a schoolyard rink. After many appeals, he finally got the rink. To make it into an ice rink (there were no mechanical ice machines available), he figured out a way to use garden hoses to fill the space with water that sprayed evenly. In cold weather it made a nice rink. He collected any donated skates he could locate for those children without any. He also organized a winter ice show and carnival. The children practiced and were the performers. Classrooms were filled with games, and parents donated prizes. It was a wonderful celebration.

Karen Sue was a traffic assistant with a flag to stop traffic on Fireweed Lane. One year the flag crew was treated to a swim in the old “spa” pool, and the bus let her out at school. She arrived home with her long hair frozen in strings. Both Karen Sue and Mark, our son born here in the year of statehood, have fond memories of North Star School.

I volunteered as room mother the first year we lived in Anchorage. The Halloween party was my assignment. I proposed bobbing for apples, but Mr. Norton stopped that plan. There was a danger of spreading tuberculosis. I then decided to make jack-o-lanterns and was able to find one store in Anchorage selling pumpkins. Some of the children had never seen a jack-o-lantern before. It was a new world here in Alaska.

Mr. Norton was a kind man, but a disciplinarian too. When some boy became unruly, he was invited to meet “Harvey” in the principal’s office. Harvey was a fair-sized wooden paddle, administered by Mr. Norton to the errant boy’s seat. Two whacks as the boy bent over the chair. No beating, but most embarrassing. Today’s North Star Elementary school sits across the street from the “old” North Star, which is now Steller High School, with a nice gym. You can still see Harvey, once used to discipline errant boys, displayed in a glass case in the front office.



Doris Rhodes came to Anchorage in 1955 but her parents had been here previously, from 1942 to 1946. Anchorage has been quite an experience: statehood, the 1964 Earthquake, oil, the Alaska Railroad, and the military—not to mention gold.