A Northern Exposure -- Alaska Writer Brings Family Secrets To Light

"Johnny's Girl: A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up in Alaska's Underworld" by Kim Rich Morrow, $22

Here's yet another memoir about coming of age during the 1960s. But this one's different - instead of a middle-class kid trying to rebel, Kim Rich grew up trying to escape to a normal life.

Hers is the story of a troubled daughter of a troubled father. The publisher of this memoir describes that man, Johnny Rich, as "a major player in boom-town Anchorage's underworld." That's a bit of an exaggeration.

As his daughter puts it, Johnny was more like a small-time hustler who moved from one failed venture to another, running clandestine card rooms and massage parlors, driving Kim's mentally disturbed mother into stripping and prostitution, and eventually into a psychiatric institution, where she died of cancer.

Finally, in 1973, a rival hustler killed Johnny in a gangland slaying. The wide-open days of Anchorage were over. The town, and its vice scene, had grown too big for amateurs like Johnny Rich.

Kim Rich looks at this world with the wide-eyed wonder of a child, tempered with the detached objectivity of the adult journalist she became. Rich worked at the Anchorage Daily News for several years before finally writing her own story, tracking down everybody who knew her father and digging up old court transcripts, arrest records, birth certificates, letters and diary entries.

She learned a lot about her father that he'd never told her.

"For all his casual attitudes about schedules and morality, my father lived a guarded life," she writes. "He had many acquaintances, but few close friends. He was extremely secretive about his affairs. I was never, under any circumstances, to let anyone into our house unless I checked with him first. I was to trust no one, not even his best friends."

Rich's depiction of early Anchorage, from the pre-statehood 1950s through the North Slope oil boom of the '70s, is just as fascinating as her personal story. Anchorage was a very small community in a very large setting. This was especially true before statehood in 1959, when the city was "nothing more than a rough-edged community of 50,000 people."

Many of those were people who'd failed elsewhere, or were running away from something. It was a land of few laws, a flourishing "carnival of vice, leading a small band of local hoods to think they inhabited a twilight world where the law could never intrude," especially along the business strips just outside the city limits.

Neither of the Riches had much interest in the great outdoors - even when Johnny took his daughter boating on a Sunday afternoon, it always became an excuse for "hitting all the lakefront bars" - and Anchorage in those days didn't offer much else. For Johnny, that was good for business. For Kim, it was like suffocating in the wide-open spaces.

The town tried its best to become an outpost of middle America, with high-school sports, suburban streets, even a Sears. But these were insufficient consolations for a girl growing up in a tiny subculture in a small city, who longed for a normal childhood in one of the least normal places in the nation.

Like many young girls, Kim yearned for the simple pleasures of American life; she also yearned for a kitchen table that wasn't really a disguised poker table. Johnny would be gone for days at a time on shady business, and when he was home, it was often in the company of what Kim calls "the denizens of Anchorage's nightlife - pimps, con men, gamblers, prostitutes, heroin addicts, strippers."

With her mother locked away in the Lower 48, the only adult women in her life were the B-girls and hookers Johnny brought home. Kim spent most nights home alone, "staying close to the television for company" while her father worked the clubs. By age 15, she'd started off on her own.

In the end, despite his reputation as a crime lord, Johnny Rich died virtually penniless. His killers wanted to muscle in on his action; in fact, there wasn't anything worth taking over.

The last time Kim saw Johnny alive was when he drove up in his Cadillac during her shift as a cashier at a self-serve gas station. "His `empire of vice,' " she observes, ". . . was only a veneer of flashy cars and expensive clothes that covered piles of virtually useless leases, debts, and rental receipts."

While Alaska remains a relatively rough-hewn place, it has grown, and even matured, a lot in the 20 years since Johnny Rich died. While discovering the secrets about her own past, Kim Rich also reveals that raucous, faraway world.

Seattle writer Clark Humphrey is a contributor to Mirror and The Stranger.

-- To hear Kim Rich read a passage from "Johnny's Girl: A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up in Alaska's Underworld," call The Seattle Times' InfoLine at (206) 464-2000. From a touch-tone phone, enter category 6868.