Boom Town Boy: Coming of Age in Alaska's Lost Frontier, with Jack DeYonge

Start: 10/24/2010 3:00 pm

End: 10/24/2010 4:00 pm

In an outspoken memoir filled with irony and wit, a former Seattle Post-Intelligencer editor and reporter recalls his youth in remote Fairbanks, Alaska, a dying gold rush town that booms again with a wild mix of Russian and American pilots, a busy red-light district and a round-the-clock bar scene in the 1940s.

The son of a hardwareman at the N.C. Company and a black Irish daughter of the gold rush, de Yonge is a fist-fighting, music-loving, reluctant altar boy who discovers his own truths about sex, religion, racism, and how the world works. His earthy story describes how war arrives in a small Alaska town next to Nowhere— and nothing is ever the same again.

Jack de Yonge is a retired newspaper reporter- editor, political-environmental activist, and avid fly-fisherman who lives with his wife, Sonjia, in Concrete, Washington. De Yonge's journalism career took him to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the Seattle Times, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.