9DCU0404HD_Directors_Cut_Studio_Transcript
 
 Information is at: eCampus. Wisconsin. edu They were some of the most wonderful people.  I loved it.  I just loved it here.  We all felt close together.  We were all leaving home, and we became a close-knit group.  We had lots of fun.  And then of course, the men would go hunting, fishing.  Everybody went salmon fishing that first year.  We got so fed up on salmon, I think they'd had it! ( laughs ) Hi, and welcome to Director's Cut.  I'm Charles Monroe-Kane.  That was a clip from "Alaska Far Away," a documentary about a group of Wisconsin farmers who start a colony in Alaska during the Great Depression.  We're joined today by Paul Hill and Joan Juster, who wrote, directed and produced the film.  Thank you both for joining us today.  Thanks for having us.  First to you, Paul, why did a group of Wisconsin farmers go to Alaska during the Depression to be colonizers? It seems so odd to me.  Well, there's multiple reasons for going, but the real reason was they were coming from farms that were just impossible to survive on.  They were looking for a chance to start over, and the federal government is giving them a chance.  Usually, for programs like this, they would move you from one part of the state to another, so there are other resettlement colonies in Wisconsin.  But Alaska was looking for people, and the government wanted people to go to Alaska. 

 The government knew that there was a war coming, and that some day they'd have to send soldiers.  And if you want your soldiers, if you're going to send your son to go fight in Alaska, then you want him to be fighting for people like you.  So they send Wisconsin farmers, the most normal people on earth, up to Alaska.  It's interesting.  It's 2011, why make a film about this? We first heard this story in 1994 when Paul and I decided to take a vacation in Alaska.  I'd never seen U. S.  snow, so we went in February, 1994.  I'm from California.  We had a friend in Alaska that we could visit.  Our friend was living in this town of Palmer, Alaska, which is about 45 minutes outside of Anchorage, in the beautiful Matanuska Valley, surrounded by magnificent mountains.  He was, at that time, living with his grandmother, Irene Benson, who was one of these original colonists.  She was still living in her original 1935 colony-built house.  We stayed there for a few days, and heard all of her stories about this grand adventure of leaving the Midwest and going up to Alaska, with the help of the government, being followed by reporters and Newsreel cameras the whole way, and settling in this relatively remote, at that time, valley.  We turned to each other and said, what a great story.  Somebody ought to make a film about this.  Swear to god, after three days, we had a moment of shared insanity, and said, why don't we do it, it can't be that hard.  It will only take a year or so.  It's not like you're filmmakers and you decide this is another film you're going to make.  You've never done this before.  Correct, we've never done anything like it before. 

 I'm in the entertainment industry, and we knew a few things like that.  But we just thought we could do it.  The real answer to why did we make a movie, is because we didn't have anybody to tell us not to.  There you go! We didn't know.  If we had any clue how long it would take, or how much money it would cost, or how hard it would be, we never would've had the nerve to do it.  But I'm so glad we didn't know that, because this has been the grand adventure in our lives.  It's a great film.  We're going to show another clip from the film.  You talked about Newsreel.  It's interesting, because for the colonists, they were followed around by news cameras.  They were national celebrities.  It was on the front page of every newspaper.  It was in the editorial pages of every newspaper, because it was highly controversial.  These were just normal folks.  They were not just from Wisconsin.  There were families from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.  The upper-most counties, which at that time was still-- It had been clearcut and logged over during the early part of the century, so it was called the cutover at that time.  All the trees have grown back since then, so now it's called the north woods.  ( all laugh ) Cutover is a term that your listeners may not be familiar with.  Let's show a great clip.  This is a Newsreel from that time. 

 * From these barren farms in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, 1500 men, women and children are moving.  Uncle Sam is lending the money.  He's taking them to greener pastures in Alaska, to fertile land, normal climate.  Here's one family ready to go.  I hope that when we get in Alaska that things will be better up there, and I can make a living without asking anyone for help.  I'll do my best to make a real home for my family.  For years, life here has been severe, but in Alaska, 40 acres of land for each family, a $3,000 loan, farm equipment, a new chance to live.  * That seems like a grand adventure to me.  Let's get some basics down, so people understand what we're talking about here.  How many colonists were there? How were they chosen? You know, how did the government organize this? This was a big undertaking, right? It was a huge undertaking.  It was a while in the making.  There were people trying to get people up to Alaska for a long time, to populate Alaska.  The Alaskans wanted people.  Alaska is trying to get the government to send people to them.  The Alaska railroad had been built in the teens, but didn't really have a market all the way along this railroad, so they needed people, not only to help support the railroad, but also people to grow food to support the people in Alaska.  But this project was part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.  Right.  And it fell under the auspices of the newly created New Deal agency, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, FERA, which shows up in the film.  They created about 100 of these settlement projects around the country.  This one was authorized by Congress on March 9, 1935.  I remember that date because it's my birthday. 

 Not 1935, March 9! ( all laugh ) On May 1, the first batch of colonists were on a train on their way.  Right, because they have to make it there before summer.  It had to happen that year.  Can you imagine the government moving that fast today to do something this big? There were 202 families.  There is some discussion about how many families, but we came up with 202 families.  These are big families.  These are families with eight, nine, ten, 11 children.  These are big families.  They're supposed to only have two.  ( all laugh ) Oh, really? In fact, one woman tells the story, she goes, well, we only really want you to have two, or maybe four kids.  And she goes, well, I'm not going to knock the fifth one on the head! It's done on a national level, but it's done on a county level.  It's the county relief workers that are sending people.  They were chosen because they wanted farmers.  The Matanuska Valley wanted people to move to this area of Alaska, 200 farmers, who want to go there and farm.  But it was a colony, though, they weren't homesteaders.  They also wanted people who had other skills, too.  A lot of the colonists also had, shall we say, lumberjack skills.  They had forestry skills.  They had blacksmiths.  They had people who had other skills, as well.  They're starting a city. 

 There's no one there, right? Where they were going, there was nobody.  A community totally from scratch.  But normally, when something like that would happen, when you have the pilgrims coming over, people going in covered wagons, they all know each other.  If they don't know each other, they know each other along the way.  Now, they meet on the train.  They've got like six days to meet each other.  They have to become a community.  And they're a community where nobody is over the age of 35.  Right.  Everybody is young.  There are a bunch of parents, one woman has a baby and she has no adults to teach her how to take care of the baby.  She had the baby three days before she goes on the trip.  It's funny, you had mentioned earlier that these guys were celebrities along the way, from when they left Wisconsin locally, to nationally.  They were followed by cameras and crews.  This became romantic.  When they ended up on the train in San Francisco, by the time they got to San Francisco, they were celebrities.  People greeted them like they were movie stars.  I'm surprised by that.  These are people, most of them came from isolated areas.  You know what northern Wisconsin was like.  It's pretty sparsely populated. 

 A lot of these came from very isolated areas.  Some of them had never been on a train.  Some of them had never seen an ocean.  Sure.  This was a very big deal for many of them to come together in this huge group and travel together.  They were on the train for two or three days.  They had their respite.  The Wisconsin folks stayed over in Seattle on their way to Alaska.  They were given the red carpet treatment in Seattle.  They were given red ribbons that said, "Wisconsin Colonists. " You can ride the street car for free! You could go to the movies for free.  They took them to the zoo.  They took them all over and really gave them a wonderful, warm welcome, and then sent them off on a ship with serpentine.  Wow, I love it.  Hundreds of people were on the dock.  We don't have this on camera, because the guy told us this story separately and we didn't actually get it.  But he talks about the fact that, you know, there has to have been a purpose, that part of their purpose was to be entertainment, because every time we turned around, there was a camera in our face, and we just weren't that interesting.  ( all laugh ) Let's see another clip from the film.  This one's a great clip that I really like.  I think it speaks for itself.  This is from leaving the train in San Francisco and going on the boat. 

 This is a great clip from the colonists going on the boat to Alaska.  * May 1.  Left Frisco at 4:35pm.  The water is a little rough.  We're going to have to sleep in Hatch 6-7.  Some colonists may have had visions of a honeymoon cruise, but the St.  Mihiel was an uncomfortable Army transport with separate holds for men and women.  Everyone slept in bunks and hammocks, rocking with the ocean waves.  There was one woman, she got a chair and she sat down at the foot of the stairs there, that came down where the women were.  She was going to see to it that no men got down in there.  Well, you'd be surprised how many there were.  ( laughs ) The boat was kind of a hilarity too, because of all the mothers trying to take care of their babies, and big families and kids running all over.  You got probably 150 families, or roughly, with probably an average of two to three children per family.  That's a lot of kids.  I got seasick of course, right away.  You have the swell of the ocean.  It just comes up kind of slow, you know, and it goes down kind of slow, and oh.  That I couldn't take.  I'd sit out on the deck, facing into the wind.  And my husband was bringing me crackers and cheese, and pineapple all the time.  It was a terrible boat ride. 

 Most of the women were sick.  Somebody said there was a crack in the boat, but I didn't-- I was too sick to give a darn.  I didn't care if the darn boat went down or not.  I was ready to go! ( laughs ) No, I was ready to go.  The adventure begins before the adventure begins.  The journey, tell me more about the journey.  It sounds pretty intense once they got on the boat.  That last voice that you heard was a woman from Sheboygan.  There were two groups of colonists.  The first batch were from Minnesota, 67 families from Minnesota who took the train and left from San Francisco.  They had a nice trip up.  Their trip was perfect.  Everything is nice.  The boat ride is smooth.  Everything is excellent.  But the second batch are the folks from Wisconsin and Michigan, who took the northern route and left from Seattle.  Their ship did not go up the inside passage, it went straight across the open ocean.  There was, I just heard this story the other day from a colonist, who told me that the captain of the ship told her it was the worst storm he had ever been in.  They developed a hole in the boat.  For all these poor Midwesterners who had never even seen the ocean, oh my god.  Everybody was so sick. 

 I can't tell you how many seasickness stories we had to choose from.  I bet.  To give us perspective, how long would it take? It was three or four days.  Five days, I think.  Okay.  They must have been exhausted when they finally arrived.  Oh, my god.  Imagine, it's the kids that are less seasick than the adults.  All the adults, one woman tells the story, she's five.  She's running back and forth bringing oranges to her mother and father who are just like dying on their separate bunks.  I just can't imagine.  That's your precursor to getting to one of the harshest places in the world.  So the Wisconsin folks actually had the hardest voyage.  They get sick on the train.  They have a miserable boat ride.  They arrive, and they have to share tents with people who have already been there, who are mad that they-- Because their tents aren't done.  So people have been living in their tents for two weeks and then they have the Wisconsin people.  So what happens? They get off the boat, they're exhausted.  They've been seasick.  They've been gone for like a week.  They're nervous. 

 They have all their stuff.  They get there and what are they greeted by? Keep in mind, there's no town there yet, right? They're just greeted by the people from Minnesota, who just have tents, right? They arrived in Seward, where the ship actually ran into the dock and almost tore it down.  And the women have to stay behind on the boat, while the men are sent immediately up on a train to Palmer to draw for their lot of land.  Oh, wow.  There's a lottery to decide which 40-acre lot of land you're going to get.  Sure.  This was a huge, huge, historical moment for them, this long line of 202 men standing there.  They drew numbers first to see which spot in line they would get, and then they drew.  They must have vivid memories of that.  That would be a huge memory.  The journey itself, the whole getting up there and everything, the stories that we heard from people were so vivid in their minds, 60-65 years after the fact.  This was a turning point in their lives.  They remembered so much of it.  We had this one woman, it's again, not in the film, it's in a different project that we had done, but she talks about how her husband went along, and she's got the five kids, and she has to get off the boat.  She is terrified of getting off the boat, because it's just this narrow gangplank.  But she is so horrified at being on the ship one more second that it's like, okay, just grab the children and off we go.  ( all laugh ) I want to show another clip from the film.  I think this really illustrates very well what they're greeted with when they arrive in Alaska.  The colonists were exhausted from their difficult journey.  19-year-old Virginia Berg from Anchorage was there to help them get settled.  They'd had a rough trip. 

 They were far from home.  They got up there and things weren't all ready for them, you know, so some of them were a little bit discouraged.  There was nothing here.  I didn't expect to come someplace where there was absolutely nothing.  They had a little store, and a post office.  They had a boxcar for a depot.  In May, we had a cold east wind.  Things were just a little bit out of kilter there for a while.  A lot of stuff arrived before there was a place to put it, including people.  They didn't have the tents ready yet for all the colonists.  So the colonists had to stay on the train.  We were rustling around for blankets and milk for the babies on the train.  When we hit Palmer, there was nothing.  You couldn't buy a loaf a bread.  Nothing was set up in the tents.  And it was rainy, and mud up to your ying-yang, you know.  I'm carrying the baby.  My husband picked up the daughter and we got into a tent.  My husband said, "This is for the birds. " It was cold.  It was muddy. 

 It was rainy.  I thought "My God, what did we get into?" She's right, that must've been for the birds.  I can not imagine.  It seems totally crazy.  For you all, what was it like when you go to Palmer and you interview these people that we see in the film? What was it like interviewing them? What was it like talking to them about these stories? First of all, it was an incredible privilege.  These are people who have really lived their lives.  When we first did our interviews, it was at the 60th reunion.  These people had been up there for 60 years.  They had not only gone through that grand adventure and the trials and tribulations of that first summer, but then they'd gone on to live lives for 60 years, you know, in Alaska.  60 years of Alaskan winters.  These are people who were absolutely, there's no pretense to them.  It's a whole different generation.  It's a whole different feeling.  They did not want to talk about hard times.  They did not want to talk about the Depression.  They didn't want to talk about a time when it was so hard for them to take care of their families and to be self-sufficient.  You know, one man said, you know, when you're out of work and the kids need something to eat, what are you going to do? Right.  It was hard for them to go and ask for help.  They didn't want to be on relief, but there was nothing up here for them, up in the cutover, there was just nothing left.  They didn't want to talk about those times.  These are not people who came together as a colony because of their shared ideology. 

 They had an opportunity to have a better life for their families, and so they took it.  I was going to say, one of the things is, they hadn't talked to people in a long time.  They went through a period where they got a lot of bad press.  So they were burned, they felt, by the press.  So they were very reticent to talk to outsiders.  We were concerned about what would happen.  We'd sit down, you know, the first interview we did was in a very small house, where I have to actually sit in the bathroom to run the sound machine, because there's no other place to go.  We start the interview, and they just start talking immediately, like there's no stopping them, like they've been waiting all this time for us to finally ask them these questions.  It's funny they don't want to talk about hard times.  I think it's implied in this film, the whole time you're watching it, but Alaska's tough.  You've got mosquitoes.  You've got black flies.  I mean, you've got winter that's nothing like winter here.  But that's just living your life.  That's tough living up there.  It's tough living up there, but you know, once they got up there and got used to it, it's just like, well, this is the hand you're dealt, you deal with it.  Were they ready? When you talk to them now, do they laugh about it? Were they ready for the first dark, minus-40-degree winter for nine months? You know, northern Wisconsin isn't that easy.  That's true! Some people said, you know, when we were living in Wisconsin, we not only didn't have jobs, we didn't have running water, we didn't have electricity, we didn't have a hospital, a school nearby.  We didn't have any of that stuff.  The government chose the right people.  One woman said she went because she knew she could get an education for her kids. 

 Wow.  That was it.  she knew there'd be a school.  That's why she went.  I want to show another clip.  This one, I think, is much more sad.  But it's also inevitable what's going to happen when you have a group of people in a small space, mostly children, and sickness is going to hit the colony.  I want to show this clip, because I think it does show that though this was dubbed a great experiment in Socialism, that some things could go awry.  This is a clip from when sickness hits the colony.  Well, it started out with measles.  And then the measles turned into pneumonia.  My oldest daughter, she was 4, she had the measles.  The doctor checked her that day.  The next morning, she was worse.  He said "Well, I think she's got a touch of pneumonia.  I can't give you a permit to move a pneumonia case. " I said "I don't care whether you okay it or not, I'm going to have her on that train tomorrow morning. " And when we got to Anchorage, old Doc Romig, he says "You know," he says, "I think you got her here just in time. " I can remember the first two children who died very, very clearly.  The one was the Campbell child.  I can remember my dad helping to build the coffin, and my mother helping her prepare the child. 

 My little son got sick with poliomyelitis.  I thought you had to be sick a long time before you ever would die, and he just had the sniffles.  You know, you just didn't think that anything like that could ever happen.  First thing you know, he just died.  Donny was 14-1/2 months old when he died.  Then I went down to these other people's tents.  Their babies were sick.  And they lost them, too.  Four of them in one camp, Camp 8.  That's so sad.  You say this was your first film, so this is your first experience with doing all this stuff.  Were you prepared for being in a small house in Alaska, Paul, say where somebody is suddenly talking about the death of their child? That must be a pretty intense experience, if you've never done it before.  We had known that her son had passed away.  And I'm thinking, how am I going to bring this up in the conversation.  We turned on the camera, and it's the very first thing she says to me.  That's why there's that pause, because I am so taken aback, I don't have a follow-up question ready to go.  I'm thinking, you know, how are you going to bring it up, how am I going to say it.  And she is just ready to talk about it.  Again, it was less about us getting the stories out of them.  They had them.  It was just, we have 100 hours of footage. 

 It was us figuring out how to get all those stories into an hour and a half.  This was dubbed, I think, by the newspapers as the great Socialist experiment.  Could we do this again today? Is it possible to have this great Socialist experiment today? First of all, if you watch the film carefully, you'll notice that our narration never uses that word.  We let people choose or draw their own conclusions about this project.  If you really know what Socialism is, this wasn't really Socialistic, anymore than building Denver was Socialistic, which was built with government money, too.  However, a lot of people felt that way, so we let them speak their own mind.  There's different ways to look at it.  Could this happen again today? Oh, I can't even imagine.  The one thing that definitely will never happen again is that in this era of instant communication, from not only all over the globe, but we get instant pictures from Mars, never again will anybody feel that far away and that isolated.  When they went up there, they thought they would never see their families again.  Right.  It took six weeks for a letter to get back home, and back again.  They were completely isolated up there.  We'll never have that feeling again.  We will always be in touch.  It's funny, in the end, it was a social experiment.  A social experiment.  In the end, how did it work out? I mean, from what I know from Alaska and the Matanuska Valley where they did this, that's the famous farmers.  Famous vegetables, they have huge cabbages and award-winning tomatoes.  It's a great place to farm.  It's a great place to live. 

 Palmer is a lovely little town.  It has a very Midwestern feel to it.  People still have a Midwestern cadence in their voices.  The values of the community are very much Midwestern.  The look and the feel of the town is Midwestern, because it was planned for Midwesterners.  It doesn't look like other parts of Alaska, as you know from being up there.  They formed their own community.  Part of the thing that we tell in the movie, that the best farmer, they throw out of the co-op.  They get rid of him because he's too good, you know.  To make something like that in the frontier survive, you needed individualists, and you can't have individualists if everybody has to work together in community.  So exactly the people you want are exactly the people you don't want.  Well, it was an excellent film.  Thank you very much for joining us today.  Thank you for having us.  You're welcome back next time you make another film.  Both: Thank you.  Thank you for watching Director's Cut.  For more information on "Alaska Far Away," please go to: www. wpt. org and click on Director's Cut.  While you're there, send us an email, 'cause we loving hearing from you. 

 I'm your host, Charles Monroe-Kane.  For everyone here at Director's Cut, thank you very much.  Check the gate.  Funding for Director's Cut is provided by the University of Wisconsin System eCampus, providing access to online degree programs and certificates offered throughout the 26 campuses of the UW System.  Information is at: eCampus. Wisconsin. edu