Homer Alaska - News

While many who came to Homer 50 years ago steamed up along the coast or flew into Anchorage, Gus and Rita Weber did things a little differently.

Coming from Switzerland, the couple and their two children, now Claudia Johnson and Barb Hrenchir, flew through Denmark, along the Norwegian coast and over the North Pole down to Anchorage and then drove what is now the Old Sterling Highway before arriving at the end of the road, in Homer, in June 1959.

"When we left Denmark it was at night, in the black, but as we went the sun came up and it seemed like it just went higher and higher and didn't go down for two days," said Gus.

Gus and Rita originally met while Gus was in the Swiss Army. She was 9 years old at the time, and spent her days near the military kitchens. She said that she and her friends thought the food that they could get there was better than the food they could get at home.

It wasn't until much later that Gus and Rita met on more regular terms, through Rita's sister and mutual friends who congregated frequently at a nearby river to swim on warm summer days.

They married in 1953, and after six years they made their way to Homer. What they had seen on movie reels inspired them to make the move, a change that would alter how they lived their lives forever.

Luckily, that's what they both wanted.

Together they built a cabin and, within two years, they had their own property on East Hill Road, where they live today, their old cabin now integrated into their house.

Gus was a commercial fisherman aboard the F/V Violet Ray, a crabber that sold king crab for 8 cents a pound.

Rita sits outside of the cabin she and Gus built when they arrived in Homer.

Before coming to Alaska, Gus worked as a superintendent on road construction on a section of highway that connects Germany to Italy through Switzerland.

After Alaska's devastating earthquake of 1964, Gus began work as a contractor, laying concrete.

While Homer shook, Gus was busy taking king crab.

"We were around the epicenter, but we didn't feel a thing. We heard that Homer was destroyed, that Seward was wiped off the map. We tuned the radio into Anchorage and all we got was static. When we finally heard what happened we thought we should try and go in and see what we could do. When we came in, everything was floating," said Gus.

The earthquake wiped out several local canneries, including the one in Seldovia where the F/V Violet Ray sold much of its catch.

So Gus turned to laying concrete. He is responsible for many Pioneer Avenue foundations and concrete buildings including the ones that house Armageddon Café and Curves.

"All over the place I stacked blocks up. I stacked blocks up for a long time," said Gus.

In the same year as the earthquake, Gus and Rita's son, Mark Weber, was born.

For both Gus and Rita, life in Homer was utterly removed from the life they had known in Brugg, near Zurich.

"When we got here there was nothing, practically," said Rita. "I had to carry water. We didn't have a bathroom. Switzerland was all electric so we had to do new things, like cook on a wood-fired stove."

But in the days of Alaska's infancy as a state, friends and neighbors considered it an important duty to help one another out, whenever it was needed, Rita said.

"I think a lot of people then came up here because they wanted that kind of life. Today it seems like people come here with their own ideas, like they want to bring their old lives here," she said.

Today most anything someone in Homer needs can be picked up locally, or delivered to his or her door in just a few days. In the 1950s and 1960s things were different.

"You could buy lumber in town, but really, just about any other building supply you wanted you had to have sent in by boat," said Rita.

The differences between then and now come down to more than just shopping options.

"There were a lot of things that were different. You could go down to the docks and if a crab boat was in you could buy a 12-pound king crab for $2 at most. People were close to each other. We didn't have television so we had to make our own entertainment. People really depended on one another," said Rita.

Rita even put on plays with a theater group. "Some people would go to the show two or three times just because they had nothing else to do," she said.

Rita and Gus also faced one obvious challenge — language. Both had to struggle with English, as did Claudia and Barb when they began attending school for the first time.

"But we never really felt outside of things here. There was the language, sure, but I always felt like I never really fit in in Switzerland and here I have always felt like I fit in," said Rita.