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Former Kenai resident and businessman Hal Thornton first arrived in Kenai on the evening that Ethen Cunningham was murdered. He described his experience with this event in the Kenai chapter of this memoir.

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States of Mind: The death of Ethen Cunningham — Part 1

AUTHOR’S NOTE: At the outset, I want to acknowledge invaluable contributions to this story from these three primary…

On its last legs. When the Peninsula Clarion’s Ashlyn O’Hara captured this image of Good Time Charlies in 2022, the old bar and strip club was about to be demolished to make room for a highway-safety project.

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A violent season — Part 7

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The aftermath of the 1967 shoot-out at the Hilltop Bar and Café, near Soldotna, began to…

This is the front side of the 1942 draft-registration card for Wilford Lorenzo “Bill” Hansen. He came to live on the Kenai Peninsula during the early 1950s and soon purchased a share in the Circus Bar, later changing its name to the Hilltop Bar and Café. (Document from ancestry.com)

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A violent season — Part 6

AUTHOR’S NOTE: After the Ann Pederson suicide and the Jack Griffiths murder in 1961, the former Circus Bar…

These three drink tokens, probably all from the 1960s, came from Hilltop Bar and Café, in Soldotna, and were contributed by Jim Taylor.

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A violent season — Part 5

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The jury in the Jim Bush murder trial would soon have a decision to make. Bush…

James Franklin Bush was arrested and jailed for vagrancy and contributing to the delinquency of minors in California in 1960, about a year before the murder in Soldotna of Jack Griffiths. (Public document from ancestry.com)

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A violent season — Part 4

AUTHOR’S NOTE: When a crime has no witnesses other than the accused perpetrator, investigators must search hard for…

Public photo from ancestry.com Shortly after the death of Jack Griffiths behind the Circus Bar in 1961, young Jim Bush was arrested and charged with murder.

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A violent season — Part 3

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Only a few months after the 1961 suicide of “Mrs. Oscar W. Pederson” behind a bar…

Calvin Fair, in his element, on Buck Mountain, above Chief Cove on Kodiak Island, in October 1986. His hunting partner and longtime friend Will Troyer captured this image while they were on one of the duo’s annual deer-hunting trips.

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The Road Not Taken: A tribute to my father’s career choice

From the moment my father began working for the U.S. Army in Whittier, Alaska, in the fall of…

The Soldotna shooting death of Ann Pederson, another wife of Oscar Pederson, drew brief media attention in Southcentral Alaska. Many questions remain about the victim’s final days. (Excerpt from the Anchorage Daily Times on May 29, 1961)

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A violent season — Part 2

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Although the focus of this interconnected series of stories rests squarely upon actions that occurred in…

This 1961 drawing of the Circus Bar, east of Soldotna, was created by Connie Silver for a travel guide called Alaska Highway Sketches. The bar was located across the Sterling Highway from land that was later developed into the Birch Ridge Golf Course.

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A violent season — Part 1

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The motives people have for violent actions can be difficult to discern. We can examine the…

While sitting in front of the wall-tent home he shared from several months with Ira Little, Soldotna homesteader enjoys a cup of coffee and a brief respite from cabin building. (Image from the Wayne Herald, of Nebraska, on March 10, 1949)

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Bound and Determined: The Smith & Little Story — Part 2

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Best friends Ira Little and Marvin Smith came from California to the Kenai Peninsula in 1947.…

Little Family photo courtesy of the Soldotna Historical Society One of Soldotna’s earliest homesteaders, Ira Little married his “California sweetheart,” Odette Ann Finley, in 1950, and by 1953 they were living full time in Soldotna.

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Bound and Determined: The Smith & Little Story — Part 1

For the better part of a decade on the central Kenai Peninsula, the lives of Ira Little and…

This Al Hershberger photo of his good friend Hedley Parsons was taken in Germany in 1945, after World War II had ended. Parsons and Hershberger came to Alaska together a few years later, and in 2010, when Parsons was interviewed for this story, he may have been the last person living who had actually attended George Dudley’s messy funeral

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This parting was not sweet sorrow — Part 2

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The funeral 57 years ago for North Kenai’s George Coe Dudley became the stuff of local…

The front of George Coe Dudley’s 1941 draft-registration card bears his signature and shows him as a resident of Anchorage. By the 1950s, he was living on the Kenai Peninsula.

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This parting was not sweet sorrow — Part 1

AUTHOR’S NOTE: A similar version of this story first appeared in the Redoubt Reporter in 2010.