On 2/22/2012 8:27 PM, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

Steve B wrote:

And $5 gas is nothing new to Alaska.


No kidding. I went there in 1973 to Ft. Greely, from Ft. Rucker Al.

A good friend of mine was in Ft. Greely in about 1967 or 1968. This guy
exemplified making lemonade from lemons. I don't think he was
particularly keen to go to Ft. Greely, but he took the opportunity to
learn to ski, and bought a nice .22 rifle and took all the free ammo the
Army gave him and became a skilled marksman. Then he went to Falls
Church, VA and finished the rest of his time in the Army, and avoided
the Vietnam quagmire altogether. He used to hint that in one of his
last official actions, he managed to reroute my older brother's Army
destiny into some clerical MOS that kept my brother out of the infantry.
When my brother ended up being sent to Vietnam in 1971, he was feeding
punch cards into an IBM 360 computer housed in a double-wide at Long
Binh rather than slogging through rice paddies.


Premium gasoline was 18.9 cents a gallon at Rucker and over $1.65 a
gallon at Greely. If it has only trippled in 39 years, it's a bargain
along the Alcan at $5 a gallon. It's $4 a gallon in some parts of
Florida, without the expense of trucking small tankers on the Alcan.