"Rick really moderated even more than I had seen him moderate," said his friend Smith. In recent years, tensions between McCarthy residents and the National Park Service have cooled, as had Kenyon's stories on the pages of the Wrangell-St. If we had, we would have come out fighting for (the abused family members)." His regrets were that we did not see the signs of abuse. "He didn't have regrets about standing for access, whether it was them or anybody else," she said. Kenyon had cut ties with Pilgrim long before the truth emerged, Bonnie Kenyon said. Robert Hale, known as Papa Pilgrim, became a folk hero to some but was later found guilty of horrific abuse against his family. Kenyon championed the Pilgrim family's cause in his newspaper. It all came to a head in 2003, when a homeschooling, bluegrass music-playing religious family dressed in the clothing of another era arrived in McCarthy and became embroiled in a high-profile fight over property access with the National Park Service. We wanted to be true to what we believed," Bonnie Kenyon said. His wife says he considered himself a watchdog. He also voiced strong opinions about improving the road to McCarthy. When Kenyon detected what he saw as bureaucratic overreach by the National Park Service, he took his crusade to the pages of his newspaper. "It detailed people's lives out here," she said. Who was working on their ATVs, and whose garden had been pillaged by moose. Whose grandchildren had visited from Tucson. Elias News at a community Fourth of July parade.īonnie Kenyon wrote a column about the over-the-fence neighborly life in McCarthy: Who had just pickled cabbage for winter. They first handed out a few stapled pages of the Wrangell-St. "Or we would never have had any inkling this was part of God's plan for us to do." "Neither of us were great in English in school," Bonnie Kenyon said. In the early 1990s, they became unlikely newspaper owners. When the McCarthy-Kennicott Church was built - the first ever in McCarthy - Rick Kenyon became the pastor. They held Bible study groups in their home. They missed the 1983 mail plane massacre, in which a quiet part-time resident from California killed six of the 22 people who lived in town. "If you need to get a message out, you had to go down there," said Kenny Smith, a longtime McCarthy resident and friend of the Kenyons. In the early days, they eked out a living with odd jobs and quickly made themselves indispensable to the town, operating the only ham radios around. They moved right away and began building a cabin. But Kenyon felt Valdez was not the wilderness God had called them to.Ī pilot friend flew them to McCarthy, where a few families were living in the wilds near the ruins of an old mining town. It took her a while to come around to the idea of uprooting their family to go north, where she imagined "polar bears hiding behind every tree."Īt first, the family lived in Valdez, where Rick Kenyon worked as an airplane mechanic. He moved to Alaska in the 1970s with his wife and son, Rick Jr., because he felt "called by God," Bonnie Kenyon said. Rick Kenyon was born in Flint, Michigan and raised in Florida. With Kenyon gone, the last issue will likely be published this fall, said Kenyon's wife, Bonnie. Its motto was "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," and its subscriber base far exceeded the population of McCarthy, which hovers around 20 or 30 in winter. Elias News, a tiny newspaper that chronicled the big and small dramas of the region.įrom a cabin across the Kennicott River from town, Kenyon and his wife had, since 1992, published the paper bimonthly. "When someone like Rick departs a community, you just stand there scratching your head in shock, wondering how you can go on," said Kenyon's friend Ray Kreig, an Anchorage property rights activist who owns land in McCarthy.Īmong the losses: The Wrangell St. Not everyone in McCarthy agreed with Kenyon, a tall man who wore a bushy beard and started each day with coffee and Bible study.īut many have a hard time imagining the town without him. In the wilderness hamlet of McCarthy, Rick Kenyon was the preacher, newspaper editor, propane salesman, official weather observer and often the loudest agitator against what he viewed as incursions of the federal government on frontier Alaska life.
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