Three Salmon Summers: Working in Alaska Canneries: 1909, 1937, 1939: The Stories of Louis and Evan Hill

By Lucinda Hill Hogarty

"Alaska has an immensely magnetic, lusty, fundamental drawing power." Evan Hill wrote that sentence years after his first trip to Alaska. Before statehood, Alaska for many young men from the West Coast meant salmon canneries and work that guaranteed travel and adventure-- a quest.Three Salmon Summers begins with Evan's father Louis Hill, who in 1909 at age 17, sailed from San Francisco to Bristol Bay. Twenty- six years later, during the Great Depression, Evan, age 18, sailed from Seattle for a summer of work and an adventure. Louis was "shanghaied" into working for a cannery crew, while Evan ended up as a member of an emerging Filipino labor union. Both father and son became writers and story tellers. More than 100 years after that first trip, the author, Lucinda Hill Hogarty, Evan's daughter and Louis' granddaughter has compiled their writings to let you experience their amazing journeys. These coming-of-age stories reveal their fascination with the people they worked with, the new cultures they experienced, the hard lives and sometimes deaths of workers in the salmon industry, and the challenges and allure of life in Alaska. Hill Hogarty uses newly discovered family letters, unpublished manuscripts, and photographs to tell the story of a father and son whose similar summer jobs separated by a generation shaped them and their destinies. This short book brims with humor, tenderness, naivet?, curiosity, compassion, and intellect. The use of original source material lends an authentic voice to the telling of the tales. Three Salmon Summers reflects family relationships, adolescent ambitions and yearnings as well as an admiration for the richness that is Alaska.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1481169130
• ISBN13: 9781481169134
• Release Date: December 2012
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 146 Pages
• Weight: 0.61 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.4" x 6.0"