Telephones, and the telephone system.
All the telephones I saw in Magadanin 1994 were rotary dial phones in pastel colors. The line connections weren't very good either. People took it in stride when a connection was broken in the middle of a conversation.
Finally, after a week or so of observing phones, I finally saw a touchtone, office model phone in the office of a young entrepreneur. The office was very impressive with chrome, smoked glass and black leather Scandinavian office furniture. And the phone console sat on a corner of the desk.
When the businessman left his office for a moment, one of the other Americans in the group -- we'd all grown interested in Russian phones -- went over and picked up the receiver. No dialtone. He looked more closely. The phone wasn't plugged in. It was just a prop.
Well, when I last saw a good display of the Northern Lights, back in South Dakota in the '50s, when I was a boy, they were flickering lights low in the night sky to the north. I did see them from a plane once on a flight from Seattle to Anchorage but have never seen them from the ground in Anchorage. The city lights here are too bright.
People do see them though; I've just been unlucky. Japanese tourists come to Fairbanks in the winter just to see them. But I figure Anchorage in the winter is bad enough.
Our Sen. Stevens would like us to find a way of harnessing their energy, and I think he's channeled some federal money to the university at Fairbanks to look into that.
If you want to impress people (such as members of congressional appropriations committees), you can call them the aurora borealis.
Alaska is probably the biggest small town in the world. It's one-fifth the size of the Lower 48, but it doesn't take long for you to feel as though you know everyone in the state who you want to know.
There are fewer than 600,000 people in the entire state and you get to know the other people who share your interests -- whether they're journalists or journalism professors -- fairly quickly regardless of how far away they may be.
Students' copy usually, but not always, isn't as clean as reporters' copy. But at the university I don't have to clear my changes in copy with the city desk.
I put in longer days -- and this surprised me -- as a teacher than as an editor; there's a lot of stuff that goes on in the background for university faculty members that students (fortunately for them) are unaware of.
Both kinds of activities have real but quite different rewards; I suppose that's why I'm still doing both things.
Copyright 1998, Thomas L. Mangan
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