Digital Bob Archive

First Football Game: What was said to have been Juneau's first football game, and may have been the first in Alaska, was played, of all times, on January 1, 1903, between the teams of the Juneau school and the Douglas school. Not the high schools. It is not certain that Douglas had a high school at that time, and it appears from the records that the Juneau High School had only one male member and he was Grover Winn, father of Juneau art dealer William Winn and one of the first two graduates of the school.

Why it was played on New Year's Day is not explained. It was not a bowl game. Had bowl games even been invented in 1903? The playing field was the beach below Evergreen Cemetery, where baseball was played in the summer. Conditions must have been ideal - 15 inches of snow on the ground, temperature 15 above zero, and a Taku wind blowing!

The Douglas team dominated the game and scored four touchdowns, to none for Juneau. In fact, said The Alaska Daily Dispatch, \"They made the Juneau team look like three plugged dimes.\" They did not kick the ball for fear the wind would blow it into the channel and they would lose it. Apparently they had only the one ball. The news story does not say what they did instead of punting.

Football games were played between the two schools for some years before the sport was dropped, but it is not known that another one was played on New Year's Day. More than 30 years later, however, there was a New Year's football game between two pick-up teams of local men. It was called the Gold Bowl.

The Cyanide Ball: A New Year's Eve dance with that name does sound a little grim, but it was the social event of the season when it opened the year 1913 at the Treadwell Club. Sponsored by the men who worked in the cyanide plant of the Treadwell Mining Company on Douglas Island, the ball was attended by people from both sides of Gastineau Channel. Special ferries ran from Juneau to carry people to the ball and home again when it ended. A special feature was a 12-page program, each page of which had an etching and some verse, the whole explaining the cyanide process for treating ore. The program must have been a collector's item back then; it would be even more so today if any have survived.

Tracks in the snow: Two of the most inept thieves in the history of Juneau must have been the pair who stole a 500-pound safe from the America Cigar Store in February, 1920. A couple of inches of snow had just fallen and they hauled the safe on a Yukon sled from Lower Front Street(now South Franklin) to a cabin on Willoughby Avenue. City Patrolman Al Forsythe followed the sled tracks and arrested the men half an hour later. They had not yet gotten around to opening the safe, which contained $200.