In the summer of 2023 I was cruising the aisles of the local Salvation Army thrift store in Homer, Alaska and came across some old slide projector carousels and a Crown Royal bag sitting on the shelf. I peaked in the purple bag and pulled out a couple dozen old slides with pictures of family, mountains, glaciers, and other Alaska stuff.
“Pretty neat,” I thought to myself, “maybe I’ll scan these and see what’s on them.”
I paid $1 for the bag and tossed it in my truck. Little did I known the histories and memories it contained.
I’m into old timey photography stuff. I do a lot of film photography myself and even have a small darkroom for developing and printing that I set up for $37 with the help of some very generous local donations. Life during the summer in Alaska can be extremely busy. The season burns hot and fast and most of us are doing our best to put up money and food for the winter ahead. So I sat the bag of old slides on a shelf and there they stayed for several months collecting dust.
But winter finally came and I eventually had some time to get back around to things. I stuck the old slides in the film scanner. I didn’t know any of the people in the pictures, but I could pick out a few names on a mail box and Valentine’s Day cake. They were definitely mostly from Homer. Writing on most of the slides dated them from 1972-85. Or so I thought…
Fast forward to March 2024 and I decided to post the images to the “Historical Homer, Alaska” group on Facebook. I’d followed the group for a while and figured that if there was any chance of learning more about the photos, the 8.8-thousand members in the group were my best bet.
Once I posted the photos it took about 3 minutes to find some answers.
Within the first few minutes the daughter of Bennet Smith identified her dad in a few of the pictures. Within 10 minutes people started pointing to other photos as pictures of the Kilcher family, some of whom are best known broadly as stars in Discovery Channel’s Alaska: The Last Frontier, but also well known locally as long-time Homer homesteaders and standup locals.
It didn’t take long — less than an hour — before I started getting messages from some of the Kilchers directly. They were ecstatic to see the photos. They thought they were lost forever. After a few conversations it came to light that these old slides had been sent to the Salvation Army accidentally when one of the sisters donated some old — presumably empty — slide projector reels (they’re still debating who made the mistake!).
Some of these photoes were much older than the dates on the slides suggested. Some of the slides were marked as duplicates, so it’s not a stretch to assume they were copies of earlier pictures.
The oldest of the lot dated to 1947-48 and showed Atz Kilcher as a newborn in Switzerland. There were also rare photos of matriarch Ruth Kilcher from the early 1950s with kids in on the homestead in Homer, Alaska. Other photos showed long-gone Kilcher relatives and had never been seen before by the now-senior Kilcher generation.
It turns out the bag was a mishmash of photos spanning several decades. Mairiis “Mossy” Kilcher helped identify most of them, along with other family members Linda Fay Kilcher Graham and Conni Barber, among others.
The original Facebook post garnered more than 200 “likes” and more than 100 comments. The photos offered a glimpse back to a time in Alaska that many of us can only read and reminisce about. A time when “the last frontier” was even more wild and untamed. A time that is still embodied in the way many of us here approach life.
The original slides were returned to the Kilcher family earlier this week. Thankfully they ended up back where they belong.
