‘The most depressing town I’ve ever visited’: One tourist’s Fairbanks experience and the war of words it inspired

Part of a continuing weekly series on Alaska history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage or Alaska history or an idea for a future article? Go to the form at the bottom of this story.

Newcomers to Alaska, whether transplant, tourist, or wayward traveler, have expectations for the state. They think they know what Alaska is like, with an imagination fueled by media depictions and rampant myths, reality shows and cartoons. And it’s not really their fault. Information consumed over a lifetime is not easily ignored, and the variety of cultures, geographies, and climates that make up Alaska is difficult to describe succinctly. Still, many such visitors endure a sort of dissonance during their stays, a jarring gap between expectations and experience. Some new arrivals shrug the feeling off and update their mental conceptions. Others feel slighted.

As much as Alaska is beloved for its natural splendors, insulting the great state is almost a sport for some visitors. John McPhee’s 1976 book “Coming Into the Country” remains infamous among many Alaskans for its scathing takes. For example, he described Anchorage as fundamentally generic and divorced from its environment: “A large cookie cutter brought down on El Paso could lift something like Anchorage into the air. Anchorage is the northern rim of Trenton, the center of Oxnard, the ocean-blind precincts of Daytona Beach. It is condensed Albuquerque.”

Though forgotten today, few people were as absolutely disillusioned with aspects of Alaska as Californian Raymond Lentzsch. Before a quick 1957 trip to Fairbanks, the city and state were like a dream to him, a perfect place. Once he returned home, his disgusted account of the town made him briefly the most hated man in Fairbanks.

Lentzsch was a proud resident of Whittier, California and public relations manager for the hometown Whittier College. For a decade, he consumed every newspaper and magazine article about Alaska, read all the books, and watched all the movies. More specifically, his fascination lay with Fairbanks, and that summer, he finally had the opportunity to visit. Lentzsch wrote, “I had been reading stories and seeing movies on the frontier town of Fairbanks with the view that I might someday like to live there.”

To answer the obvious question, the Whittier of California and the Whittier of Alaska are both named after the same person, Quaker poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892). To be pedantic, Whittier Glacier came first, then the Alaska community was named after the glacier, but both town names ultimately refer to the poet.

When Lentzsch returned home, he wrote several articles on his experiences in Alaska for the Whittier News. The series was primarily filled with banal but helpful observations, like the necessary planning for the Alcan Highway. Then, on Aug. 2, 1957, the newspaper published his thoughts on Fairbanks in an article titled “Wild Fairbanks a Filthy Town.” As Lentzsch summarized, “After visiting for only three days (I had planned to stay a week), I can tell you I would never live there.”

He sneered at the Fairbanks atmosphere. “Perhaps you have to hear the gritty sound of shoes grinding dirt into linoleum floors of department stores and hotel lobbies, or feel your nose twitch from the dust before you realize just how unpleasant mud and dust can be.” He also noted, “With but a few exceptions, Fairbanks reminds of a cheap section of South Chicago,” not a term of endearment for those unfamiliar with the state of the midcentury Second City. “I couldn’t help wondering what possessed all these people to crowd together into such a flat, barren, dusty mudhole.”

He mocked the architecture and urban planning. “It is difficult to recognize the center of town. I passed right through town to a dead-end at the railroad depot before I realized I had missed it.” “All but three streets in town are mud. Homes are old-fashioned two and three-story frame houses that look very uncheerful, painted in dark colors if at all, and almost completely lacking any sign of landscaping.”

Regarding the hotels, he said, “The one first-rate hotel in Fairbanks is comparable to a third-rate hotel in the States.” His hotel accommodation was unsurprisingly also not to his liking. He described it as “A narrow dank smelly room” in an “‘umpteen’ rate hotel.” Its most notable feature was its most colorful. “A “hangman’s noose tied to the wall in each room is actually the means of escaping from fire, but its macabre suggestion looks altogether fitting to the bare rooms.”

While it may sound like Lentzsch was exaggerating, fire ropes were a common type of fire escape in older hotels, often stored coiled up on a wall. They were about as effective as you might guess. Imagine descending, hand by hand, down a rope during an emergency while possibly inhaling smoke. In midcentury America, they were most common in cheaper hotels, areas with poorly developed or enforced fire codes, or all of the above.

The driving experience was similarly unpleasant. He advised, “brace yourself and hope for the best as you jam your foot down on the accelerator to plow through a gumbo street of town before you recall how beautiful a blacktop of clean concrete road looks.” Not that Lentzsch knew it, but he had arrived at the messy peak of the spring breakup, which somewhat understandably colored his time there.

He saved his most scornful observations for the Fairbanks residents. Everyone was “out to ‘gouge’ you for all you’re worth.” At the hotel, the staff “watched me carefully each time I left as though I might be taking out part of the furnishings. In talking with other visitors, I was reassured in finding that what I saw as distrust was considered ‘sensible business practice.’”

He declared, “You anticipate the bold swagger of the adventurous pioneer; instead you find lost lonely-looking men slithering self-consciously from bar to bar or to the little shops of smutty magazines and dirty movies or to the cheap tumble-down makeshift burlesque halls.” Moreover, “You expect to find strong men who work hard, lumber jacks, prospectors, construction workers; Instead you find the bored, disgruntled service men who resent being so far from home and the deluded unemployed laborers who have not ‘struck it rich’ and are just looking forward to making enough money to get back to the states — but in the meanwhile are drinking themselves further and further into a hole.”

All that said, he did end his screed with something of a compliment. “My only fond memory of Fairbanks was the policeman who let me go after catching me doing 60 mph through a 25 mph zone on my way out of town. He must have sympathized with the sad look on my face and realized why I was so anxious to escape Fairbanks, the most depressing town I have ever visited.”

Amid all the rage, he surprisingly made no comment on the weather, likely due to the short length of his stay. In the spring of 1952, a large electronic temperature sign was installed on the First National Bank building at the corner of 2nd Avenue and Cushman Street. During the 1950s, one of the more popular images of Fairbanks, frequently reprinted and sold as postcards, was a composite photograph of that sign. On the left side, the sign reads 91 degrees, on July 22, 1953. On the right side, the sign reads minus 49 degrees, from Jan. 23, 1953, just six months later. If Lentzsch had endured either end of that spectrum, he surely would have mentioned it.

Four days later, the Whittier News published an angry retort from Martin Tye, a Whittier resident who had spent some time in Fairbanks. “I have never read such bilious vilification in any newspaper,” wrote Tye, who then acknowledged, “there is some factual basis for the article.” More importantly, the author was one of several who forwarded Lentzch’s article on to Alaska.

For most towns, the bitter diatribe of a man several thousands of miles away would have made no dent at all. In some places, maybe there would have been a small item, buried in the back pages of the local newspaper. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner responded with a report that began above the front page masthead, an extremely rare choice. In other words, Lentzch’s complaints were more important than the price, date, or the name of the newspaper itself. This initial reply included the entirety of Lentzch’s article, which the News-Miner described as “indignant.”

Over the next month, the News-Miner published one opinion column, three editorials, and several letters to the editor about Lentzsch. In their most direct attack, the newspaper claimed Lentzsch’s animosity stemmed from a failed job opportunity at the University of Alaska, where he had “made an ass of himself.” Elsewhere, the newspaper described his article as “violent,” “dyspeptic,” “garish,” “untypical and uncalled for.”

The Anchorage Daily Times pitched in with a supportive editorial. Editor Robert “Bob” Atwood wrote, “Obviously the writer was right and everybody in Fairbanks is wrong. He was trying to say that the 20,000 or more people who live in Fairbanks are wrong. Twenty thousand people are stuck in the wild, filthy city and he (courageously and heroically) distinguished himself by getting out! We don’t go along with that line of thinking. Twenty thousand Alaskans can’t be wrong. One transient from Whittier, Calif., not only could be but was.”

While the letters to the various editors included many proud proclamations of Fairbanks pride, several wrote in with far more complicated views of the Golden Heart City. One letter writer admitted, “Gee, isn’t Ray Lentzsch the lucky one? He doesn’t like Fairbanks but then he is in Whittier and doesn’t have to stay here ... Seems to me he only succeeded in stirring up a hornets’ nest in Fairbanks while he sits in California and laughs at the rest of bickering about it.” Another letter stated, “Fairbanks is not quite as bad as the gentleman infers. I have been here since June and have seen no mud. Dust, smoke, and bugs and mosquitos by the millions, yes, but no mud.”

Yet another Alaskan, Ron Turek, wrote, “I’ve been in Alaska over 15 years and I admit I was quite discouraged by my first impression.” He continued, “To be more to the point, (Fairbanks) is an eyesore, and the numerous bars along the way do not help the situation.” To quote Yoda, “Mudhole? Slimy? My home this is.”

While Fairbanks did not expand at the same rate as Anchorage during and after World War II, it was still a boomtown. Per the Census, in 1939, there were 3,455 people living in Fairbanks, 5,692 total in the greater area. In 1960, that had grown to 13,311 people living within city limits, 23,408 in the greater area. By Lentzsch’s visit, city leadership was still struggling to contain, organize, and serve a rapidly growing population. The shocks and fault lines of such growth were visible throughout the town. There were opportunities galore in a place like midcentury Fairbanks but maybe not the nicest streets, not yet.

For his part, Lentzsch refused to back down from his description of Fairbanks. In a follow-up article, he wrote, “If anything, I was charitable in what I wrote ... the only statehood Alaska will appear fit for will be a state of inadequacy.” Incendiary though his opinions remained, the storm eventually passed. Alaskans found new events and opponents to battles, critics being an eternally renewable resource.

Key sources:

“It Says Here: ‘Wild Fairbanks a Filthy Town’ . . . More Coming.” Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, August 8, 1957, 1, 2.

“It Takes Great Men to Make Great Cities.” Anchorage Daily Times, August 12, 1957, 6.

Lentzsch, Ray. “Wild Fairbanks a Filthy Town.” Whittier News, August 2, 1957, 11.

McPhee, John. Coming Into the Country. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991.

“On the Inside.” Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, August 12, 1957, 4.

Orth, Donald J. Dictionary of Alaska Place Names, Geological Survey, Professional Paper 567. Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1971.

Rich, Mel. “Et Ceteras: Lentzsch is Not Out.” Whittier News, August 22, 1957, 12.

Thomas, Maude M. Letter to editor. Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, August 29, 1957, 4.

Turek, Ron L. Letter to editor. Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, August 19, 1957, 4.

Tye, Martin. Letter to editor. “Fairbanks Protest.” Whittier News, August 6, 1957, 6.

“‘Wild, Filthy Fairbanks.’” Fairbanks Daily News Miner, August 10, 1957, 4.