“The Queen of Fairbanks: Extraordinary Family Secrets & Untold Stories of America’s Farthest North Bag Lady”
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By Tricia Brown; Larson & Larrigan Publishers, 2024; 302 pages; $22.95.
In the summer of 1996, after several years of drifting in and out of Alaska, I settled into Fairbanks, missing Irene Sherman by about 15 months. The town had drawn me since first laying eyes on it more than a half decade earlier. Having fled Seattle just as it was becoming the hipster capital of the universe, the unpretentious, unpolished little city felt like the antithesis of what I’d left behind. Quirky in an unforced way, devoid of urbanity, disinterested in the outside world’s approval, and home to people who were inherently nonconformist instead of self-consciously so.
Reading “The Queen of Fairbanks,” longtime Alaska writer and journalist Tricia Brown’s telling of Sherman’s story, made me appreciate again what first intrigued me about the Golden Heart City, and why I chose it as a home. Colloquially known as the Farthest North Bag Lady, Sherman wandered the streets of the town for decades before my arrival, cherished by many, avoided by a few, and widely accepted by what might have been the only community to embrace one such as her.
Sherman’s story was marred by tragedy. Born in 1911 to an absentee prospector father and a negligent, mentally ill mother, she spent her earliest days shuffled between the family’s cabin, located on their mining claim, and the newly emerging towns of Fairbanks and Nenana. At age 2 she nearly froze to death when her mother dragged her and her infant sister on a sled through the wilds in search for their father; a fatal journey for her sibling, not the last child the family would lose.
But the incident that would define Sherman’s life occurred when she was 5. Left unattended in the family’s Fairbanks cabin with her baby brother on a frigid subzero day, she was joined by a playmate. As the afternoon wore on, the fire heating the house died down, and the children began to freeze. The two girls attempted to rekindle it, using flammable liquid to do so. The details are not entirely clear except for this: The fire erupted and almost immediately engulfed the cabin in flames. Rescuers dashed in to pull the trapped children from the inferno. Only Sherman, her entire face and body badly burned, survived. She was severely disfigured for life.
Brown first encountered Sherman in 1978 during the annual Golden Days Parade shortly after her own arrival in Fairbanks. Amidst the floats and marchers, Sherman pedaled by on an adult tricycle, waving to the cheering onlookers.
“When she turned toward us,” Brown writes, “beneath the brim of her fancy hat, Irene’s face was a mask of discolored, uneven burn scars. As the trike passed, I read the poster on the back. ‘IRENE MARY SHERMAN, THE QUEEN OF FAIRBANKS, FAIRBANKS-BORN 1911.’ I scanned the faces of the locals stacked along both sides of the street and saw smiles and hints of pride. She was their bag lady, their Irene Mary Sherman. Maybe they wouldn’t have had her over for dinner, but on this day, it was love.”
Brown went on to write a profile of Sherman for the Sunday supplement in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, coming to know the woman who lived in a ramshackle home on land permanently lent to her by a prominent businessman. A relentless hoarder, her home, to which few were granted entry, was barricaded behind pallets, boxes and broken-down household appliances. Sherman’s needs were seen to by a plethora of locals who protected her, and who she would frequently join in downtown bars, demanding to be served Olympia Beer and nothing else.
Children both feared and adored her. Adults freely socialized and occasionally clashed with her. And on the coldest nights, she was given a room in the now condemned Polaris Hotel, the closest thing to a high rise in downtown Fairbanks.
How all of this came to be is the topic of Brown’s deeply moving book, which, a bit like Sherman herself, freely wanders back and forth, tracing the bag lady’s calamitous childhood, excruciatingly difficult early adulthood, and eventual emergence as a Fairbanks icon.
Along the way, Brown delves deeply into Sherman’s extended family, many of its members plagued by mental illness, who arrived in Alaska with the Gold Rush, and who all left except Sherman and the children they buried in graves.
Through this deeply troubled and shattered family, who abandoned Sherman to her own fate, Brown follows the development of Fairbanks from its beginnings as a frontier outpost to the small but relatively modern city it is today. One that didn’t lose its pioneer ability to care for one of its most unfortunate citizens and exalt her as a favored daughter. Its adopted, eccentric, and mostly beloved elder.
Sherman was, by Brown’s telling, emblematic in her unique and sometimes difficult way of a town that refused to shun someone whose very appearance would have rendered her outcast in more cosmopolitan and urbane cities like the one I bolted from in 1990. The Fairbanks that, almost immediately upon my initial exposure to it, left me thinking quietly to myself, “What a strange and unusual place. I’ll bet I end up living here.” This book, in its unique way, tells me why I stayed.
Sherman struggled against long odds. A family caught in a swirl of madness that discarded and largely forgot her, a mind beset by the same maladies that drove her mother into a mental hospital, a body mutilated by a childhood accident. Yet she refused to allow these misfortunes to define her. Nor did her hometown.
“Early on, Irene’s security — her physical and mental health — had been destroyed in every way possible through parental negligence,” Brown concludes. “Other factors had undermined her further: violence, homelessness, sexual assault, and base poverty. If not for her pioneer friends and the stake she made in Fairbanks, Irene would have been a lost soul. Some thought she was, but I don’t believe she saw herself that way.”
By Brown’s telling, neither did most of Fairbanks.
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