“At Home in Nome”
I wrote the “At Home in Nome” column for the weekly newspaper The Nome Nugget when living in Nome, Alaska, 1994-1995. Tom was managing an IT Group project to clean up the World War II waste that had been left strewn about the Seward Peninsula when the war ended in 1945. It had taken almost 50 years to finally clean up the tundra.
Like many Alaskan workers, Tom and his crews worked during the “summers” (typically April through October) and spent the winter elsewhere. We homeschooled our sons.
In May 1994 I nervously entered the Nugget’s office on Front Street with three columns I’d written. Editor Nancy McGuire was sitting at her office in the front room wearing a large straw hat with a sunflower stuck in the band. She looked over my writing and said, “Which one shall we run first?” I think “Shoes” was the first one published.
I had originally conceived of my column as letters to my mother about what life was like in Nome, since I was “at home in Nome.” I thought of myself as an Arctic Erma Bombeck. I wrote about polar exploration, Alaskan history, and daily life in Nome. I was free to write about any aspect of Alaskan life that interested me. I walked to the library every day, read voraciously, and taught myself about our new state. You can read my columns at http://www.kathygrossman.com/writing/category/travel-writing/
In the winter of 1994-95 we lived in an apartment in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. For the 1995-96 winter, we rented an 850-square-foot basement apartment in Anchorage which Tom had found between planes on a business trip. While in Anchorage, I wrote a piece for The Anchorage Daily News. I had hoped to continue writing for The Nome Nugget and The Anchorage Daily News, but Tom’s work responsibilities changed to supporting a tar ponds clean-up project in Sydney, Nova Scotia, and we moved to Dartmouth (a suburb of Halifax).
We left Alaska for good during a snowstorm on Valentine’s Day 1996.