Gastineau Channel Memories

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Bareksten/Christensen

Norma Bareksten Weaver

My grandparents Joseph Lindley and Ida Esther Green, were in Seward during the time the railroad was being built to Anchorage. They moved to Anchorage where my grandfather worked for the Land Office.

I remember coming to Juneau in the early 30s, in time to start first grade. My mother and father were Gladys and Tom Bareksten and I had an older brother Jack. We lived on 12th Street for a couple of years and then built a home out on Auke Lake. I spent the summer with my grandparents in Anchorage while the house was being built. The road has changed now and the house was later torn down to build the Chapel by the Lake church after we left in the early 40s.

Our Juneau family connection was the Pete and Ed Christensen family, right next door at Auke Lake, who owned and drove the school buses at that time. Pete?s wife, Clara, was Tom Bareksten?s sister, and that may be why we came to Juneau. Tom drove the bus from Thane part of the year and fished in the summers. My grandmother had a stroke somewhere in the mid 30s and she came to live with us in Juneau. She was born in 1867 and died in Juneau on December 31, 1941.

Our family broke up in 1940, and I went south with my mother and graduated from high school in Washington. The Christensens sold the bus system to Eric Lindegaard in 1949. Ed went north to Palmer and started a bus system up there and Pete stayed in Juneau. He had the Nash auto agency for a while until moving to California where he died of cancer in 1974.

My brother Jack worked for the CCC in Juneau until he joined the Coast Guard for most of WW II. In 1946, he joined the army and was killed in action during the Korean War in March, 1951.

I later married and returned to Alaska, living in Fairbanks and Seward where my husband worked for the Alaska Railroad and later the Ferry System. We were living in Seward at the time of the 1964 earthquake. We had three daughters, two of whom live in Anchorage. We retired to Arizona in 1979, where I still live.

Norma, Jack and Gladys Bareksten, 1945. Norma, Jack and Gladys Bareksten, 1945.