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Photo by Eric Engman

One of the last remaining daughters of the Gold Rush, Alaska Stewart Linck, died Sunday evening at her home in Fairbanks. She was 97.

During her lifetime, Linck contributed to the territory and state with hard work and energy in both the political arena and in her community service endeavors.

“She was a true pioneer of Alaska, always very interested in heritage and history,” said her longtime friend Mike Dalton. “She had a lot of curiosity about everything. She was very inquisitive and had a lot of spirit and a wonderful sense of humor.”

Linck was born Dec. 2, 1910, in Seattle to Christia and James A. Stewart, the oldest of four children.

Her father had headed north in his teens to prospect in 1892, before the great stampede later in that decade. Her mother arrived in Nome in 1906 in search of adventure and work. The two eventually met in the Interior and married.

The family lived in Seward and Wasilla before settling in Fairbanks in 1925, where her father continued to mine in the Circle District.

Linck graduated from Fairbanks High School in 1929, and attended the University of Alaska in Fairbanks before marrying James “Edson” Moody in 1932.

“She was the last remaining member of the Class of 1929,” said her son, Jim Moody, who saw to his mother’s care the past several years.

During her teen years, Linck was one of the first usherettes at the Empress Theater on Second Avenue, worked in the City Clerk’s office and as a clerk in Gordon’s store. After her marriage to Moody, the young couple built and opened Moody Mercantile in Ester when Fairbanks Exploration Co. was starting a camp there.

The store's motto was “As you demand, we expand.”

Edson Moody also worked as a miner and was injured in a dredge accident. He later developed cancer. He died in the mid-1930s.

Linck worked as postmistress at Berry (now Ester) for a year before going to work for Pacific Alaska Airways, a subsidiary of Pan American Airways at the time. She retired from Pan Am 38 years later.

During those working years and later, Linck took on extracurricular challenges. Her legacy includes serving as a legislator in the Territorial Legislature (1943-47) and on the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly (1974-77). She was the first woman director of the Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce, past president and founder of the Fairbanks Club, the Pioneer Igloo No. 8 Auxiliary, was grand recorder for the Grand Igloo of Pioneers for eight years and a member of the Eastern Star.

In addition, she was named the Soroptimist Woman of the Year in 1990 and received the UAF Community Achievement Alumni Award in 1996.

Linck met and eloped with L.E. Linck in 1941, acquiring adult stepchildren in the process. L.E. died a couple years short of their golden anniversary.

Linck had a lifelong interest in aviation. She enjoyed travel, curling, photography and journalism and was among the first in Fairbanks to purchase a 16mm movie camera. She wrote a legislative column for the News-Miner in 1947 and took up her pen again as a weekly columnist in the 1970s.

Lee Alder remembers Linck for her kindness to Fairbanks old-timers. “She’d always be looking after their welfare and give them money or arrange to buy glasses,” Alder said.

Sybil Ramsey shared similar memories.

“She (Linck) always had a helping hand for causes, the animals, the poor, and newcomers to the state,” Ramsey said.

“When I was a newcomer, we all sought her out because she had such a sunny, warm disposition and she knew everything because she grew up here and she knew how to survive here,” said Ramsey, who worked nearby at competing Wien Airline.

“She was truly a woman of distinction. She was a true pioneer whose contributions to the community and the development of the state should not be forgotten.”

Linck’s adventurous side was evident in a 1989, when she took a four-day float trip with the late Vuka Stepovich and Kathleen "Mike" Dalton down the Fortymile River to the old Fortymile community and on to the Yukon River to Eagle. The trip marked the 98th birthday of a California friend, Crystal McQueston Morgan, daughter of early Alaska trader Jack McQueston.

According to Dalton, the camping/float trip led to the formation of the Arctic Sisterhood, “when we were having too much fun fighting mosquitoes, picking sand out of our food, cooking over bonfires, sleeping on the ground in tents.”

Requirements for membership include hiking the Chilkoot Trail, floating the Yukon River or otherwise meeting the group’s “Pioneer Woman” standard. There is an annual meeting at the Fairbanks Creek mining camp established by Vuka’s husband Wise Mike Stepovich in the early 1900s, Dalton explained.

“This year we will not only remember Vuka Stepovich, but we will honor the memory of a great Alaskan, Alaska Stewart Linck,” Dalton said.