Ketchikan broke tourism records this year, with 1.5 million visitors. A place many tourists end up is the town’s oldest bar – The Arctic Bar, which was opened in 1937. It is famous with tourists and locals alike. Paula Weisel is the bar’s longtime owner.
For CoastAlaska’s Tourism Today series, KRBD stopped into the bar to talk to her about how she’s seen the town change over her years serving up drinks.
Picture this: you’re new to town. It hasn’t stopped raining since you got here. You’re walking along Water Street past the cruise ship docks, cars are whizzing by – just pairs of floating headlights. You pass a squat, unassuming bar between a Filipino restaurant and a sprawling souvenir shop called Sockeye Sam’s. It looks warm. And dry.
“Hi honey! I’ve heard nothing but good sh- uh, stuff about you,” shouts a woman from the other side of the dimly lit room.
You’re in the Arctic Bar and you’re talking to its co-owner, Paula Weisel.
Weisel knows a few bar songs. “I feel like if I don’t start singing them, they’re going be lost. Because I never heard anybody else that sings them. And I learned them over in Craig,” Weisel says. Then she sings.
“I know the bartender; she and I are friends. But when I asked her for a drink, that’s when our friendship ends. Is she a man? Is she a mouse? It’s time we had one on the house. I’ve been buying and buying and buying and buying so, bartender, don’t be a louse. As the rooster once said to the hen on the shed: Let’s have one on the house!”
Craig is a small logging town on Prince of Wales Island. When Weisel was 17, she went to a wedding there. She brought a fake ID with her. She wasn’t old enough to drink.
“We were there for like five days. And on the third day, one of the girls said, ‘Paula, you’re going for a job interview tomorrow.’ And I said, ‘I am?’ And she said, ‘Yeah.’ And I said, ‘What am I going to be?’ And she said, ‘You’re going to be a bartender.’ I said, ‘I’m going to be a bartender?’ Wow! It must have been my calling is the only thing I can think of,” she recounts.
A young man comes through the door and waves.
“Yeah, they’re all my kids now,” Weisel says, waving back. “I don’t have any kids of my own. But I run a big daycare center called the Arctic bar.”
Weisel is a bit of a den mother for newcomers to Ketchikan and lifelong locals alike. ‘Anything you need, honey,’ she often says, ‘you call me.’ It is a role that she is well known for in the community. That, she admits, and her colorful vocabulary.
Weisel says the bar is her life’s work. And when she bought it, she wanted it to be a gathering place for the community. When the high school track team didn’t have enough uniforms for their students, Weisel says she held a fundraiser at the Arctic.
“They were doing what they were supposed to, you know, their hearts were in it,” Weisel remembers. “But they couldn’t compete because they didn’t have any uniforms? Give me a break. No, they were getting uniforms. If people can buy beer, they sure as hell can buy uniforms too.”
You’re likely to hear many stories like this around the old dive bar.
“And he said, ‘Paula, I am now five hours out at sea, and I’m turning my nuclear submarine around, and I’m bringing you your tap handle back’ and I’m like, ‘Cap, you really don’t have to’ and he goes, ‘Oh, yes, I do.’” Weisel says about the captain of the USS Albuquerque, a Navy attack submarine. She is telling the telling the story of when the huge vessel turned around mid-voyage to return a hand-carved tap handle bearing the bar’s mascots, the infamous “happy bears,” stolen by one of the overly zealous crew, who frequented the Arctic.
Weisel has been behind a bar for almost 40 years and has owned this bar for 27 of them. Its original location was Creek Street, in the days when it was dominated by brothels. According to a newspaper clipping that is laminated into the bar top, a 1956 flood swept the entire bar into the river. For years afterwards men would allegedly dive into the river and come up with cases of beer.
The new bar again stands in a central location: on Water Street near the cruise ship docks. When the huge ships pull into port, the Arctic is in their shadow.
Weisel has seen the town change over the decades. The fluctuations of the fishing industry, the booms and busts of logging, and now, the town’s current economic engine: tourism.
“It’s just different. Tourism is different than the logging, than the fishing, than the pipeline. The good old days are over. And so, it’s tourism now. And like I said, if you don’t change throughout the time that you’re doing this, after so long, you’re just going to fade. You’re not going to survive. And so, the tourism has made us change. Not for bad, for good. It’s just change. Change is hard for me. But change is good,” the bar owner explains.
But how has the bar had to change?
“Okay, I mean, at the end of the summer, now, we could have 150, 169 – 69 is my number – 169 credit cards left here. And I used to really fret about what to do with them. Do I take them to a police station?” Weisel says, adding that the bar has to open earlier. “It’s totally different. It’s balls to the walls. Opening at 8 in the morning. People are waiting outside that door to get in. By state law, they can’t come in before 8am. You can’t open at 7. And you can’t open at 6 in the morning. And I know it’s crazy. But believe me, there’s people that would like to have a cocktail at that time. They’re on vacation. They’re happy. You know, I get it.”
The bar is co-owned by Kara Jones, who handles the day-to-day finances.
Weisel though says there will come a day though that she won’t be behind the bar. When that day comes, hopefully far in the future, she hopes one of her bartenders will buy the Arctic. She doesn’t want the bar to be “bought by Disney Cruises.” Or any of the big outfits that would jump at the chance, because of the Arctic’s prime location.
That is a common concern in Ketchikan. As the tourism industry expands, locals express worry about the increasing space it takes up around town. At the same time that Weisel is saying this, there is debate among the Ketchikan Borough’s assembly about a swath of land north of the city. The borough plans to subdivide it to help with the borough’s housing crisis. But as one assembly member said, ‘if we don’t put restrictions on that land, tour companies and developers are going to put lodges on it.’
This sometimes-adversarial relationship between locals and tourists isn’t new though. Weisel recalls when she first bought the bar. Her first act of business was removing a sign that the previous owner, Larry Buster Sr., had hung from the back deck. The sign was on full display when cruise ships pulled into port. And it said: “F*** Princess Cruise Lines.”
“As soon as the paperwork was done, I said I gotta go get something on the deck,” Weisel laughs. “And Larry said ‘No! The sign that I made that says, F*** Princess Cruise Lines?’ And sure enough, I come off the deck and I have that sign. You might as well shoot yourself in the foot, Larry, to have that sign out there. I just bought the bar. I’m sorry. I mean, come on. Times change. It had to go.”
Weisel says she gets it though. “A lot of locals, the really devout locals, they know what day is the slowest for the cruise ships every year. That’s the only day they come and get mail. I mean, some people just do not like the tourism, and I understand. I’m not going to push it down their throat, I get it.”
But she also says it plays an important role in keeping places like the Arctic alive.
“I’m not gonna be mean to people and make them think that they’d never come in here. You know, I mean, I want to welcome everybody. And you know, make sure everybody has a good time and has fun.”
Weisel pours herself a small glass of Jagermeister. She reminisces about her beginnings in Craig. A town she showed up in as a summer visitor, and learned songs that she hopes, now, won’t be forgotten.
“I like humpback salmon. Good old humpback salmon. Caught by Alaska fishermen. I like crab and shellfish. They sure make a swell dish. I think the halibut is grand. I don’t like T-bone steaks, cut from the steers in Texas but give me fish and I don’t give a f*** if I do pay taxes. I like humpback salmon. That humpback salmon caught by Alaska fishermen.”
Get in touch with the author at jack@krbd.org.
