In 1995, going thru a footlocker in my mother's basement, I stumbled upon a clipping from the Anchorage daily newspaper from February 27, 1958, "Alaskan Scientists Bring Better Living to Villages" which talked about Bill Pages's work in the interior, as part of the Arctic Health Research Center, where my father worked as a bacteriologist. The article started "14 years ago, a 24-year-old lad named Bill Page was conducting studies for the Coast & Geodetic Survey on the storm-swept Aleutian Islands". I had myself been in the Aleutians in the 1980s, dropped off on Unimak to do a geological study of Shishaldin Volcano, so this resonated with me. And since he was family friend, I got his current address from my mother. I wrote him , and asked the question "what were you doing in the Aleutians?" -- to which he replied with a 4 page single spaced letter. In 1998 I discovered that Ray Wilcox was a Badger (University of Wisconsin-Madison alumnus) and cooked up a scheme to get departmental funds to go visit and interview him for the alumni magazine. I mentioned my interest in the Aleutian history and he said there was a whole gang of the guys from the USGS Aleutian Volcano project living in Denver -- and that got it started.

Working in the Aleutians is not easy. The experiences of those individuals who weathered the storms and put up with the lousy (and sometimes dangerous) living conditions needs to be preserved. My goal has been to compile and preserve the memories and records (including photographs), and ultimately develop this material into a book, and to also make much of the information available on the web. This is particularly true for the hundreds of slides and photographs which I have scanned.