Palin's Alaskan town proud, wary

Neighbors recall love of outdoors, ambition

(Brian Adams for The Boston Globe)

WASILLA, Alaska - Sharing coffee and doughnuts at a plastic table in the back of Carr's Quality Center supermarket, Lou Hoffman and Dave Chatterton savored the image of their former mayor, Sarah Palin, mixing it up at a Beltway soiree.

"I can see her sitting at a party and they're talking about this, that, and the other," said Hoffman, an 84-year-old Air Force veteran. "And she asks, 'How many guns do you have?' "

Chatterton, a retired corrections official, burst out laughing. " 'And what caliber are they?' " he said.

As Palin prepares to accept the Republican nomination for vice president tonight, in a speech that will mark her sudden ascent to national fame, neighbors in her Alaskan town are responding with a mix of pride, amazement, and, in some cases, trepidation.

From Chimo Guns, where Palin buys ammunition beneath stuffed heads of moose, caribou, and musk ox, to the green booths of the bustling Mat Su Family Restaurant, to the battered barroom of the Mug-Shot Saloon, people here are bursting with excitement that their two-fisted governor could ride into Washington and clean up the mess, the same way she took on corrupt politicians in Alaska.

"She's more woman than Hillary and she's more man than Hillary," said Cheryl Metiva, who attends Wasilla Bible Church with Palin. "She's a feminist on a mission. She's very much in touch with being a wife and a mother and a girlfriend to the women in her life."

Behind some of the bravado and sense of pride, some also harbor fears that a woman who only four years ago was building sewer lines and a new hockey rink as mayor of this town of 9,700 could be called on to handle an international crisis. "She's a very effective local leader," said Don McNamee, 57, who voted for Palin for mayor and was at the Alaska State Fair in neighboring Palmer, selling raffle tickets for the Disabled American Veterans. "But as far as being vice president, I'm concerned. She's been mayor of Wasilla. Wasilla is nothing."

Stopping for coffee at the Holiday gas station, on his way to a fishing expedition with his son on the rustic Kenai peninsula, Tom Smith said he was "electrified" that John McCain chose Palin, whom he called a "breath of fresh air - Alaska air, last-frontier air."

"She'd be a good vice president," said Smith, 68, a retired marine engineer. Then he leaned forward and added in a hushed tone: "But if something happens to him . . . she's lost. She doesn't have any foreign experience."

Located an hour north of Anchorage, Wasilla was founded in the early 1900s as a base for gold-mining in the Talkeetna Mountains, the saw-tooth, snow-laced range that juts across the horizon. Now, it is a shopping hub, a series of drab strip malls and big-box stores straddling a highway. Nail salons, hardware stores, and Chinese food restaurants sit side by side with Wal-Mart, Fred Meyer, and Target. The blue-and-yellow Alaska railroad makes whistle stops in town, carrying miners and tourists 300 miles from Anchorage to Denali.

Just blocks from the shopping plazas, thick pine forests rise on all sides. Many residents live in the wooded outskirts, including Palin and her family, who own a large cedar-shingled house with picture windows overlooking Lake Lucille and her husband's red-and-white float plane.

Palin, whose family moved to Wasilla from nearby Eager River when she was 8, stood out from an early age. As a teenager, she shot rabbits and willow ptarmigan, the state bird, said Curt Menard, a friend who took Palin on hunting trips with his sons. "Her dad is such a great hunter, and he had great skills, and she took to it like a duck to water," Menard said.

A star guard at Wasilla High School, she led the Warriors to a state championship in 1982. A year later, she was named princess of the Fur Rendezvous, a winter festival in Anchorage that traces its roots to the area's fur-trapping days, said Trent Flagg, 36, whose mother was on the festival board.

The next year, Menard's wife, Linda, persuaded Palin to compete in the Miss Wasilla pageant. "It took a while of Linda's encouragement to get her jump in and say 'yes,' " Menard said. "She was still into more outdoor activities - hunting and fishing and athletics."

After winning the local contest, Palin was chosen runner-up in the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant. She ran for office for the first time in 1992 at age 28, when she won a seat on the Wasilla City Council, defeating a local telephone company worker, 530 to 310 votes, on a promise to bring "my progressive, competitive attitude" to government, according to a regional newspaper, the Frontiersman.

In the council, she spoke out against a push by the city police to shut Wasilla's bars at 2 a.m. instead of 4 a.m., to prevent drunken driving by patrons who came after Anchorage's bars closed at 2 a.m.

John Hartrick, a former councilor who supported the measure, said she he was surprised by Palin's opposition because she was then a member of the Wasilla Assembly of God, an evangelical church that preached abstinence from alcohol. "The Assembly of God was very much opposed to drinking, but yet Ms. Palin became the spokesman for the bar owners," Hartrick said. "I felt this was quite wrong because we weren't trying to shut the bars down; we would simply say if they could possibly go ahead and close two hours earlier it would be helpful and would prevent accidents."

The measure was defeated and, in 1996, Palin ousted the three-term mayor, and dismissed several department heads, including the police chief, who she felt was not supporting her agenda. The backlash spurred talk of a recall, but it quickly died down.

As mayor from 1996 to 2002, Palin slashed property tax rates by 75 percent and built roads and sewer and water lines that brought the big-box stores to Wasilla, said Dianne M. Keller, the current mayor. Keller credited Palin with helping Wasilla grow and draw 50,000 shoppers a day.

"She made it more of a community," said Nancy Wallace, co-owner of Chimo Guns. "It's no longer a little strip town that you can blow through in a heartbeat."

On the Wasilla Council, members knew Palin was aiming for higher office.

"Well, I knew she was a go-getter by the way she acted," said Pat Hjellen, 90, a former mayor who was on the council with Palin. She recalled Palin "trying to pump me for some information" about how to climb the political ladder.

In 2004, Palin was elected governor, after gaining prominence for challenging the state Republican Party chairman, whom she accused of doing political work while serving on a state oil and gas commission. As governor, her approval ratings soared, but few in Wasilla expected McCain to pick as his running mate the mother of five they still see shopping at Carr's or stopping by parties at the VFW.

Flagg, an explosives technician for an oil company, said he was confident Palin would rise to the occasion. "She could handle the job easily," he said. "She's got a real smart head on her shoulders and, honestly, she'd probably do better than what we're getting now."