By Donald H. Harrison
SKAGWAY, Alaska – Carlin “Buckwheat” Donahue bought and sold oil leases in Colorado, acted in Skagway’s gold-days pageant, and tended bar, before he found his Princess. “Thanks to them, I’ve had a wonderful career,” he boomed.
Princess Cruises has been bringing passengers to Skagway since the 1980s, and holds the distinction of being the port’s longest continuous customer, as well as its biggest. In the most recent season, Princess disembarked 275,000 passengers, compared to 240,000 brought to this port by its next closest competitor.
Back in the 1980s, while working as a bartender, the burly Donahue made contact with a tour scout for Princess Cruises, and suggested that hiking in the backwoods might be just the thing for “the Love Boat’s” passengers. He took the agent with him on a hike, and, impressed, the agent said the tour would be listed in the following year’s book of excursion options.
“So I went from just being a bartender here in town to having a hiking company which in three year’s time had 12 employees in the summer, and three year-round people, and then we expanded into canoeing, and then started doing multi-day trips into the Yukon Territory,” Donahue recalled. “It was all because of the cruise lines; all because of Princess.”
If Princess hadn’t been more savvy than Donahue, he would not have survived in the business, the entrepreneur admitted. He told the cruise line how much money he wanted to be paid per passenger, and after studying his proposal, the cruise line company actually told him that he should charge even more per passenger.
“We don’t want you to go out of business after the first year,” they explained.
From hiking, his company expanded into canoeing, and multiple-day stays in the Yukon territory, and even built a cabin near a remote section of the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad line to serve as a base camp for hikers and campers who really wanted to experience the back country.
Those entrepreneurial days are over for Donahue now; he sold his company and now serves as the director of Skagway’s visitors bureau, located in a much photographed, driftwood covered building. But, he says, the spirit of entrepreneurship is very much alive in his town, which has a year-round population of 850 and more than double that number of residents during the “season” of June through October.
The year after Donahue started his hiking business, another hiking company had risen to compete with him, while others were offering bike trips and raftingtours. There is something about Alaska that attracts people with the old-fashioned, American, can-do, spirit, Donahue says, but that doesn’t mean that every idea proposed by a Skagway resident makes a lot of sense.
There was the time that a company proposed sled dog mushing down Skagway’s main thoroughfare, which, perhaps with tongue in cheek, is named “Broadway.” The trouble with the idea was that the dogs and their sled passengers would have had to navigate through motorized traffic, including buses. Nope, there were no takers for that idea.
Later, another company began offering dog mushing in the outback, and that has proven a very popular tour, said Donahue. So, too, has zip-lining.
I asked Donahue how he came to be known as “Buckwheat.” Wasn’t that the name of a character in the old black-and-white “Our Gang” comedies?
Yes, he responded, and like him in his childhood, Buckwheat in the comedy series was the one who was different. He was African-American. Carlin Donahue, on the other hand, was big, but ungainly.
Some of the kids he grew up with started calling him “Buckwheat” and, though it wasn’t meant kindly, Donahue decided to turn the nickname into a badge of honor — similar, perhaps, to the way that Mexican-Americans transformed “Chicano” and gays “queer” into names in which they take pride.
What attracted Donahue to Alaska was “it’s sense of confidence.”
“You know how we grew up with our parents saying things like, ‘This is America, if you want to you can grow up to be president’? Well, when I got to Skagway, I met people who had that kind of confidence,” Donahue replied. “It never occurred to me that I couldn’t be president if I wanted to be. So I met people who had that kind of self-confidence, that I didn’t see down south in Denver. It just wasn’t a prevalent theme; there were a lot of people giving up.
“And then you look at the land , you look at a mountain here, and everywhere you look, there is wilderness–you’ve got to like it,” he added. “So, I guess it was the land, and the people that I met, the confidence. I’ve been here 29 years and I acknowledge how lucky I am to live in this town.”
During seven months of the year, when cruise ships are sailing in warmer climes, the town tends to recuperate from the hectic tourist season.
“If you want, you can work hard in five months to survive 12 and still keep benefits, and there aren’t many communities that can say that,” Donahue says. “Eighty five percent of all the visitors to Skagway get off the cruise ships; 15 percent come by other means, including RV’s – because, unlike Juneau, we are connected to the Alaska Highway which is connected to the North American road system — so we are set that way.”
Whereas everyone who visits Juneau has to come either by boat or plane, “people can get here by road.” Skagway is not all locked up, and “we like keeping all the politicians in Juneau (the state capital), where they can’t get out!”
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com US Canada West 16