And so I’d like you to come with me back to the summer of 1970, ‘way up north of Fairbanks, Alaska, to what was once the thriving gold mining village of Chicken, Alaska. My column in the Anchorage Daily News … brace yourself … was called “Slim’s Column.” So I arrived in Chicken, Alaska, only to find I’d nearly doubled the local population. In an electrically lighted outhouse in Chicken, Alaska. Chicken, Alaska, got its name because none of the miners there knew how to spell ptarmigan.