![]() ![]() ![]() It wasn’t simply all work and no play for the girls. “My sisters and I were latchkey sort of children because our parents were running a business, so we would go in with my dad, and he would say, ‘Hey, how about adding all these figures up?’ So we’d sit there (at an adding machine) - which I can 10-key like a fiend - and add up all those figures to make sure they matched.” You have to figure out where they’re going to go - which store gets how many - so at the time - no computers - you had this giant sheet that said, ‘Hewitt’s Drug, two Reader’s Digest, eight Time Magazine, 14 whatever.’ That was the pull-sheet that they would use to go and pull the magazines, wrap them, and send them out. “We have 10,000 copies of Reader’s Digest. “Let’s say we’re doing magazine distributions,” Gere said. Later that same year, she and her sisters began joining their father on Saturdays at the news agency - the wholesale clearinghouse for all reading materials in Southcentral and beyond - and they were put to work. Gere was 4 years old when her family made the move to Alaska from Bellingham, Wash. The photo apparently quelled some of the fears that Anchorage was on fire following the quake. This image went out over the AP wire after the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake. When the Riemanns sold the business in the late 1980s, The Book Cache chain comprised 17 outlets, including two in Maui, Hawaii. In the late 1950s, the Riemanns parlayed their knowledge of the wholesale distribution of reading materials into a new retail establishment - The Book Cache - which would become Alaska’s preeminent bookselling business for the next three decades.Īmong its many retail outlets, The Book Cache included popular and profitable stores in the Carrs Mall in Kenai and the Central Peninsula Mall in Soldotna. Gere is the second child of Russ and Doris Riemann, who came to Alaska in 1953 when Russ agreed to take over the managerial duties for a floundering Alaska News Agency, which was headquartered in Anchorage. Working with books is a job that is perhaps - especially given her family’s place in the history of Alaska literacy - even in her blood. Although it might not be plain for the casual observer to see, Gere is hard at work at more than just a job she loves. In The Bookstore at the Kenai Peninsula College’s Kenai River Campus, tucked away in an office behind the last row of textbooks, bookstore manager Gwen Gere sits, ordering, tabulating sales and expenditures, and planning. The name of the store at this time is The Cache. This pre-Good Friday Earthquake photo shows the downtown store in the early 1960s.
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