A lifetime commitment.

• Author: Dalby, Ron
• Position: Entrepreneurs Walter and Vivian Teeland

Until they retired 25 years ago, Walter and Vivian Teeland owned the only store in Wasilla.

In 1923, President Warren G. Harding journeyed to Alaska to hammer in a gold spike marking completion of the Alaska Railroad. Very few Alaskans have Walter Teeland's perspective as a part of the crowd who watched the event near Nenana.

"Harding's first swing missed the spike and hit the rail," Walt said. "Boom - they must have heard it almost in Fairbanks."

At the time, Walt worked at Coghill's General Store in Nenana. He would go on to a long career as a small-town storekeeper.

Walter Teeland and Vivian, his wife of 63 years, still live in Wasilla, where for a quarter of a century they ran the only store in town, a combination grocery store, general store and hardware store known as Teeland's. Their 50 years in Wasilla have made them perhaps the most-respected and best-loved couple the town has ever produced.

But the years in Wasilla are only part of the story. Both have deep ties to the Alaska of yesteryear, the Alaska most of us know only as vignettes from history books.

Walt's father, John Teeland, hiked over the Chilkoot Trail from Skagway in 1898. By the time Wait was born in 1907, the family lived at Cleary Creek, a mining site north of Fairbanks.

Walt learned to talk while they were living in Nome. "My mother said my first word was 'beans,' and my second word was 'more beans.'"

In 1911, John built a raft at Tanana and floated his family down the Yukon River to Ruby, where they would live for 10 years. Walt, then 4, says his earliest memory is of stepping ashore in Ruby.

"In those days, we thought going to Fairbanks from Ruby was like going to New York," Walt said, reminiscing one day not long ago. Many of those memories cover things now taken for granted.

"I saw my first airplane in 1920 - the New York to Nome flight when they stopped in Ruby for gas," Walt said. "We cleared the brush off the sand bar in front of town for them to land. People came from all over to see them.

"I spotted them first way off, just tiny specks. But we weren't prepared for the noise. We'd seen airplanes in silent movies, but it never occurred to us that they were loud."

Vivian, born Outside, came to Alaska in 1917 with her father, Evan Jones, and her mother and sister. Her father, who started out working in the coal mines of Wales when he was 12, was lured to Alaska by a coal mining job. "He worked at the Daugherty and Eska coal mines," Vivian said. "We actually...