Makings of landmark restaurant.

• Author: Oswald, Lori Jo
• Position: Lucky Wishbone Restaurant in Anchorage, Alaska

At the Lucky Wishbone in downtown Anchorage, the noonday chatter is almost as alluring as the food.

If you sit at counter B at the Lucky Wishbone Restaurant in downtown Anchorage at noon weekdays, you too can join the daily seminar.

Perhaps the topic is golf, or fishing, or Clinton, or the B-2 Bomber.

Some of these debaters, mostly pilots, have been solving the world's problems at counter B for 20 years. And almost always you will hear the restaurant's co-owner, George Brown, leading the repartee while wife and co-owner Peggy Brown scurries about refilling coffee and greeting customers in the always long, lunchtime line.

The Lucky Wishbone Restaurant opened for business in 1955, then mainly as a carry-out chicken and hamburger establishment with just five tables and a counter inside. Anchorage residents have been ordering jumbo burgers and pan-fried chicken (and now some two dozen standard lunch and dinner menu selections) from this 5th Avenue icon ever since.

"We were trying to establish a carryout chicken and hamburger place similar to one I'd seen in Tucson, which had the same name," says George. "We had tried to start a competing business in Tucson, but it did not do well. We went out of business. So we left and came to Anchorage."

That was 1951. The young family, two friends, a large black lab, and all their belongings headed up the bumpy, muddy Alcan Highway in search of new business opportunities and adventure. Before opening the Wishbone, George worked as a concrete foreman at Elmendorf and Fort Richardson, as well as on the Ship Creek Dam. The couple also managed a trailer park, and Peggy worked in her brother and sister-in-law's restaurant, the Mt. View A&W Drive-in.

It wasn't until several years after their arrival that Peggy, George and short-term partner Sven Jonassen purchased four lots at the corner of 5th and Ingra for $30,000 by borrowing money and requesting a one-year delayed balloon payment from the seller. They put an additional $15,000 into the business.

"At that time, many people thought 5th Avenue was out of town quite a ways - which it was," George says. But somehow, the location worked. Patrons of the Anchorage landmark include those living and working in downtown

Anchorage, police officers patrolling the area, pilots landing at nearby Merrill Field, and tourists visiting Anchorage.

The restaurant business came naturally to George and Peggy. As a teenager, George worked in a neighborhood diner in Wisconsin. The...