Hucka Doobie was chatting to pass the time. “You know you’re colored about the same as a chicken, Baker Bloch. Maybe you should think of becoming a chicken man yourself. By that I mean opening up a restaurant, perhaps a chain. Maybe you should begin to think up a name. Blochbuster Chicken? You could even steal some signs from that old, defunct VHS tape renting outfit, the one that went belly up.”
But Baker Bloch was still thinking about his father instead of chicken, although the 2 will always be connected now in his mind. Banished back to Regaltown. Could this possibly be the end of the Horns of Hatton tale already?
Hucka Doobie studied his worried face. “Aah, still thinking about dear old pops. He’ll be fine. Kevin A. too — Kevin Orchardsity, all three of hisselves. Come on; cheer up. The Queen’s story can continue on without the King and his tomb, without Space Ghost’s trailer.”
“But the parcel was called ‘*Ghost* land.’ Fate.” Baker Bloch sighed. “I just feel — something will always been missing here.”
“And then Cpt. Americus accidentally jumping in the watermelon tub with the *real* Queen (!) Awkard indeed! But I don’t think the Queen was present at the time. By that I mean she was AWOL.”
“AFK,” corrected Baker Bloch.
“Um, like the chicken, then.”
Baker Bloch expressed confusion, then realized: “Oh, you’re thinking about KFC. No, it’s like the former president. AFK. They’re talking about renaming the whole of Bay City after him.”
“JFK, then. The (former) president, I mean,” responded Hucka Doobie. “John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”
“Yes, you’re right — that’s it.”
“Well there you go. Something else to think about. Another Ghost.”
“Everybody in the country laughed about it,” [Carolyn *Kennedy* Crusey] said. “There was no city out there.”
Who voted Mor the mayor? No one, she said.
“That was just purely for something to put in the paper,” she said.
How did it change from Bay City to JFK City?
It was shortly after the assassination, she recalled. Across the country, people were renaming all kinds of things after the late president. Plus there was another guy out there at the time named Kennedy, (no relation to her or JFK) who came up with the idea, she said.
I wondered out loud if they’d hatched the plan while drinking at the bar. It wouldn’t be the first piece of Alaska legislation born that way. Maybe that was how Mor was “elected.” Maybe they dreamed up the dome city, too.
“We never did find out what happened,” she said
Mor eventually moved to Anchorage and started spelling his name with a second “o” and an “e,” she said. She couldn’t remember why.
The last newspaper clipping to mention the city was a 1973 story about Alaska ghost towns. It called Bay City “an alleged village” with a population of 0 in the 1970 census, that might have been renamed to “The City of Kennedy” after the late president.
“But,” the article said, “there’s nobody left to verify it.”
Sunklands 