Julia Scully
Outside Passage:
A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood
(New York: Random House, 1998)
Julia Scully was born in 1929 in Seattle. She now lives in Manhattan. She was the second daughter of her parents. She attended Nome High School, graduated from Stanford College, and went to New York to work in the magazine business. She was editor of Modern Photography for twenty years. Then she wrote about her childhood in Outside Passage: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood.
Her life was very hard for a child to handle. Her parents moved around a lot, never in one place for long. Julia never felt as if she had a home while growing up, a place to put down roots. Julia had to deal with feelings of abandonment from both her parents.
Her parents ran many businesses that never took hold in San Francisco. When Julia was eight, it was right in the middle of the Great Depression. She and her sister found their father's body; he had committed suicide, leaving the family broke and with little hope. Two years after that her mother placed Julia and her sister in the Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum, called Homewood Terrace. While her children were in the orphanage, Julia's mother went off to Alaska to look for a business to run. Julia became very close to her big sister. In 1940 her mother put her and her sister in the Seattle Children's Home for three months while preparing to bring them to Alaska.
When Julia was eleven and her sister was thirteen, and after almost two and half years in foster care, they arrived in Nome. Her mother ran a roadhouse in an outpost a few miles from Nome. Winters were too bad to run the roadhouse so they moved back and forth between the outpost and Nome. Julia and her family did this for almost two years, until the Second World War forced the roadhouse to close down and they moved to Nome for good. When Julia was thirteen she had her first love with a nineteen-year-old soldier. After a few months of joy her world went back to normal; he was shipped out of Alaska. Julia wrote, "he is gone and I still do every thing I always did."1
At the age of fourteen, Julia moved again to Fairbanks with her family. Julia was uprooted again simply because her mother said that there were better opportunities in Fairbanks. After about six months in Fairbanks their mother left to go back to Nome, once again leaving Julia and her sister without a parent. Both girls got jobs and tried to have a normal life without their mother. Julia dealt with her abandonment issues by joining the USO club to dance with the soldiers in Fairbanks. Seven months later their mother sent for them to rejoin her in Nome. Their mother did not give them any reason for her actions, nor did either girl ask.
The Depression ended and again within a few months, Julia and her family moved again. This time, they went back to San Francisco and a two bedroom apartment with little furniture. Life in San Francisco ended soon also; they moved back to Nome for the last time before Julia left for college.
By the time Julia was fifteen or sixteen, she and her sister were not close any more because the sister worked all day and went to night school. Then her sister married and had a child before Julia finished high school. Julia's adolescence was filled with pockets of solitude due to the fact that she moved around so much. She had a friend her own age just once in her life; this was before she moved to Fairbanks and she lost connect with her. She never mentioned a girlfriend or any close friend again in the book. Her childhood was full with many things that she did not understand and had no power over, along with many questions she never asked or answers.
Notes:
1 Julia Scully, Outside Passage: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood (Random House, New York, 1998), p. 160
Further Readings:
Peter Miller and Julia Scully, Disfarmer: The Heber Springs Portraits, 1939-1946 (The Group, inc.)
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