My family didn't have many gadgets that other families did when I was growing up, so family videos were extremely rare. But my mom and dad were creative when it came to finding ways to document their kids in the late '80s early '90s, usually by borrowing other people's cameras. In 1989, my dad had a connection with someone at Channel 2 News, in Anchorage, Alaska. So when we were visiting his parents, my three siblings and I were able to pretend we were news anchors for a day.
I've been digitizing many of these memories from VHS and Hi8 tapes for my family. Many of these tapes are 20-35 years old, so there are a lot of artifacts and quality issues, but I kind of like that look. I've also been having fun adding silly edits to them for fun, like the video above of my older sister Andy talking about Arby's.
For those of you who don't know, Fairbanksans (especially college-aged students) would travel over 300 miles to Wasilla to get Arby's and then turn around and drive back to Fairbanks. They'd usually take other people's orders, so it was a fun community activity, and just another reason to go on a road trip when you didn't have anything better to do. This Wasilla Arby's provided a service called the Fairbanks wrap, where they would keep all of the ingredients separate so the customer could put their sandwiches together when they got back home.
So, as you can see, Arby's was a hot commodity until 2022, when an Arby's finally opened off of Mehar Ave in Fairbanks. In the video above, my sister pretends to be a news anchor and explains why Arby 's needs to open a restaurant in Fairbanks.
