20 years ago

Fred Meyer Stores Inc. announced Monday it had penned an agreement to lease 3.5 acres in downtown Homer where the company intends to build a grocery store and adjacent liquor outlet totalling 45,000 square feet. The department store chain based in Portland, Ore., will now seek a conditional use permit from the city of Homer to build at the corner of Lake Street and the Homer Bypass on property owned by the Waddell family, next to Gold-Mine Gifts and Fine Jewelry and across Lake Street from McDonald’s. But that is within the city’s General Business District where buildings currently are limited to no more than 20,000 square feet by a city ordinance adopted in late July.

— From the issue of Sept. 25, 2003

30 years ago

To Port Graham village Chief Elenore McMullen, the ancient remains of 82 Native men, women and children excavated 60 years ago from Yukon Island and Cottonwood Creek weren’t just museum specimens. “Maybe some of those remains are tied to my family,” McMullen said. “I know our people live in these areas, camped in these areas. They were migrant people.” So the repatriation last week of bones excavated by archaeologist Frederica DeLaguna and stored for decades in a Pennsylvania museum was very important, McMullen said. The remains, which were returned under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, were reburied in two cedar coffins on Yukon Island.

— From the issue of Sept. 23, 1993