They Await Belongings Stranded in Real Cold Storage

Often when 2 1/2-year-old Joel Douglas is asked about one of his misplaced possessions, his mother says, the boy’s catchall answer is: “It’s on the van.”

For the Douglas family, the van has become a code word for the odyssey of their worldly possessions, now locked up in a warehouse in Anchorage, Alaska.

As a result, Robin Douglas, 32, and her husband Brian, 28, along with their three children, sleep on mattresses on the floor of their rented home in Westminster, using suitcases for night stands. They make do with whatever clothing they have bought or borrowed in recent months. One article of clothing Robin Douglas has managed to hold onto is a T-shirt that reads “If You Don’t Think Hell Freezes Over, You’ve Never Been To Alaska.”

The shirt, like the elusive moving van, is emblematic of an Alaskan adventure that turned into a cautionary tale for those who believe the Alaska Highway is the road to Easy Street.

Headed North for New Life

Three years ago, the Douglas family, then numbering four, headed north for a new life. Robin had what she thought was a lucrative job offer in the retail carpet business in Anchorage, and Brian, a sound engineer, was assured by local boosters that there would be work for him as well.

But almost from the beginning, Robin said, “we were not terribly happy.” Her job turned out to be less than promised, and Brian, working for a network television affiliate, “had to take a terrible cut in pay and a terrible cut in the quality of the work that was expected.” They were also homesick, she said. “Westminster is home, and Anchorage has a lot of problems we couldn’t get along with.” Despite the arrival of Joel, their third child, the family’s discontent with life in Alaska grew, and within a year they began making plans to return to California, trying “to scrape up the cash to get home.” The biggest expense, Robin found, was moving their furniture and household goods back to Westminster.

Ad for Inexpensive Cartage

“We had been researching ways to move our stuff,” she said, and then they saw a newspaper ad offering to transport goods at rates that undercut not only commercial movers, but even the cost of renting a van and moving it on their own.

The ad was placed by Raymond and Wanda Hurst, themselves immigrants to Alaska from Asheville, N.C. Like the Douglases, the Hursts had gone to Alaska to make more money. Raymond, 39, first went in the late 1970s for a high-paying job as a telephone installer in the North Slope oil fields, and settled permanently in Anchorage in 1980.

He started the moving company, Hurst said, as “an extra business” that he could run while holding onto his job in the oil fields. He invested between $30,000 and $40,000 in the company, purchasing four trucks and trailers, and advertising at rates he thought would be competitive. His wife, who also works full time, helped run the company.

At least 15 other individuals and families--many, like the Douglases, strapped for cash and disenchanted with the Alaskan dream--signed contracts with Hurst Enterprises in the spring of 1985 and paid the full fee up front. Some were so hard up that they had to pay the Hursts with pieces of furniture or televisions. Most, also like the Douglases, had no insurance.

Not at Top of List

“We were so poor we couldn’t pay attention to insurance,” Robin Douglas said. “It wasn’t at the top of our list.” The Hursts, she said, “were just as sweet as they could be.”

The movers were also inexperienced, never having been in the transport business before. And they were unlucky, as well. Raymond Hurst believed, erroneously, that because of deregulation he was not required to get certification from the Interstate Commerce Commission. He had trouble with his trucks and trouble with his employees, and within six months he was out of business.

“I got ‘took’ a lot,” Hurst said. In addition, “a lot of unforeseen expenses came up on the highway.”

By last fall, more than a dozen customers, including the Douglases, had returned to the “Lower 48” and were waiting for their belongings to arrive. Hurst kept promising that the goods would soon be on their way.

“I talked to him three or four weeks before Christmas, and he said he would do his best to get our stuff by Christmas,” Robin Douglas said. “I think he only said that because I was upset. The children don’t understand. They don’t have their toys, their beds.”

Cries at Night

“I have cried at night thinking about these people’s stuff,” Hurst said. “I know how they feel.”

A subsequent call by Douglas to Hurst brought even grimmer news. “He finally said he didn’t have the ability to move the goods. He said he lost everything he owned in this. I asked him if he had a bed to sleep in. He said ‘yes,’ and I said that was more than we had and our children had.”

As winter set in, some of the Hursts’ other customers around the country were in dire straits. Among them:

- Fern Felts, 52, a widow who left Anchorage after her husband died and found herself in Junction City, Kan., without winter clothing or her upholsterer’s tools. Now studying interior design at Kansas State University, Felts hired a lawyer to help her get her possessions back, but she cannot afford a telephone and has had to turn to the Salvation Army.

- Mary and Ronald Kanouse, 38, who returned to Tucson, Ariz., when Ronald lost his job as a diesel mechanic in Anchorage. Now they, too, are without their winter jackets, and Ronald Kanouse is in jeopardy of losing his job now because his tools are also in Anchorage.

Christmas was especially hard on some. Kanouse was without her family Christmas tree, doilies and crocheted work given to her by her late mother, as well as a picture of a guardian angel dating back to 1864. Robin Douglas had to do without the antique dolls brought from Yugoslavia by her grandmother.

‘Point of Desperation’

“We’re at the point of desperation,” Robin Douglas said. “There are things on the truck that can’t be replaced,” such as photograph albums that recorded the early months of each of her children. “A couch can be replaced.” Douglas is working full time and her husband is working part time. So far, Robin said, they have spent more than $100 on phone calls to Alaska.

“If it wasn’t for my husband’s family living here, my kids would still be sleeping on the floor,” she said.

There may soon be some good news for Douglas and the others, whose travails captured the attention of both Anchorage newspapers.

Sheridan Strickland, an assistant attorney general with the state’s consumer protection agency, has worked out a consent agreement with the Hursts under which Raymond Hurst will pay $2,000 every six weeks for the next 76 weeks. Under the schedule, all the goods now in storage will be shipped to their proper owners in less than a year. The five customers who already paid Pacific to have their goods moved should have refunds within 18 months.

‘Compelling’ Case

Hurst said Wednesday that he expected to sign the agreement in the next few days and to make the first $2,000 payment in the next few weeks. If and when any of his trucks are sold, Hurst said, the payment schedule may be accelerated.

Once the decree has been signed and filed with a local judge--tentatively scheduled for Jan. 13, Strickland said, “I don’t think there’s going to be a big bottleneck.

“This case is particularly compelling. Most of these people are too poor to afford to pay (any more) to have their stuff moved, and they certainly don’t have enough money to hire an attorney.”

Strickland said that “there’s been a great amount of understanding” by all parties in working out a settlement. “Pacific Movers has been quite good,” she said, accepting for storage all of Hurst Enterprises’ goods and agreeing to ship the goods at a bulk rate. Raymond Hurst “probably could’ve protected his wages by declaring bankruptcy. It’s to our advantage that he hasn’t. We’re just hoping that this works out.”

Never Considered Bankruptcy

Hurst said he never seriously considered bankruptcy because “you don’t treat people that way. I didn’t go into business to be dishonest or unfair.” The family will be under a financial strain for the repayment period, he said.

There are no plans, Strickland said, for criminal prosecution of Raymond Hurst. In “the ultimate and true horrible scam,” she said, the mover would have taken the money and the goods, sold the goods and fled the state.

“He really did not have any idea of what it took to run an interstate moving company,” she said. “He totally underestimated what it would take. His problems were just lack of good business sense.”

In Alaska, she said, “We have a very high rate of businesses that start up and fail. The idea is: ‘Let’s go to the frontier and start up a new business.’ So they need money up front. Consumers are giving money up front to a business that might not be there very long.”

But Hurst disagreed that his problems were unique to Alaska. “If it would have been in another state it might have been the same thing,” he said.

‘Cold, Gray and Dark’

“I believe they were really honest people,” Robin Douglas said of the Hursts. Raymond Hurst, she said, “was a good old boy. I really believe he is hurting for all the trouble he has caused people. Maybe I’m being naive.”

“People have a misconception that the streets are paved with gold up here,” said Strickland, a legacy of the boom times when the Alaska Pipeline was being built. “That’s not so. . . . Don’t come up here thinking that your dreams are going to be fulfilled.”

Because when the dreams aren’t fulfilled, Strickland said, “the winter sets in, and it gets gray, cold and dark up here.”

United Press International contributed information for this story.