Alaska visit, Dutch wedding -- and life goes on

A little over one year ago a planned ALASKAN CRUISE for my wife, Wendy, and I was canceled when the ship ran aground two days before our planned departure.

Celebrity Cruise lines refunded our money AND offered us a free cruise to any of its cruise destinations within one year.

Wendy rebooked Alaska along with Victoria and Vancouver, B.C., and local travel agent Mark Hill got a five-day land cruise included at no additional charge.

The longest time away from Cape Girardeau in my lifetime (only matched by 17 days in Japan when son GARY was married in 1987) had me out of touch with current events.

Alaska was great! The Butchart Gardens and the atmosphere made VICTORIA my favorite city.

A seaplane flight, helicopter glacier tour and a twin-engine Navajo flight to an altitude of 21,000 feet to circle and explore Mt. McKINLEY (Denali to some) excited my aviation interests. Alaska has more airplanes and pilots than any state, and the Fairbanks airport has four runways: normal 12,000- and 4,000-foot parallel runways plus ponds for pontoon water landings and a grass strip for ski landings. Incidentally RUST'S FLYING SERVICE (no relationship) is the largest charter service in Anchorage and western Alaska.

Many of the people in Alaska are friendly Indians (First Nation People to the politically correct ) who focus on the lifestyle that 23 hours of daylight (in July) or 23 hours of night in winter permit.

The cruise ship was great. The side excursions for fishing, whale watching, salmon fisheries, glacier tours, kayaking, whitewater rafting, gold panning, museums, Iditarod husky dog ranches and shopping offered a variety to satisfy most any age group.

If you want to experience some of the true flavor of ALASKA ... book it soon. Numerous cruise ships and tour buses are filling the demand and may eventually overwhelm this beautiful state's naturalness ... although nothing can compare with its beautiful mountains, glaciers and the stunning inland passage.

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We did get back to Cape for five days before leaving for MAASTRICHT, Netherlands, where our son JON and his fiancee (now wife) VICTORIA were married Aug. 9. It was a storybook wedding too perfect for my limited vocabulary to describe. A wonderful experience for all involved.

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So now ... I'm back! Some friends, employees and relatives have died, been diagnosed with cancer or had children born. Others have married. Life goes on ... as it has for centuries. This especially is called to your attention when you have recently toured the historic St. Peters Mines in Europe, the thousand-year-old architecture, the rebuilt Alaskan cities after the 1964 earthquake (9.2 on the Richter scale -- the New Madrid earthquake was 8.4) leveled some areas, and read the history of the land and people. Time is, was and shall be ... and our influence is less than we might believe.

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A positive, motivating, informative book I read during my travels is "REAGAN IN HIS OWN HAND." The book is devoted to the hundreds of policy essays that Ronald Reagan wrote from 1975 to 1979 on a yellow legal pad for his radio programs. I commend the book to anyone who wants to know more about Reagan and how his ideas and thoughts were formulated before he became president. Example:

"America's Strength, December 22, 1976 -- 'Every once in a while it's important that we look at the balance sheet so we'll know what it is we're trying to save. ...

'I know that I've used these broadcasts to criticize those who have lost faith in our system, those who would make fundamental changes on the premise that what we've done in the past is all wrong and those (increasing in number) who think we are over the hill & headed for the dustbin of history.

'Therefore it is important every once in a while to remind ourselves of our accomplishments lest we let someone talk us into throwing out the baby with the bath water. I intend to go on talking about our problems because in the main they are problems that truly need solving. I'm also going to go on resisting those who would have us believe the problems are proof that our system isn't working. Put another way, it's time we recognized the system has never let us down -- we've let the system down now & then because we're only human.

'Compared to the world at large we are politically stable. A few years ago when we had the unprecedented resignation of a president there were no knots of people gathered on street corners, no boarding up of storefronts, no people marching in the streets nor screaming sirens heralding the round up of Cabinet officers and officials. Americans just went about their business, took in a ball game and watched their favorite TV shows. And that's why foreign money invested in America has increased about 50 percent in the last 5 yrs.

'Last year in spite of govt. confiscating our earnings at an unprecedented rate for a lot of unproductive social reforms we managed to raise $217 Bil. to finance new & existing private enterprise projects.

'Our productivity is phenomenal. We raise 37 percent more wheat per acre than the world average. We are 6 percent of the world's population on only 7 percent of the world's land but we produce almost half the world's corn, 2/3 of the soy beans, 1/3 or more of the worlds paper, electrical power, college graduates and almost 1/3 of the farm machinery. Just to round it off we make more than 2/3 of the computers & 80 percent of all the passenger aircraft.

'We lead the world in advanced technology, in telecommunications, drilling and mining equipment, medical science & agri-science.

'All of this is because our system freed the individual genius of man. Released him to fly as high and as far as his own talent and energy would take him. We allocate resources not by govt. decision but by the mil's. of decisions customers make when they go into the mkt. place to buy. If something seems too high priced we buy something else. Thus resources are steered toward those things the people want most at the price they are willing to pay. It may not be a perfect system but it's better than any other that's ever been tried.

'This is RR -- Thanks for listening.'"

Gary Rust is chairman of Rust Communications.