Tom & Mary's Polar Bear Café, Kodiak Alaska 1945
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Tom and Mary's Polar Bear Cafe was a popular local restaurant and gathering place operated by Tom and Mary Gallagher in downtown Kodiak, Alaska. This menu is dated 1945.
The cafe served residents, fishermen, and service members. Tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel were stationed across Alaska during the final months of World War II and many servicemen and women would have dined here.
Major units included the Eleventh Air Force, troops at Elmendorf Field, Ladd Field (now Fort Wainwright), and personnel assigned to Aleutian Island bases like Shemya and Attu.
Although it is called the Polar Bear Café, we’ve found out that there are no polar bears in Kodiak. Kodiak Island is home exclusively to the Kodiak brown bear, a unique and massive subspecies of the brown bear. Polar bears in Alaska live much further north in areas with sea ice.
Male Kodiak bears weigh 600 to 1,400 pounds, stand up to 5 feet on all fours, and reach nearly 10 feet when standing upright.
They match Polar Bears as the largest bears on Earth, much larger than mainland grizzly bears.
The Café was ultimately destroyed by the tsunamis that followed the catastrophic 1964 Alaska earthquake, which lasted for four minutes and 38 seconds and was a 9.2-9.3magnitude megathrust earthquake. It remains the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Northern America.
The earthquake generated tsunamis along the entire south-central coast of Alaska but was most damaging along the shores of the Kodiak group of islands and the Kenai Peninsula. The wave action lasted for about 11 hours after the earthquake, and many communities were inundated by 7ft to 10ft waves over periods lasting from from 30 to 90 minutes.
The regional Alaska Tsunami Warning Center was established in 1967 as a direct result of this earthquake to provide efficient tsunami warnings to the coastal areas of Alaska.
Each order includes a print of the interior menu.
All printed in USA.
