Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part story about Kenai’s Gwen Gere and her life among books. This week’s story introduces Gere and the famous family business in which she grew up. Next week, part two will focus on the rise and fall of that business, and what its existence meant to Gere and to Alaskans.
By Clark Fair
Photos courtesy of Riemann collection. This pre-Good Friday Earthquake photo shows the downtown store in the early 1960s. The name of the store at this time is The Cache.
Redoubt reporter
In The Bookstore at the Kenai Peninsula College’s Kenai River Campus, tucked away in an office behind the last row of textbooks, bookstore manager Gwen Gere sits, ordering, tabulating sales and expenditures, and planning. Although it might not be plain for the casual observer to see, Gere is hard at work at more than just a job she loves. Working with books is a job that is perhaps — especially given her family’s place in the history of Alaska literacy — even in her blood.
Gere is the second child of Russ and Doris Riemann, who came to Alaska in 1953 when Russ agreed to take over the managerial duties for a floundering Alaska News Agency, which was headquartered in Anchorage. In the late 1950s, the Riemanns parlayed their knowledge of the wholesale distribution of reading materials into a new retail establishment — The Book Cache — which would become Alaska’s preeminent bookselling business for the next three decades.
Among its many retail outlets, The Book Cache included popular and profitable stores in the Carrs Mall in Kenai and the Central Peninsula Mall in Soldotna. When the Riemanns sold the business in the late 1980s, The Book Cache chain comprised 17 outlets, including two in Maui, Hawaii.
This image went out over the AP wire after the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake. The photo apparently quelled some of the fears that Anchorage was on fire following the quake.
Gere was 4 years old when her family made the move to Alaska from Bellingham, Wash. Later that same year, she and her sisters began joining their father on Saturdays at the news agency — the wholesale clearinghouse for all reading materials in Southcentral and beyond — and they were put to work.
“Let’s say we’re doing magazine distributions,” Gere said. “We have 10,000 copies of Reader’s Digest. You have to figure out where they’re going to go — which store gets how many — so at the time — no computers — you had this giant sheet that said, ‘Hewitt’s Drug, two Reader’s Digest, eight Time Magazine, 14 whatever.’ That was the pull-sheet that they would use to go and pull the magazines, wrap them, and send them out.
“My sisters and I were latchkey sort of children because our parents were running a business, so we would go in with my dad, and he would say, ‘Hey, how about adding all these figures up?’ So we’d sit there (at an adding machine) — which I can 10-key like a fiend — and add up all those figures to make sure they matched.”
It wasn’t simply all work and no play for the girls. Russ Riemann also treated his daughters to a plentiful supply of comic books.
Gere, however, didn’t mind the work. Her favorite job in her early years at the agency involved opening the old canvas mail sacks. “That’s when I was probably 7 or 8,” she said. “I used to love that. I don’t know why. It was the smell, or dumping them out, or whatever.
“And I remember on my birthday one time, my dad’s like, ‘Let’s go in, and you can empty mail sacks for your birthday.’ And I pulled the mail sacks over, and there was a (brand-new) bicycle. I was more excited about the mail sacks. I was like, ‘Whatever,’ and just kept doing the mail.”
Roy and Doris Riemann met on Roy’s first day as hospital administrator at Camp Swift, Texas, where Doris 
was a physical therapist. They were married on April 1, 1945, and in the early 1950s they found themselves in Washington state, with three young daughters and Russ searching for regular employment.
Working as a wholesale book distributor was nowhere near the top of his list of preferred jobs, but when the opportunity arose he decided to check it out. He flew to Anchorage to assess the job and then called home to Doris. According to Gere, he said, “Sell the house. Pack the kids up. Come on up.”
Two of the most important clients for the Alaska News Agency were the Anchorage military bases — Elmendorf and Fort Richardson — and behind Russ Riemann’s solid management, the distributor quickly turned around its sour fortunes.
Then in about 1958, the Riemanns began considering retail. Esther Tout had a small bookstore inside the Fifth Avenue building that housed Jonas Brothers Taxidermy and Furrier, and they joined forces with her in her 15-by-25-foot space.
During the first three months of business, according to an article in an Aug. 3, 1984, issue of Publishers Weekly magazine, The Book Cache grossed $2,300. In the following year, the store grossed $31,000 — nearly $230,000 in today’s money.
In the early 1960s, The Book Cache moved into the location for which it would become best known — 436
James Huntington chats during an autograph session for his new book, “On the Edge of Nowhere,” at the downtown Book Cache in 1969 or early 1970.
Fifth Ave., between Alaska State Bank and the J.C. Penney building.
At first, the main sign on the front of the store read “The Cache,” suitable because inside were several businesses — a “cache” of them, one might say.
Filling the long left wall and a portion of the back end of the rectangular space was The Book Cache. Also in the back left corner was the Stamp and Coin Cache. Up front and center was a floral and gift shop called Barb’s Cache and Carry, and along the right wall and into the right back corner were a lunch counter, a small bar and a cigarette machine — all part of Cache Dining and Cocktails.
The dining and cocktails business became the first casualty. According to Gere, the owners ran into tax problems and were asked to leave. For a while, then, that section of the store was walled off.
On March 27, 1964, The Cache endured the magnitude-9.2 Good Friday Earthquake. In the Publishers Weekly article, Doris Riemann recalled hanging onto two display racks on rollers, “They rolled while books flew off shelves and the display windows (along the street) shattered. A cardboard Easter bunny in the window was impaled on glass shards, and the entire downtown area was in a shambles.”
Just up the street from The Cache, huge slabs from the front of the Penney’s building had fallen into the street. One of the slabs had crushed a sedan parked near the sidewalk and had killed the occupant. All over Southcentral, communication with the Lower 48 had been severed.
Despite the damage and the uncertainty, however, the Riemanns were one of the first businesses downtown to re-open.
“We had to — we had to have something to do,” said Doris. “And The Bookstore was a meeting area. People stopped by to ask directions, and we became sort of an information center for the town.”
Eventually at the Fifth Avenue location, only The Bookstore and the stamp and coin business remained. The
Photo by Clark Fair, for the Redoubt Reporter. Gwen Gere’s life still includes books. She’s the manager of the bookstore at Kenai Peninsula College.
large sign indicating the home of The Cache was replaced with an equally large Book Cache sign in bright yellow, a color that became identified with the business throughout its history.
Gere, meanwhile, continued to work for the family business, primarily for the Alaska News Agency. After graduating from West High School in 1967, she attended college in Colorado for a year and then returned to Alaska to complete her education. She enrolled in Alaska Methodist University and worked for both the news agency and The Bookstore.
During the year she was out of state, the number of Book Cache stores doubled. As the state of Alaska experienced a booming economy and a burgeoning population, the serious expansion of The Book Cache franchise began in earnest. And Gere’s life among books continued.
