“I remember being chased and nipped at several times,” he said in an interview last week. “But I don't think I ever had to go to the doctor to have any holes filled.”

Yet the incident — which forced two of the children to seek medical treatment —made headlines in the two local papers.

“It is doubtful that any parent who has observed the number of dogs daily assembled on the school grounds was surprised at Monday's episode,” said a Jan. 12, 1962, article in the Eagle. A Jan. 10, 1962, story in the Knik Arm Courier noted, “(Principal Ed) Ryan has long deplored the number of dogs which hang around the Eagle River School. He stated that there are usually from 15 to 20 dogs on the premises at all times.”

Mauldin does recall a multitude of dogs at the school (which is now Eagle River Elementary) and around the outskirts of town.

“The dogs packed up and roamed and caused problems,” he said. “They had a lot of fights amongst themselves.”

While both newspaper articles suggested that the dogs loitering on the playground were pets that easily could be kept at home, Mauldin said the issue wasn't so straightforward.

“A lot of times dogs had pups out in the woods away from the family home,” he said. “People would feed them but they never really belonged to anybody.”

Besides, even bona fide pets were allowed to wander back then, Mauldin said, making the atmosphere ripe for trouble.

“Nobody had dog runs or yards,” he said. “Everybody's yard was the back 40.”

Nanette Belk, who lived by Fire Lake at the time, agreed.

“I remember my dad letting our beagles out at night,” she said. “They used to run and hunt rabbits out where Powder Ridge is now. There was nothing back there.”

The roaming dogs tangled with moose, too.

“There was a bigger population of moose in those days, and the young ones were taken down by the dogs,” Mauldin said. “That made the moose around our community kind of jumpy.”

Mauldin recalled walking home from friends' houses in the evenings and coming upon moose.

“If the dogs were around, they'd get the moose pretty charged up pretty fast,” he said. “And then it wasn't safe to go any further while the dogs were chasing it around the woods.”

Mauldin thinks the dog packs wreaked havoc for a period of roughly two to three years. He's not sure why the problem improved.

“I don't know if the dogs just got older or if people just started paying better attention,” he said.

The authorities were of little help. The Alaska State Department of Health dropped a short-lived plan to employ emergency dog control measures after an official toured the area and declared that he saw no signs of loose or roving dogs. As reported in the Feb. 7, 1962, edition of the Knik Arm Courier, the official, District Sanitarian John R. Kuhn, pointed out that Eagle River was “an unincorporated area with no functioning local legal entity, laws, regulations, enforcement processes, or personnel,” which would have made it difficult to enforce any attempts at dog control.

More than likely, locals took the situation into their own hands. Belk, who said she could not recall any dog packs near her Fire Lake home back then, explained that residents had little tolerance for animals they considered a nuisance.

“People would step out their door and plug them with a .22,” she said. “Nobody hesitated.”

The dog at the Eagle River School received gentler treatment, according to the January Courier story.

“Principal Ryan reported the matter to the State Police, who contacted the owner of the dog. The dog's owner regretted the incident and agreed to keep the animal confined until it could be determined if the dog might be rabid.”

Shirl Mauldin, editor of the Eagle, and Bart Mauldin's mother, said most people probably dropped the issue after that.

“In that era, lots of things were quietly taken care of without anyone having any knowledge of the outcome,” she said. “But the problems were solved, nonetheless.”

This article published in The Alaska Star on Thursday, August 7, 2008.