A food seller from Alaska was nicknamed his small-town savior for not allowing his neighbor to starve amid a coronavirus pandemic.
Toshua Parker, owner of Wholesale Ice Strait in Gustavus, began loading shipping crates on ships to make a 14-hour weekly trip to Costco in Juneau, 50 miles away, to supply his city with food.
Parker told the Post that he took $ 30,000 to “basically everything – like milk, land, meat” during his weekly trip to Costco.
Before the outbreak, Parker, 39, received shipments from Costco via the Alaska ferry system. However, the pandemic, along with a severe storm that damaged the city dock, caused the ferry to stop operating.
When the ferry system collapsed, Parker said he bought a “96 foot barge,” for fear the city would starve.
“The joke in the city is, we will be the biggest idiots ever,” Parker said.
Gustavus – who had no roads – began to run out of supplies when the city was locked, so Parker talked to local fishermen and decided to make a weekly trip with “a 96-foot military landing craft that had been converted” and scheduled a trip around the tides. and the weather to Juneau.
“When we arrived in Juneau, we couldn’t get off the ship because of restrictions. So a different group of men brought supplies to the ship. Our people loaded the goods on the ship, Parker said. Then the staff of 15, turned around and traveled 7 hour back to Gustavus where he used supplies to store grocery stores.
“Hours make it worth it – you know who you serve and you see it every day,” Parker said about feeding Gustavus.
The business owner told the Post things were “not perfect.”
Recently he ordered eggs from Costco in Juneau, and was later told that the store had an egg restriction per customer due to lack of eggs, he finally had “a few dozen eggs for the entire city.”
He “doesn’t know how long the restriction will last” and “frantically ordered 800 dozen eggs from Seattle.” A truck is scheduled to take the eggs, but then miss the barge. Five days later the egg arrived in Juneau.
“There were no eggs for two weeks then having 1,000 dozen eggs sitting there for a city of 400 people, is incredible.”
“We will continue to do what we do,” Parker said. He is optimistic about the future, admitting he will “need to adjust to the new normal.”
“Toshua saved the city,” Mayor Gustavus Casipit said in an interview with Good News Tanks. “I really don’t know what we would do without him.”
