It almost seems like "Déjà vu all over again."

The newspaper is back after a six month absence, under new ownership. Glory hallelujah!

It arrived Saturday on Peninsula Airways.

I picked it up at the air cargo office and made the deliveries: North Pacific Gas 'N' Go, Alaska Ship Supply's liquor store and the grocery store in the old A.C. store, Captains Bay convenience store, Safeway, the Grand Aleutian Hotel, and the Unisea liquor store.

A déjà vu is a feeling you've been here before, or history repeating itself. Even after history did repeat itself in the Super Bowl and the New England Patriots lost to the New York Giants, I still feel compelled to quote a legendary New York baseball sports figure, Yogi Berra, on déjà vu all over again.

My first full-time news job in rural Alaska was as a reporter and photographer at the Bristol Bay Times and Dutch Harbor Fisherman in Dillingham in 1990. The two papers were merged prior to my arrival, and a couple of years later were separated again.

The Dillingham job came with housing included, an unheated room upstairs over the office, with live music on weekends from the nearby Willow Tree bar. That was fine: no heat, no problem, with enough blankets and a sleeping bag. The heated newsroom downstairs served as the living room, kitchen included, since the place was a former private home. I spent a lot of time inside the Willow Tree too, drinking non-alcoholic beer.

The office was not accidentally adjacent to the Willow Tree, since both properties were owned by the late Rance "Hutchy" Brannon, a supporter of the newspaper owned by Fritz Johnson. Hutchy thought the non-alcoholic beer was funny, but he did keep it in stock.

Before moving to Alaska in 1988, I'd worked as a reporter for daily newspapers in Amherst, Gardner and Greenfield, Massachusetts. I also freelanced community profile articles to the real estate page of The Boston Globe, and clips, or copies, of those articles greatly impressed the Bay Times editor. I don't recall which clips I sent, I remember I profiled Fitchburg, Berlin, Stockbridge and Webster, Massachusetts, and Nashua, New Hampshire.

I heard of the Bay Times job from Mike Rostad, publisher of the former Kodiak Fisherman newspaper where I worked briefly in 1989 before getting a job as an oil recovery technician on the Exxon Valdez oil spill. I can honestly say I took money from VECO. The oil field support company was my employer when I did environmental janitorial work on Kodiak and Afognak islands and Alaska Peninsula beaches.

VECO officials later got into deep trouble for bribing state legislators. When I took money from VECO, it was for stuffing oiled seaweed into garbage bags.

When I was demobilized as an OR Tech in August, 1989, I put my car back on the ferry and drove up to Anchorage and enrolled in the state university for a semester, funded with oil spill wages, what I called my "Hazelwood scholarship" after the tanker captain's name. And very recently I got a little something more from the Exxon class action suit, over 22 years since the grounding. I picked it up Christmas Day, 2011, when I went to the Dutch Harbor post office and found a check in my mail for $222.26 from the Kodiak cannery worker class.

When the semester ended at UAA, I delivered Dominos Pizza in Anchorage for two months from the store at Karluk and Fifth. I lived on pizza. The manager would make one for the workers and call it the "crew pie." Then I traveled back to Massachusetts for a wedding, and spent a month in Mexico visiting Mexico City and the Mayan ruins to the south, before returning to Alaska and processing seafood in Kenai and Homer before getting the newspaper job in Dillingham.

I was a journalism student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst between 1974 and 1979, never graduated, I spent too much time around the student newspaper and not enough in the classrooms.

Plus, too much time in the campus bars, not drinking non-alcoholic beverages, at the Blue Wall and Top of the Campus, during the brief window of opportunity when the legal age was lowered to 18. I was 17 years old when the drinking age was lowered, and 22 when it returned to age 21.

Perfect timing! Or not? Maybe I'll finally get a degree from somewhere before I turn 60, I'm 56 now.