By LEAH WEATHERSBY

Kathleen Lopp Smith and her husband, Verbeck, are both retired teachers enjoying their golden years in Seattle's Roosevelt District. They never dreamed they'd someday publish a book, but a few years ago their realized they were sitting on a story too good to go unread: Kathleen's own family history.

The Smiths' recently published book, "Ice Window: Letters from a Bering Strait Village: 1892-1902," tells its tale mostly through letters written by Kathleen's grandmother, Ellen Kittredge Lopp.

When Ellen Kittredge set off on her journey to Alaska in 1892 she expected nothing more than a job teaching the local natives in a Bering Strait village (Cape Prince of Wales) and an escape from hot weather.

Unbeknownst to her, one of her traveling companions, Harrison Thornton, had left his own teaching post in Alaska months earlier with the express purpose of finding wives for both himself and his colleague, Tom Lopp, in the states.

Kittredge was selected from a pool of applicants for the teaching position partly because it was thought she and Lopp might make a good match. Thornton and his new bride Neda even went so far as to hide a non-perishable wedding cake in their luggage and pack rings and a marriage license as well. Another member of the party was minister.

At first, Kittredge, 24, was nervous about hints of the match-making, but her fears were allayed when she found Lopp to be a man who shared many of her values, including and abhorrence of alcohol and cigarettes. It was a good thing, too, since winter was coming and there simply wasn't room in the quarters for a single woman.

Lopp and Kittredge were married two months after their first meeting.

The Lopps were to spend the next 10 years in Alaska teaching and getting to know the natives and miners who inhabited the area. Ellen Lopp's letters home to her family provided details about their life in the snowy wilderness. The letters were preserved and handed down to the Lopps' descendants.

Fast forward nearly 100 years. Kathleen Lopp Smith starts to read through her grandmother's old letters. Eventually, Smith gathered the records (including photographs) into a binder, a copy of which she and her husband took with them on a visit to Cape Prince of Wales in the mid-'80s.

The Smiths' work was enthusiastically received by the villagers, some of whom recognized their ancestors in the old letters and photos. They urged the Smiths to get the material published as a book.

It was to be an uphill battle. Self-publishing was out of the question, because the Smiths wanted the book to be available to schools, and most schools can only buy books from certain pre-approved publishers.

After approaching University Press of Alaska twice, the publishing company finally expressed interest in the manuscript in 1996, but only if the Smiths could get their book to meet the company's academic standards. This meant adding a bibliography and footnotes, writing transitions between the letters, and making sure that what the Smiths wrote adhered to the publishing company's style manual. The Smiths edited the letters themselves, rearranged paragraphs for clarity, removed repetitious passages, filled names, and replaced arcane words. The result of their efforts was the creation of a historical narrative that reads like a bit like a novel.

"We want it to be read by normal people," said Verbeck Smith.

"Ice Window" was published at the beginning of this year. In the meantime, Kathleen Smith had also prepared a children's book for publication, which was published last year. The book, "Neeluk: An Eskimo Boy in the Days of the Whaling Ships," was written by her great-aunt, Frances Kittredge, Ellen Lopp's sister, who also lived in Cape Prince of Wales for a short time.

The Lopps decided to return to the states in 1902 so that their children (six kids at the time) could get a better education. Ellen Lopp's father, Charles "C.B." Kittredge, had decided that Seattle was a land of opportunity for the family and he purchased several lots near the University of Washington.

C.B. Kittredge not only became a real-estate investor, he also took and interest in public projects. He was touted as the "Father of the University Bridge," because he led the fight to locate the bridge in its present location.

The Smiths said that one of their greatest impetuses to publish "Ice Window" came from their desire to remember the Lopps as people who really cared for an respected the native villagers they lived among, unlike some of Alaska's other early white settlers.

Although Tom Lopp returned to Alaska many times on business, Ellen Lopp never did. Kathleen Smith said she felt a bit of Ellen's presence when she and her husband recently flew to Cape Prince of Wales. Though most of the flight had been through clouds, the plane was met with blue skies as it approached the village.

"My grandmother must have arranged it so we'd have a beautiful day flying into Wales," she said.

For more information about "Ice Window" and "Neeluk," visit the Smiths' Web site at http://ice window.com.