You definitely came to the right place. I'm covering this topic in my next book, The Alaskan Missile Crisis: The 49th State and the Early Cold War.

Most of what I'm about to share comes from the early part of the Cold War, which I've defined as anything before 1963.

It's important to remember first of all that the men (and they were almost all men) who worked in the stations were almost all civilians. In the United States, most of them were hired by RCA or Federal Electric Corporation.

The best online resource I can point you toward is Brian Jeffrey's Adventures from the Coldest Part of the Cold War.

In short, life on the DEW Line was extremely profitable -- if you could take the conditions. In 1960, Jeffrey was hired for $1,000 CDN per month -- almost the equivalent of a six-figure U.S. job today. After passing an exam, you were sent to the DEW Line training station in Illinois, where an entire mockup station was built in the middle of a cornfield.

Your contract (most workers were contract employees) was for 18 months. You'd spend three months training, then be sent up to the DEW Line. You got two weeks of vacation after nine months on the Line, but by that point a lot of the workers were fairly "bushy" as they referred to it.

The workers were well cared-for. Food was ample and usually of high quality. Most men gained weight during their stay on the DEW Line.

The principal problem was boredom, which different men addressed in different ways. There were ample opportunities for pranksters to practice their craft, gamblers to hone their skills in poker, and photographers to document their surroundings. Each of the main stations had a darkroom due to procedures that at the time required photography. Most of the time, there was a beer ration -- liquor was harder to come by. You had to have connections among the pilots or someone who was traveling to or from the Line.

Here's a tidbit from a man named Murray Rosen:

"Almost every evening after supper, and certainly Saturday night, Gil Hyatt, administrative clerk to Dennis Kurpius, BAR Sector Manager, would announce over the PA system, 'There will be a prayer meeting in B train beginning at 1900 hours.' Gil was known as the Reverand Hyatt, and the prayer meeting was our euphemism for the nightly low-stakes poker game. We used a professional poker table, and each man had a monogrammed ash tray and coffee mug, liquor not being allowed in the poker room.

On Saturday night, Ralph Williams, our baker, would bring in fresh hot doughnuts. What a treat they were. We always thought that poker room was the healthiest place on site. No drinking, no arguments, just good comradeship at the top of the world. We loved it and life was not bad at all."

Movies rotated throughout the DEW Line stations, carried from location to location on the "lateral" flights between the stations. Here's a story from Ralph Howell:

"Back when the three 16mm films per week was the entertainment on the DEW Line, I was passing through CAM-[Main] enroute to CAM-3. One evening there was an announcement over the PA: "There will be a skin flick in the station theater at 7:30." Because the theater could only accommodate approximately 40 people on a site of approximately 100 personnel, the seats were filled long before 7:30. At 7:30 sharp we were surprised by the entrance of an elderly ... priest who proceeded to the projector and started it up. The lights dimmed and the screen displayed ... 'The Curing of Seal Skins by Hudson Bay.' It was a long evening as we were all too embarrassed to leave before the end."

There also was a lot of technical humor. The men who went north were the nerds of their day. They were radar operators, electronics technicians, radio operators and engineers, and they had the typical humor of those jobs. In one story, one DEW Line operator, to call someone on the other side of the room, dialed the main station in his sector, who connected him to Fairbanks, who connected him to Colorado, who connected him back to Alaska, who connected him back to the main station, back to his station and back to the other side of the room. He recalls a delay of quite a few seconds between talking into the phone and hearing his voice at the other end -- long enough that he could talk, get up, and go to the other phone to hear himself.