To hear Kelly Tshibaka describe her family history, her parents moved to Alaska in the summer of 1975 and were homeless. But Alaska was a land of opportunity during that pipeline boom year and they fought their way out of poverty and into the middle class.

“Life wasn’t always easy for us though. For a while my parents were even homeless,” Tshibaka said in her first campaign video.

The homeless story is an exaggeration that borders on fabrication in terms of the way people think today about the meaning of the word “homeless” and what it meant during the trans-Alaska pipeline boom of the 1970s. They weren’t homeless. They were camping.

Four years before Tshibaka was born, her parents lived for a short time in a tent in a campground in Russian Jack Springs in Anchorage. Bill and Michele Hartline married on Aug. 18, 1975.

They “honeymooned in Russian Jack Springs in the small tent where they lived,” according to a 2015 newspaper story in Kenai on their 40th anniversary.

“Homeless and happy, Bil promised to someday buy Michele a crystal chandelier. It now hangs in their retirement home in Nikiski,” the anniversary story said.

As far as her parents socioeconomic status, Michele’s mother had a teaching degree from California State University, Northridge and taught elementary education in the Los Angeles School district for 22 years, according to the 2010 obituary for Jean Harvey Allsup.

Michele’s father, Edward Allsup, had a doctorate in education from USC. He began teaching music in Newhall in 1955 and retired as principal from Newhall Elementary School in 1977, according to his 2010 obituary.

Bill’s mother, Mary Stephens, worked in World War II building P-47s in an Indiana factory, according to her obituary. She worked at Montgomery Ward for 17 years and retired at 62.

Late last year Tshibaka began bringing up the homeless anecdote and made it a central part of the biography that she relates in her campaign against Sen. Lisa Murkowski, saying her family’s story is a “homeless to Harvard” fairy tale.

Right-winger Jim Minnery embellished the homeless tale in February on his radio show and podcast. “She went from being homeless when she first arrived in Alaska with her parents, living in a tent, to Harvard Law School. It’s a very inspiring journey.”

My twin brother camped out in a tent during part of the summer of 1974 outside of Fairbanks, where the housing shortage was worse than it was in Anchorage. Like many other young people who spent some time in a tent in Alaska, he would never have invented a story about being homeless. In 1975, I slept on a couch in a small cabin rented by one of my sisters and her boyfriend and my brother. I was lucky.

At the time the “for rent” section of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner classified ads often featured a pitch by Alaska Tent & Tarp claiming a cozy white canvas home was ideal for the “frontier living of ‘75.” There was a two-bedroom house not far from downtown where 45 people shared the space and slept in shifts. Another house had 26 bunks.

Lots of people camped in tents and slept on spare couches and in hallways during those hectic years in Alaska.

At times, when Tshibaka talks to right-wing interviewers, they praise her homeless talking point as a sign of virtue,, which is what Steve Doocy of Fox News did in a fawning March 30 exchange.

‘Your parents were homeless for a while, living out of a tent. And yet from these very humble circumstances you have been able to work your way to a point where you’re now able to help other people,” Doocy said.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon did something similar on his show “War Room,” after she mentioned her family’s humble origins.

‘Your parents were homeless?” Bannon asked. “Walk me through that.”

“In Alaska they just, there was a time when they had nothing. And they lived in a tent. I saw a picture of this tent. I’d heard the stories. But then I saw a picture of this tent. It only had one side. So I think it was more like a tarp than a tent. I think they oversold it a little bit,” Tshibaka said.

Bannon was amused and impressed. “Please tell me they didn’t go through an Alaska winter. This was one of the great Alaska summers they lived in the tent?”

“I just want to be honest that I think it’s always a little bit winter in Alaska,” she said. “Our summers kind of plateau in the 70s. People here in the Lower 48 would wear coats in that weather.”

“They did not go into winter,” she said, deciding the tent “wasn’t going to work for them.”

Bannon asked his so-called “posse” to check out her website.

But Tshibaka said something different in February to Minnery and and another right-wing podcast about how long her parents stayed in a tent, claiming they went “well into winter.”

“After many months of living into winter and getting really sick, they decided that they needed to move into something better, she said on Minnery’s radio show.

“We are literally a family that went from homeless to Harvard,” Tshibaka told Minnery, a slogan she also tried out with other right-wing groups.

The point of her homeless fable, about an incident four years before she was born, is that Alaska was a land of opportunity in 1975 and her parents worked their way up from nothing, etc. Today, Alaska is not like that and Murkowski is at fault, according to her standard spiel.

Here are a dozen examples of her repeating the exaggerated homeless story in interviews and ads:

March 30: “Life was hard at times — my parents were even homeless and living in a tent for a while.”

March 31: “They had their share of struggles, including being homeless and living in a tent for a while. But they persevered. My father became a union electrician, and my mother was one of the first workers at Prudhoe Bay.”

March 31: “They were even homeless for a while.”

April 9: “They were even homeless for a while. Life hasn’t been easy for them.”

April 10: “Life was hard for them. There was a time when they were even homeless.”

April 14: “My parents moved up here looking for opportunity. They were even homeless for a while. But my mom got a job up there on the North Slope in Prudhoe Bay.’

April 15: “My mom was one of the people who helped start up Prudhoe Bay, one of our largest oil and gas fields. And for a while before that, my mom and dad were actually homeless here in Alaska. It was that job that helped to bring them out of a place of poverty and into the middle class.”

May 13: “They started out pretty poor. For a while they were even homeless. Any my mom got one of those oil and gas jobs that really helped us to climb out of poverty and into the middle class.”

June 4: “They were homeless for a while. And now here I am getting to run for U.S. Senate. It’s an American dream story, it’s an Alaskan one.”

June 10: “They were homeless for a while, but eventually they made it into the middle class.”

June 14: “Growing up wasn’t always easy. My mom and dad were homeless, surviving in a canvas tent. But tough times made me who I am today.”

June 16: “My parents came up in the 70s. Life was hard for them. They were homeless for a while.”

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