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Ketchikan Historical: The Amazing, Colorful and Controversial Life of Gertrud Mellenberg Schrader By LOUISE BRINCK HARRINGTON - First and foremost, Gertrud Schrader was a survivor.

Born in 1909 in Riga, Latvia (then part of Czarist Russia), she survived not only the Russian Revolution, but also World War II in Eastern Europe.

Her father, Leo Mellenberg, a member of the White Russian Army, died during the revolution in a Communist prison in Riga. Her mother, Alma Mellenberg, then took Gertrud and her two brothers and escaped to Manchuria. Alma Mellenberg found work in Manchuria as a chambermaid and later at an import-export business.

When World War II broke out, Gertrud was on vacation in Germany visiting her grandmother and some friends. The Nazis arrested her, declaring her “a displaced person” (she’d been born in Russia and currently was a resident of Manchuria) and threw her in jail. Being a fearless and headstrong person, however, she talked her way out of prison by convincing the Nazis she was needed as a teacher in occupied Poland.

But after a short time in Poland, she realized that the Nazis were arresting Jews and sending them to concentration camps. She watched as a German soldier grabbed a bundle of rags from the arms of a Jewish woman and threw it onto a flatbed truck.

The bundle of rags began to cry.

It was a baby.

“I saw an SS [Germany’s elite military unit] man standing on the street, filming that incident,” Gertrud told the Ketchikan Daily News years later. “I told the SS man that it was tactless to be filming that. And he said, ‘No! Do not say that. This will be an historic document!’”

When hired as a teacher in Nazi-occupied Poland, Gertrud had taken an oath to not oppose the Nazis. But now, witnessing such Nazi brutality, she wanted out of Poland—and she wanted out now. She resigned her teaching position, biked and hitch-hiked to Prague, Czechoslovakia, where she signed up for nursing courses at a university.

That’s where she was in 1945 when the war finally ended. Now, her goal was to find a way out of war-torn Europe and a new life for herself, preferably in the United States.

By 1956, Gertrud was working as a lab technician at a hospital in South Dakota. She decided that what she really wanted was to spend the rest of her days living in a small town on the west coast. She found three job openings available in her field—all in Alaska, at hospitals in Nome, Fairbanks and Ketchikan—and chose the one in Ketchikan, she said later, because the position at the Ketchikan General Hospital included a place to live and hot meals while on duty.

Ketchikan

“I was terribly disappointed in Ketchikan at first,” Gertrud later wrote in a paper for a community college course. “My first three weeks here in June, 1956, were wet and gray with uninterrupted rain. I would have left right then if I hadn’t been so stingy…I spent a lot of money to ship all of my earthly possessions here.”

Five months later, however, she changed her mind, deciding that Ketchikan wasn’t so bad and buying a log cabin at Mountain Point, six-and-a-half miles from town. “It was the air,” she wrote in her paper, “the fresh, clean, windy, cool, invigorating Ketchikan air that did it!”

She added that, while on her daily bicycle rides to work at the hospital, she “breathed deeply the fresh, moist air that the southeasterly wind carried from the ocean, through the channels and over the wooded islands to Ketchikan.” - More...
Friday AM - November 02, 2018

Ketchikan: Victor Chen MD joins Ketchikan PHMG Psychiatry - Victor Chen, MD knows what it’s like to live in a big city.

The new PHMG Psychiatrist grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles after his family moved there from Taiwan when he was five. He went to the University of California at Berkley for his undergraduate degree in Biology and, after a stint as an ambulance EMT, went to medical school at the University of Cincinnati. He returned to California for his residency at UCLA-San Fernando Valley.

But he was looking for something else. He did not want “an ordinary life.”

Dr. Chen attended a medical conference in New York City just before coming to Ketchikan to discuss working here. “I went from a place that’s the center of the universe to a place on the edge of the universe - and I mean that in the very best way,” he said.

“I got off the plane in July and it was love at first sight.”

Dr. Chen began seeing patients last week and is making progress meeting and treating people. PHMG Psychiatry had been without a permanent provider since July.

“I love my work,” he said recently. “It’s challenging. There is a stigma in society about mental illness. We don’t blame people who have cancer. No one chooses to have mental illness.

“I started medical school intending to become an OB/Gyn but when I did my psychiatric rotation I knew that was where I should be. - More...
Friday AM - November 02, 2018

Southeast Alaska: Opportunity to Object Announced; EIS for POW Landscape Level Analysis Project Released - Wednesday the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) released a draft Record of Decision proposing the largest old-growth logging project in the nation in decades. The proposal would log up to 235 million board feet of mostly old-growth forest over 15 years. This sale dwarfs any project on the Tongass since the Ketchikan pulp mill was still in operation under a 50-year timber contract. The Tongass National Forest encompasses almost 17 million acres of wild forest in southeast Alaska; roughly 9.5 million acres is classified as roadless under the Rule.

The Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and Draft Record of Decision (ROD) for the Prince of Wales Landscape Level Analysis (POW LLA) Project is being made available for public review on November 2, 2018.

An official, 45-day Objection period will begin for the project upon publication of the Notice of Availability of the Final EIS in the Federal Register. It is expected that it will be published in the Federal Register on Friday, November 2, 2018. - More...
Friday AM - November 02, 3018

Alaska Statute 23.10.065(a) requires the Alaska minimum wage to be adjusted using the Consumer Price Index for urban consumers in the Anchorage metropolitan area (Anchorage CPI-U) for the preceding calendar year. The Anchorage CPI-U increased 0.5 percent in 2016, rising from 217.830 to 218.873. As a result, the minimum wage will rise from $9.84 to $9.89 effective January 1, 2019. By law, Alaska’s minimum wage must remain at least $1 per hour over the federal minimum wage.

The Alaska minimum wage applies to all hours worked in a pay period, regardless of how the employee is paid: whether by time, piece, commission, or otherwise. All actual hours worked in a pay period multiplied by the Alaska minimum wage is the very least an employee can be compensated by an employer. - More...
Friday AM - November 02, 2018

Alaska: State report compiles vital statistic data on births, deaths, marriages and divorces - The Section of Health Analytics & Vital Records within the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services’ Division of Public Health just released its 2017 Alaska Vital Statistics Annual Report. The report examines Alaska resident births, deaths, adoptions, as well as marriages and divorces between 2008 and 2017 using the most recent Alaska Vital Statistics data. These figures provide health trends for health care providers, planners, researchers and others interested in public health.

Here are some key findings from the report: In 2017, Emma and James were the top baby names. Alaskan mothers gave birth to 10,477 babies, resulting in a fertility rate of 71.4 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age, a decrease from 76.4 births per 1,000 women in 2016, mirroring a national decline. In 2017, 5,123 marriages were performed and there were 2,680 separations; both of those rates also show declines over the last decade. 

During 2017, a total of 4,415 deaths occurred among Alaskan residents. The top 10 leading causes of death accounted for 71 percent of all deaths and were, in ranked order: 1) cancer; 2) heart disease; 3) unintentional injuries and poisonings, including drug overdoses; 4) chronic lower respiratory disease; 5) suicide; 6) stroke; 7) diabetes; 8) chronic liver disease and cirrhosis; 9) Alzheimer's disease; and 10) homicide.  The report also highlights some additional categories of death including drug-induced deaths.  - More...
Friday AM - November 02, 2018

DAVE KIFFER: Do ya feel lucky, Ecopunk? - Sometimes a news headline tell you everything you need to know.

For example: Bloggers who walked on Yellowstone hot spring die after falling from Canadian waterfall

This headline was recently in one of my old newspapers, the Casper Star-Tribune.

The gist is that a trio of thrill seekers recently died when they were swept over a 100-foot waterfall in the Canadian  Rockies. A sad, but not unusual story as people occasionally come to grief testing themselves against nature. Spoiler alert: Nature usually wins.

But, of course, there is a little more to this story. These particular thrill seekers - like every other member of their generation - believe that a life not "posted" might as well not exist. So they "blog" - or in this case  "blogged" - about their exploits. All in the name of "infotainment" or perhaps, just plain "braggadocio."

Yes, I understand that grumping about bloggers and selfieholics makes me sound like an old, old, old geezer. I plead guilty. But you do have to wonder that, if everyone is busy blogging, is anyone actually reading those blogs? It's like everyone is so busy "journaling" that no one has any time to read any one else's "journal." Right? - More...
Friday AM - November 02, 2018

RICH MANIERI: Maybe We Should Try Listening, For a Change - It might be that our political discourse is what it is because those involved are satisfied with the status quo. 

The rest of us spend a lot of time wringing our hands over the apparent impossibility to find common ground on any important issues, at least until we realize that the loud voices on both the right and left aren't really all that interested in compromise.

Political tribalism is evidently more comfortable and satisfying than actually trying to work through and find solutions to intractable problems.

Psychologists have a term for this phenomenon. It's "reactive devaluation." A June article in Psychology Today put it this way: "Once we discover it was the other side who said or supports something, then we withdraw or withhold our support. It doesn't seem to matter what was said or proposed."

That certainly explains a lot.

And it explains why, as we're still recoiling in horror over the murder of 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, we hear only demagoguery and no actual effort to reach across the aisle. No one can possibly accept a reasonable suggestion made by the other side, lest they be ostracized by their base. - More...
Friday AM - November 02, 2018