I first met Walter Johnson 60 years ago. I was 4 years old. He was maybe 33, in his second year as a doctor at the brand-new hospital in Bethel. My sister and I were getting typhoid and tetanus inoculations and my parents, teachers, were learning how to give them when Johnson rushed into the room saying a 16-year-old girl had been shot downriver and he was going to try to get to her. He and my father loaded a stretcher into a truck and drove off to a waiting floatplane.
He recounted that meeting to me years later and recalled that I was inconsolable when confronted by needles. He advised me that Alaska kids were tough and never cried about getting shots.
As he told the story, he smiled and kept steady eye contact, looking much the way he did when he assured a terrified little boy and, I suspect, a teenage girl with a bullet wound. In later years I found him to be a jovial font of knowledge about the Saami reindeer herders in Alaska. He had made it a special area of study in his later years, having treated many descendants of the original herders and listened to their family stories. His other retirement activities included an almost supernatural ability to grow such fruits as cherries and pears in Southcentral Alaska.
Doc Johnson, who will be memorialized at a gathering at 4 p.m. Friday, Aug. 21, at Fox Hollow Chalet, was a multidimensional Renaissance man. But the reason Alaskans should remember him is because of his efforts in the battle against tuberculosis.
Sixty years ago the disease was prevalent throughout the territory and was ravaging rural Alaska. Johnson was not the only individual who helped turn the tide, but he was a very important one, both as a practicing doctor and as an administrator, notably as the tuberculosis control officer for the Alaska Native Medical Center starting in 1963.
His papers are deposited at the Consortium Library on the campus of the University of Alaska Anchorage. The collection consists of papers relating to the treatment and history of tuberculosis, writings, lectures, notes, meeting records, planning documents, statistics, conference papers and more.
Merle Richard Walter Johnson -- I never heard anyone refer to him as Merle -- was born in 1922 in Nebraska. He came to Alaska in 1941, right out of high school, and worked as a miner and fisherman while attending the University of Alaska, where he earned degrees in anthropology and biology. But medicine was always on his mind. One of his jobs during World War II was working in the Army hospital laboratory at Ladd Field.
He returned to Nebraska to attend medical school and arrived in Bethel as a freshly minted M.D. in 1954. Two years later he was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Public Health Service, working in public hospitals from Boston to Memphis to Chicago. He was back in the state for good (aside from a stint in the Peace Corps) in 1963 and taking the reigns at the Alaska Native Medical Center, then located in downtown Anchorage. He retired in 1987 and moved to Homer, the site of his orchard, in 1994. He died at the age of 92 on June 27.
The wounded girl, whose name I never heard, was flown to Anchorage for treatment and recovery on Sept. 3, 1955. The typhoid and tetanus shots, in both arms, kept my sister and me in anguish all night long, moaning and weeping each time we bumped into each other in a bunk at the roadhouse. In later years we would remember it as the most painful night of our lives. But neither of us ever got tetanus or typhoid.
Thanks, Doc.
Young artist recital on Wednesday
Zachary Spontak, the winner of this year's Anchorage Festival of Music Young Alaskan Artist competition, will present his winner's recital at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 26, at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, 3900 Wisconsin St.
A violinist, Spontak was born in Anchorage and raised in Fairbanks. His teachers have included Jean Krause, Gail Johansen and Kathleen Butler-Hopkins. He studied under Paul Kantor at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he earned a bachelor of music degree earlier this year. He has won the Fairbanks Symphony Concerto Competition three times and several other important awards, including first-place prizes at the Skokie Valley Symphony Concerto Competition in Chicago and the Music Academy of the West Concerto Competition in California and the gold medal in the Junior Division of the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition.
Spontak's program will include Beethoven's "Kreuzer" Sonata plus music by Ysaÿe and Gershwin. Juliana Osinchuk will accompany at the piano. Tickets are $25, $20 for seniors and $10 for students, available at centertix.net. A reception will follow the performance.
The Anchorage Festival of Music has announced its upcoming season. In addition to Spontak's recital there will be two soirees at private homes on Oct. 17 and Jan. 10 and a program featuring pop arrangements of baroque works at UAA on April 24. More information is available at anchoragefestivalofmusic.org.
John Sebastian to perform
Mike McCormick of Whistling Swan tells us that Rock and Roll Hall of Famer John Sebastian will have two local concerts on Oct. 9 and 10. "He hasn't been here in about 30 years," McCormick says.
Sebastian had hits with the band Lovin' Spoonful and has jammed with everyone from Judy Collins to Jimi Hendrix. "He is one of the most influential musicians Whistling Swan has ever presented," McCormick says.
Tickets are now available at centertix.net for Sebastian's shows at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 9 in the Mat-Su College Glenn Massay Theater and at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 10 in the Discovery Theatre in Anchorage.