"A Good Doc Can Be Hard to Find"

In 1960, Dr. Paul Isaak moved to Soldotna to become that city's first full-time physician.
 

A GOOD DOC CAN BE HARD TO FIND

OCTOBER 2009

The 6:30 a.m. phone call brought bad news to Dr. Peter Hansen. On the other end of the line was the wife of Dr. Calvin Johnson, a physician who had been practicing in Kenai for only about six months. Mrs. Johnson wanted to know if Dr. Hansen could come over to her home soon and pronounce her husband dead.

“I’ll never forget the morning,” wrote Hansen for a 1997 Central Kenai Peninsula Community of Memory program. “He’d died during the night. It was something I wasn’t really prepared for at that time in my life.”

Hansen—then only a few years out of medical school but now the longest-tenured physician Kenai has ever had—managed to get through the experience, and he then continued a practice that has spanned four decades.

Prior to Hansen’s arrival in 1967, however, such longevity in Kenai was by no means the norm. Doctors had come and gone. None of them, it seemed, had had real staying power. And in Soldotna there had been no full-time physicians at all until Dr. Paul Isaak showed up in the fall of 1960.

The first doctor to work in Kenai was Dr. Joseph Deisher, a Seward physician who drove each week into town to work for a day or two in an office in the old Harborview Hotel on the bluff. Deisher handled the basics in the Kenai office, but for the bigger issues, such as surgeries, he directed his patients to the hospital in Seward.

Peggy Arness of Nikiski said that she went to Seward to have Deisher deliver her son Joe in 1951, and Donnis Thompson of Nikiski said that he also delivered her first two children in 1954 and 1956.

Visits from Deisher began to diminish as other doctors tried to set up full-time practices in Kenai. The first to make the attempt was a missionary doctor from Toms River, N.J., named Marion Goble, who was married to an aviation mechanic and arrived in Kenai in about 1953. Although most who remember those days claim that Goble stayed for only two to three years, stories concerning her exact dates here vary enough to create contradictions and cast some doubt.

According to Dolly Farnsworth of Soldotna, Dr. Goble tended to the ear infections of Farnsworth’s twin daughters in

In late 1960, Dr. Calvin Fair became the central peninsula's first full-time dentist.

about 1954. Arness said she taught Goble’s daughter in kindergarten in about 1956. And in separate entries in Once Upon the Kenai, Al and Virginia Poore said that Dr. Goble delivered their son, Tracy, in 1960.

Regardless of these discrepancies, Dr. Goble’s influence was keenly felt in the Kenai area. She is mentioned in more than a half-dozen entries in Once Upon the Kenai, and the details from patients who went to see her are clear and evocative.

“She never wore white uniforms,” said Thompson. “She thought that scared the kids. She wore a regular skirt and blouse, and she had a long braid of hair down the middle of her back.” When Goble moved her office from Louisa Miller’s leased ice cream parlor in town to her own home on McCollum Drive, Thompson added, “She only had afternoon hours, and you’d go into her office, and there was always the smell of fresh bread. It was great.”

Eventually, however, the fresh-bread fragrance moved away with the doctor, and Thompson said she can only speculate at the reason: “She delivered babies. She practiced medicine. She did everything. But it didn’t work out for them all that well. I think it was him who got a little bit antsy, and they left.”

When Goble departed, there was a brief physician void in Kenai, but a medical renaissance was under way in Soldotna. Dr. Isaak, who had been working with Dr. Deisher in Seward, moved into town and then joined with Dr. Elmer Gaede and new dentist, Dr. Calvin Fair, to open a clinic in Soldotna in 1961. They formed a sort of medical triumvirate of the central peninsula.

Downstairs at the new medical clinic. The door on the right led to Dr. Fair.
The door on the left led to the Soldotna public library.

Both Isaak and Gaede were pilots and made regular trips to see patients in the clinic in Seldovia and to perform rounds at the hospital in Seward. Fair, meanwhile, traveled once a month to Homer to spend two or three days working on patients from the southern peninsula. Although Dr. Fair soon became too busy locally to travel south anymore, Gaede and Isaak continued their long-distance doctoring, and by early 1983 Isaak estimated that he had flown through Resurrection Pass at least 2,000 times.

Sometimes, they flew in weather that Isaak said was “actually too bad to be flying in,” resulting in some close calls. “It was only a rare occasion that I was not able to fly, and in that case I would have to drive to Seward by auto to make my hospital rounds,” wrote Isaak in Once Upon the Kenai.

One such occasion occurred in January 1968. Here’s how Isaak described the trip: “I was going to take one of my obstetric patients and her husband (by air) to the hospital in Seward for delivery. This man was a prominent citizen in the community, and it turned out that when we got about five miles out of Seward, the weather deteriorated rather rapidly and I was unable to continue, so we turned around and came back.

“And so [the husband] drove to Seward, and about seven or eight miles out of Seward she decided that she was going to have that baby, and indeed did have it in the back seat of the car.

“Fortunately, I had some of the bare necessities with me to manage the delivery in the car, even though it wasn’t the most ideal situation. Everything turned out fine for mother and baby, and they spent several days in the hospital after that experience.”

The new Soldotna clinic offered a real waiting room with old magazines and comfortable chairs. The clinic also featured x-ray and minor surgery equipment, a small lab, medications, and a knowledgeable, professional staff. As the number of patients—and the number of instances requiring even higher-level facilities—increased, talk began in earnest of creating an actual hospital for the central peninsula.

Meanwhile over in Kenai, doctors were still coming and going. According to Hansen’s writings, a group of people, who included Thompson, Jim Fisher, Homer Swires and Ethel Sims, began a volunteer effort that resulted in the Kenai Community Clinic, which they then worked to fill by bringing in a physician to operate it.

Dr. Allen W. Barr became the first full-time physician to establish a practice in the clinic, and Swires was delighted with the doctor’s company. In Once Upon the Kenai, he wrote: “He was from Texas, which our President (Lyndon Johnson) was at that time. The doctor and I were very good friends, and he’d always stop in the morning and we’d have a cup of coffee together, and a lot of times, evenings, he’d stop by and we’d have a beer together.”

Dr. Barr stayed for only two years, but he was around long enough to deliver several babies, including Thompson’s third child in 1964. He was also able to impress former public health nurse Shirley Henley enough that she called him “a damn good doctor.”

When he left, however, Kenai residents were right back where they’d started—going elsewhere for services and waiting

Dr. Struthers (L) chats with Kenai dentist, Dr. Bailie.

for a new doctor to come to town.

Into the breach, then, stepped Dr. Robert Alden Struthers, a surgeon fresh from his own practice and regular rounds at a hospital in Portland, Oregon. He arrived with his nurse, Gloria Crandall (a single mom who later remarried and became Gloria Wisecarver).

Struthers—father of Emmy-winning television actress Sally Struthers (Gloria Bunker Stivic on All in the Family in the 1970s)—had replied to an advertisement calling for a doctor in Kenai, Alaska. According to Wisecarver, Struthers flew to Kenai for an interview, at which he was told that there were plans under way to build a hospital in Kenai—at the present location of the Benco Building—and that he could become the head doctor at that new facility.

“I just remember him coming back one Monday morning and saying, ‘Ah! I have the greatest deal!’” said Wisecarver. “And I was going to be the chief nurse. Well, I didn’t really have anything keeping me in Portland, Oregon. I could bring my kids with me, so that was no problem. So I might just as well strike out and see the world.”

In Kenai, Struthers and Wisecarver were installed in the Professional Building, off Willow Street. Their office was in a back corner, next to a beauty salon and a land-survey office.

Nurse Gloria Wisecarver in the mid-1960s.

“We had beds where people could stay, and we had an examining room with the doctor’s desk in there,” remembered Wisecarver. “And we had to go out a door to get to the x-ray, and it was primitive, to say the least. For us coming from Oregon, it was primitive, believe me.”

Just as Drs. Paul Isaak and Elmer Gaede had done in Soldotna, Dr. Struthers did in Kenai. In the days when a basic office visit might cost about $8, he handled everything that he had the facilities and equipment to handle, including setting bones, delivering babies, and doing minor surgeries.

“I can remember, I took my son over to Seward because Dr. Struthers took out his tonsils (there), and then he assisted Dr. Isaak on a gall bladder, and then we all came home again,” said Wisecarver, noting that they would all be back at their “regular” jobs the following day.

“People Outside cannot believe what they (the doctors) went through,” she said, and she added that she marveled at how many lives they were able to save, given the conditions at the time. “I talked to somebody who broke his back and had to ride in the back of a stationwagon all the way to Seward. It was just amazing. I always thought the Lord looked down on us here.”

Dr. Struthers was “an excellent physician,” Wisecarver said. “He was very patient-orientated. He was very caring, so-so outgoing, not that would overwhelm you. He was always willing to listen to you. Very nice, nice man. I’m glad I knew him.”

In the end, however, Dr. Struthers did not become the head doctor at the new hospital—which was not completed until 1972, and was constructed in Soldotna instead of Kenai—and Gloria Wisecarver did not become the chief nurse. Struthers, a heavyset man about age 50 when he arrived in Kenai, departed after little more than a year and a half on the job, while Wisecarver liked her new home too much to move.

Wisecarver, who was 36 when she arrived in Kenai, said that, in retrospect, she was glad she had never become the top nurse at the hospital. “I don’t think I’d make a very good chief nurse. I’m not really the hiring-and-firing-type person. Maybe the hiring. It’s the firing that would bother me.”

Dr. Elmer Gaede joined Drs. Fair and Isaak to form the
central Kenai Peninsula's first medical establishment.

As for Struthers, she said, “When it looked as if nobody was going to ever get this hospital built, he just lost heart and left. He just said, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I want to go someplace where I can practice.’” He returned to Oregon, and nurse and doctor gradually lost touch.

Sometime later, Arness was sitting in the beauty parlor in the Professional Building when she realized that a woman in the doctor’s office next door was giving birth. “I could hear her moaning and screaming and hollering through the walls while I was getting my hair done,” she said.

Arness’s experience was indicative of two things: First, a new physician had moved into the office vacated by Dr. Struthers. Second, the acoustics of the clinic were hardly soundproof.

The “new” doctor in town was actually the oldest physician who had yet hung out a local shingle: He was Dr. Osric H. Armstrong, a Louisiana doctor who had begun practicing medicine in the Matanuska Valley in 1939.

Armstrong, whose mother had given him the name of a minor character in Hamlet because she loved the works of Shakespeare, came to Kenai after stops in Seward, Valdez, Seldovia, and Palmer.

“He turned out to be my step-father,” said Thompson. “My mother came up here and met Doc, and within about a year or so they got hitched.” Armstrong, a widower when he first arrived, had been looking for a new place to live and practice when he heard about the Kenai opening.

Unfortunately, Dr. Armstrong’s tenure in Kenai was also briefer than he had planned. After living for a while in a Kenai apartment, the Armstrongs in the early 1970s moved out to Wildwood, where the doctor had been offered a position in the Native clinic. Shortly after the move, Dr. Armstrong suffered a stroke.

According to Thompson, the Pioneer Home in Anchorage was full, so Armstrong was moved into the Pioneer Home in Sitka until an Anchorage opening became available. In the meantime, Thompson’s mother also fell ill, and she headed south to enter a nursing home in California. Both died within a few years.

 Thompson said that when Armstrong died, no one in the state had a medical license that had been issued earlier than his.

The departure of Armstrong left Dr. Peter Hansen as the only physician in town for a while.

“Before Karolee and I got married, a few days after my graduation from medical school in 1963, each one of us had one condition for marriage,” Hansen wrote for in the 1997 Community of Memory program. “Mine was that she’d be willing to move to Alaska and try it out with me for up to two or three years. Hers was, if we started a family, that she and the kids could go home in the summertime to see the relatives as long as they would like. I didn’t really have any problem with that.”

Hansen finished school and then spent a little more than a year in residency in general practice in Minnesota. Then the Hansen family packed everything it owned into a little travel trailer and headed north.

 “It was about two months after the ’64 earthquake that we started to move. As we traveled around Alaska we came down on the Kenai Peninsula. Around Turnagain Arm, there were about 30 little bridges to cross because the whole highway had been washed out. We’ve got pictures of the big crevasses where the tidal waves had gone.

“We liked the Kenai area the best, but there weren’t enough people to support a physician. The pharmacist here, John Hulien, who owned Kenai Drug Store, did his best to convince us that we ought to stay because he was tired of sewing up people in his back room. But we traveled back down the highway and got on the ferry at Haines and went to Juneau. I found an opportunity to work with a group of mixed specialists there the next three years.”

In 1967, however, Hansen ran into Dr. Isaak at a State Medical Association meeting in Sitka, and Isaak convinced Hansen that he and Dr. Gaede needed help dealing with the growing peninsula population.

Two months later, Hansen moved again, and he has yet to run out of patients.

 

Dr. Isaak (far right) attends the groundbreaking for the first hospital on the central peninsula, circa 1970.