It was to be the first of many photographs taken during my
Alaskan adventure, working a summer job as a nurse’s assistant for my uncle,
Milo Fritz, an eye, ear, nose, and throat physician and bush pilot. Dr. Fritz
saw patients from all over Alaska at his medical practice in Anchorage. Aunt
Betsy, tall and imposing in her crisply starched nurse’s hat, ran the office
with scrupulous professionalism. At work, her husband was “The Doctor.”
My uncle also held clinics in towns throughout the state and
in Native villages reachable only by small plane, dogsled, or boat. My aunt, a
registered nurse, and John Spahn, a guild optician, often assisted him on these
clinics. Though most of my work that summer would be in the Anchorage office,
upcoming clinics in Kodiak, Fairbanks, and Sitka promised at least week-long
stays in very different areas of the state. When I met my future coworkers at
the office that first day, they were packing medical equipment and supplies
into trunks that would be airfreighted to Kodiak for the clinic scheduled to
begin the following Monday.
The day after my arrival was the Summer Solstice, when the
sun didn’t set until well after 10 p.m. “Alaskans go around all summer with
deep circles under their eyes,” Uncle Milo told me. “It stays light so late
they never know when to go to bed.” He, however, seemed tireless, despite being
“busy as a man killing snakes.”
I was soon outfitted with two white nurse uniforms, slips,
stockings, and shoes—as well as a fishing license, hip boots, suspenders, and
thick socks. Uncle Milo found time to refract my eyes and introduce me to John
Spahn, who would fit me for contacts. “You’ll have boys melting down into their
Keds,” my uncle assured me. John, a powerfully built man with thinning hair and
a quietly capable manner, measured my eyes and dipped into his store of funny
stories. I began to see why he and Uncle Milo had become such good friends.
“My uncle is a comic,” I wrote to a girlfriend back home. He
was such a font of wonderfully dark, pithy witticisms that I began to compile a
list. I also was prescient enough to keep a journal describing my daily
experiences, realizing I was immersed in potential story material. I was a
student columnist for my hometown newspaper and saw myself as a budding journalist.
Uncle Milo was in his prime then—lithe and energetic, with a
shaved head and blue eyes that blazed with intelligence and intensity. He had a
commanding presence, high standards, and strict rules that I knew I would have
to adhere to. The fact that I was young with absolutely no nursing experience
was a situation he had faced before. At his bush clinics he offered rudimentary
nursing training to volunteers, often teenage girls. After asking them to scrub
their hands, put on sterile gloves, and hold their hands folded in front of
them, he soon had them sitting next to him at the operating table where he’d
show them “how to use the suction rod and whatnot,” becoming “experts,” he
said, after two or three operations. As it turned out, Uncle Milo expected much
less of me: I just had to know how to drive a stick shift.
Within a couple days of my arrival, Uncle Milo checked out
my driving skills in his green Jeep and declared me a competent driver. I began
to learn my way around Anchorage—the bank, the stationery store, Penney’s, the
new hospital, and Merrill Field. Writing a friend back home, I observed that
“everyone drives so slowly here. The speed limit is mostly 30 miles per hour.
They also have four-way stop signs and flashing four-way red lights for which
everyone stops.” All as novel and noteworthy to me then as it would be to
Anchorage drivers today.
The Jeep had narrowly survived the Good Friday Earthquake two
years earlier. It had been parked in the garage at the Fritzes’ combination
home and office on 4th Avenue when the earthquake struck and the alley next to
it dropped four feet. My aunt was at home at the time; my uncle, nearly five miles
away, was on evening rounds at the new Providence Hospital on the outskirts of
town. Despite fearing the worst for Betsy, he took care of his patients and
then treated the first wave of casualties through the evening before picking
his way home along fractured, ice-glazed roads—and then back to the
hospital—once he found Betsy unharmed.
My uncle and aunt’s circumstances shifted as abruptly as the
ground beneath their feet that evening. They were now living in the former
priest’s apartment on the ground floor of the vacated Providence Hospital at 9th
and L Streets, with Dr. Fritz’s office situated on an upper floor.
Uncle Milo drove me out to see the new Providence Hospital,
completed a couple of years before the earthquake. My duties—in addition to
opening and closing examination rooms, administering eye drops, filing charts,
and running errands in downtown Anchorage—would include transporting surgical
instruments by Jeep to this new facility. Later that summer, Uncle Milo would
invite me to observe him perform several operations, including routine but
bloody T & As (tonsillectomies and adenoidectomies, which caused me to
retreat to another room), nasal surgery, and a delicate operation on a damaged
ear drum, which I watched through a companion microscope.
Uncle Milo was working on his instrument-rating that summer.
Most weekends found him at Merrill Field or at Hood Lake, ready to take to the
skies in a leased or borrowed plane, his old Tri-Pacer having been sold in the
aftermath of the earthquake. He would often take off with an instrument
instructor and me, dropping me off at Big Lake for a day of sailing the wooden
Penguin he kept with an elderly Swedish couple. The Swedes would see me off and
greet me upon my return: my sole contacts in case of emergency. I would take a
lunch and sail contentedly for hours, through sunlit and rain-speckled
afternoons that melded into bright evenings, until Uncle Milo flew back,
sometimes with Aunt Betsy, to retrieve me.
One evening, they flew by in a floatplane, tipping their
wings before circling back to land. I watched as they taxied to shore where I
was securing the boat—Aunt Betsy, with a brightly flowered headscarf fluttering
about her face, waving gaily. Uncle Milo was all smiles under his red baseball
cap. To look at them, you wouldn’t think they had a care in the world.
It wasn’t until many years later that I set foot outside the
Anchorage airport again, though I’d had layovers there while changing planes.
During a lengthy late-afternoon layover in October 2008, I met up with the
sister of a classmate of my cousin Piet. Before dinner, she offered a tour of
Anchorage. I was immediately lost. Three-lane highways? Overpasses? Gone was
the low-profile town that I had traversed at 30 miles per hour, using the
Chugach Mountains and the newly built Captain Cook Hotel as orienting
landmarks. Anchorage had grown into a city changed beyond my recognition.
But even in the new, I found some vestiges of the familiar.
At the Southcentral Foundation’s Anchorage Native Primary Care Center, in the
heart of its gleaming modern medical facilities, I stood before the mural True
Pioneer, artist Fred Machetanz’s tribute to rural Alaskan medicine and the work
of Dr. Milo Fritz. Within that montage of scenes depicting the Fritz clinics
around Alaska, I recognized the familiar images of Uncle Milo, Aunt Betsy, and
John Spahn. There, too, were pictured the teenage Native girls, their gloved
hands folded in front of them, as my uncle had described to me so many years
ago, the scene a lovely reminder of how much Alaska medicine and Alaskan life
have changed in the course of a single lifespan.
That pioneering era is over. John Spahn retired to
Washington State, where he died in 1985. Doc Fritz, who with Betsy moved his
practice to the Kenai Peninsula in 1974, saw patients until he was 76, retiring
in 1985. He passed away at their Anchor Point home in 2000. Aunt Betsy outlived
them all, including their two sons Jon and Piet. She died in her home at the
age of 95 in 2009.
At 16, I observed Doc Fritz challenging the status quo. “Don’t
do anything. Something might happen!” he would fume during regular skirmishes
with bureaucratic red tape, ineptitude, and complacency. I laughed but got the
message and resolved to aim high and not let naysayers hinder my work as a
journalist. I would see challenges as opportunities.
My current challenge is writing a book about Doc Fritz. “You
do it. You tell Milo’s story,” Aunt Betsy implored me during my final visit
with her. As I’m finding, it’s a story as extraordinary as the man I knew.
After a summer job brought Linda Fritz to Anchorage in 1966, she fell in love with the area
and hoped to stay on and finish high school here. The idea was nixed by her
parents, so she returned to Pennsylvania with a journal detailing her Alaskan
experiences, shoe boxes of photos, a bear skin rug, moose antlers, pressed
wildflowers, and an Alaskan Social Security number. Before and after her aunt’s
death in 2009, she helped ensure that, as Dr. Milo and Betsy Fritz intended,
their remarkable collection of Native art was donated to the Anchorage Museum,
and their massive Alaskan archives were donated to the University of Alaska
Anchorage. Fritz is currently writing a book about Dr. Milo H. Fritz, “Alaska’s
Flying Doctor,” whose life story so embodies the spirit of Alaska. Prior to this
project, Fritz was the editor of the Delmarva
Review, a literary magazine on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
No comments:
Post a Comment