KAREN:  Okay.  Today is February 1st, 2006, and this is Karen Brewster, I'm here with Bill James at his home in Fairbanks, for the Community Health Aide Oral History Project. 

And let me just do a little sound check on both pieces of equipment here.  All right. 

Thank you very much for agreeing to participate, and we finally caught up with each other after months of back and forth. 

So if you could just start out a little bit, tell us about yourself, your background, how you got into medicine, how you came to Alaska. 

DR. JAMES:  Well, I went to Ohio State University for undergraduate and graduate school, graduated from Ohio State Medical School.  Then I interned at Denver General Hospital. 

And at that time, all doctors were drafted as soon as they got through with their internship.  There was a resident there who had been in the Indian Health Service in Alaska, and talked a lot about his experience, showed me slides and pictures of Alaska. 

I had always had a romantic sort of ideal of what Alaska was like, and I thought joining the Indian Health Service and serving my two years would be more fun that joining -- getting drafted in the Army. 

So I applied, got accepted, and came to Alaska in July of 1959 with the intention of staying for two years. 

When I first got to Anchorage, they were very proud of the fact that the Anchorage Hospital had been open for three or four years then, and they were very proud of the fact that they had a bed for every TB patient in Alaska that needed a bed. 

They needed a doctor on St. George Island in the Pribilofs, and I told them I would go.  So I was sent immediately to St. George Island.  And I was there until the middle of December of 1959, then came back to Anchorage.  And Dr. Bud Shuff was the first eye, ear, nose, and throat doctor at the Native Center. 

He had just arrived and he needed an assistant, so I worked with him until the following June of 1960. 

And they needed someone to go on the Bering Sea patrol, and the Indian -- or the Public Health Service provided medical care for the Coast Guard, and the Coast Guard had this Bering Sea patrol.  So I went to Seattle in June of '60 and got on the North Wind. 

KAREN:  That was a ship? 

DR. JAMES:  That was the ice breaker.  And it was supposed to be a tour until October. 

And we went up into the Bering Sea, we stopped at -- I guess the primary reason for the cruise was to just show a U.S. presence in the Bering Sea. 
And on the way, we stopped at Ketchikan and Juneau, Tatitlek, Kodiak, and several villages on the chain. 

And then went into the Bering Sea.  And at the time, the Russians and the Japanese were fishing extensively in the Bering Sea.  It was while we still had the three-mile limit. 

KAREN:  Right. 

DR. JAMES:  So we saw a lot of the Russian trawlers. 

KAREN:  Now, were you providing medical --

DR. JAMES:  And I was providing medical care, I was the ship's doctor.

KAREN:  So you were providing medical care to the crew, not to people in the villages? 

DR. JAMES:  Primarily to the crew, but we stopped in villages along the way, and we would have a day clinic in Yakutat and at Tatitlek -- at Tatitlek.
And then Dutch Harbor, we stopped there.  And Atka.  And we just had a one-day clinic. 

We had two helicopters aboard and we had a boat, kind of a landing craft boat on board.  We would either go in by helicopter or by boat into the villages. 

And then just spent time.  We went to Little Diomede.  Went to the Pribilofs, and then most of the villages from Nome, Elim -- I'm thinking of what are the names of the villages. 

KAREN:  Wales? 

DR. JAMES:  Went to Wales.  Koyuk.  We went up to Wainwright.  Point Lay. 

KAREN:  Did you go as far as Barrow, or --

DR. JAMES:  And we went as far as Barrow, but they had a hospital there. 

KAREN:  Yeah. 

DR. JAMES:  But we went -- went ashore.  But most of the time we were just out in the ocean.  Just going back and forth.  And so I wasn't very busy unless we were going in to have a clinic.  We went to Unalakleet, Gambell, Savoonga. 

KAREN:  Were people still on King Island at that time? 

DR. JAMES:  I don't know.  We didn't stop at King Island.  It was summertime and I think that even when there were people on King Island that they usually went into Nome for the summer.