WALTER:  We're sitting at Homer, Alaska, 8th of July, 2005.  Karen is here from Oral History Department, Rasmuson Library of Fairbanks, and Walter is sitting at his home here.  We're just talking now to see what level to set the machine at. 

KAREN:  Okay.  We're back after that little test, and why don't we just go ahead and get started.  We'll start out with a little bit about you and when and where you were born and how you ended up in Alaska. 

WALTER:  This is Walter Johnson speaking in Homer on July 8th, 2005. 
I was born 83 years ago in the prairies in Nebraska, grew up there, and came to Alaska in 19 -- first in 1941 for the summer, went back to do a year at the University of Alaska on a -- University of Nebraska on a regent's scholarship.  And in the spring of ‘42, I got on my bicycle and rode to Seattle, came to Alaska where I have stayed more -- or forever.  Or since, except for going out to school and training.  In the fall of ‘42, 1942, I went to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks where I enrolled along with 116, 115 other students total at that time.  After -- during the next seven years, I spent a couple years in the Army during the war at the hospital at Wainwright, then Ladd Field, and also spent a good bit of my time up at Wiseman, Alaska, up in the -- above the Arctic Circle in the Brooks Range.  Up there, I managed -- my partner, Bill English, and I had a little store, and also I worked for the Road Commission, Cat scanning in the summer. 
After that --

KAREN:  What did you say, Cat skinning? 

WALTER:  I was --

KAREN:  What is that? 

WALTER:  Operator -- heavy equipment operator. 

KAREN:  Oh, okay. 

WALTER:  Yeah.  Anyway, I went out to a -- took my medical training at the University of Nebraska Medical School, and in 1954, was the first graduate of the University of Alaska to come back to Alaska to practice.  This was at the hospital in Bethel where there were two of us at that time, Dr. Harriet Jackson Schirmer (phonetic) and myself. 

I spent there -- two years there, and since this was the first time there were two doctors there, we began to make field trips.  And Harriet went mostly to the Kuskokwim and myself to the Yukon. 

There I encountered villages where they had never or for -- or seldom seen a doctor.  Some of them, the last time was seven years ago when the Yukon Health Boat came by to take X-rays in connection with the tuberculosis drive.  We dealt with the local folks to -- over the radio, often through the BIA teacher in order to extend some health care to the villages because up until then, I would estimate that at least about a fourth of the children died of pneumonia before school age and many had repeated episodes of otitis media and ended up with draining ears. 

The teacher, in turn, needed to talk with a local person who would be an interpreter and actually see the patient.  The teacher's training -- training consisted of stopping at Bethel for an hour to learn how to give a penicillin shot.  Penicillin being available. 

KAREN:  What motivated you to go to medical school?  Why did you go out to become a doctor? 

WALTER:  Well, I had registered from the beginning as a premed student.  There were no other premed students at the University of Alaska. 
There was one predental student, Richard Brothat (phonetic) from Nome, so there were very limited courses in biology, but -- so my major ended up in bio -- in anthropology and biology. 

But while -- well, because I was interested in medicine, I asked -- after boot camp training in Fairbanks, I asked to be assigned to the hospital and was, where I worked in the hospital laboratory for the duration, a couple years that I was in the service. 

While I lived at Wiseman -- and I lived there one year around because I enjoyed it up there, and it was nice to go hunt and hike and the country was essentially uninhabited then.  Then I would spend summers, and long summers, because this school term was kept short so we could all work, and then I would usually have to put up wood and whatnot for Bill's mother, so I would have a fairly long summer before I came down to school, and they always let me in late. 

While I was there, of course, there was not -- very little illnesses, but I ended up dressing wounds and extracting aching teeth and things like that.  So I could see what -- what it was like to be in a remote place where there was no care available.  And then, of course, people did not have the money to go into the hospital and there was -- Wiseman was not a predominantly Native village, and so there was -- there were no -- no resources by way of drugs or contact with the physician. 

But anyway, I went into medicine because I -- that was the field I wanted to work in.