Do you know which bar is the oldest in Alaska?<\/p>\n
How about what the relationship was, in the 1940s, between Juneau police and prostitutes?<\/p>\n
Historians, museum employees, and history-philes from around Alaska gathered in Juneau at the end of September for the Museums Alaska\/Alaska Historical Society annual conference. Two of those talks, by historians Doug Vandegraft and Averil Lerman, discussed fascinating, and interrelated, \u201chidden histories\u201d of Southeast. Other talks \u2014 Karen Hofstad of Petersburg\u2019s talk on salmon can labels, Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park historian Karl Gurcke\u2019s talk on the sinking of the 1898 barque Canada, now in Skagway\u2019s Nahku Bay, and scholar Yoko Kugo\u2019s talk about traditional Yup\u2019ik names, among many others \u2014 focused on other aspects of Alaskan history, some more known, some less known.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cNOTORIOUS BARS\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Doug Vandegraft, author of \u201cA Guide to the Notorious Bars of Alaska,\u201d has traveled all over the state as a cartographer. Over the years, he kept notes on \u201cnotorious bars\u201d \u2014 a \u201cmixed history,\u201d as Alaska, he pointed out, has \u201ca long history of enjoyment and abuse of alcohol.\u201d<\/p>\n Vandegraft showed historical maps of downtown Juneau\u2019s buildings, remarkable visuals of how many were dedicated to alcohol. (In 1914, 11 bars were on Front Street, which then curved around at the Triangle Building to include what is now South Franklin Street.)<\/p>\n Alaska voted to go \u201cbone-dry\u201d two years before the rest of the country began prohibition. Officially, it was \u201cdry\u201d to the point, Vandegraft said, that doctors couldn\u2019t get medicines with alcohol as an ingredient. Alaska Prohibition lasted 15 years, from 1918 to 1933.<\/p>\n Post-Prohibition, bars became known as dispensaries; they weren\u2019t allowed to serve liquor until 1939, he said. The first bar to get its license was the Imperial (though the sign above the door says it opened in 1891, Vandegraft considers Prohibition as \u201cresetting the clock.\u201d Regardless, the Imperial still had its license five weeks after the end of Prohibition.)<\/p>\n Of course, Alaska was nowhere close to \u201cbone dry\u201d during that period.<\/p>\n \u201cBootlegging and moonshining were extremely lucrative,\u201d Vandegraft said. So were cigar stores, card rooms and pool halls \u2014 and, presumably, so was the trade plied in the small \u201cdwellings\u201d the old maps show clustered around those businesses. (Territorial officials ordered an end to prostitution in Alaska in 1954, though it likely continued in Juneau until 1956. Ketchikan dealt with its \u201cred-light district\u201d with a big, public scandal of a trial in 1953-1954.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cFANTASTICALLY INTERESTING\u201d HISTORY<\/strong><\/p>\n Prostitution is something historian and public defense lawyer Averil Lerman\u2019s addressed in her talk on the \u201csecret\u201d police blotter kept by the Juneau police. Many of those blotters are now in public archives. Lerman spoke about the blotter from 1946 to 1947, which she said offers \u201ca way for us to look at a mirror\u2026 of ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n Back in the 1940s, police used handwritten ledgers to communicate with each other between different shifts and record the day\u2019s events. Federal marshals took care of felonies, and the police dealt with local eventss.<\/p>\n The blotter provides insights into daily life. One of the interesting aspects, Lerman said, is how many people called about missing children \u2014 toddlers that had gotten out of the house and wandered down the street, or went to sleep in a hidden corner of the house\u2019s basement. Wives or husbands might wander away. People called about lost property: clothing wasn\u2019t easy to get up here back then, and coats regularly went missing.<\/p>\n Most of the entries are \u201cdirectly connected\u201d to alcohol, Lerman said.<\/p>\n Police also dealt with mental health, which was a big issue; police called mental illness \u201cgoing snaky\u201d and discussed the need for a padded cell.<\/p>\n They regularly had to euthanize dogs and cats, disposing of their bodies through a hole in a dock, enclosed by a fence. They ensured that people diagnosed with venereal diseases got treatment (Lerman thinks Juneau had the highest rate of venereal disease in the territory.) Wives \u201cwere regularly getting seriously beaten up,\u201d Lerman said; it was such a normal part of policing, and everyday life, that it was \u201calmost a non-event.\u201d<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s the relationship between police and prostitutes, which Lerman said \u201cis fantastically interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n Prostitutes had to check in with the police to get permission to work, and police regulated \u201cthe line\u201d \u2014 ensuring the curtains were drawn when the lights were on, for example, helping the IRS collect taxes from prostitutes, and serving as go-betweens with the medical clinic.<\/p>\n \u201cAlmost every month, the women all went to court, were fined $25 for disorderly conduct, paid, and went back to work,\u201d Lerman said. \u201cWere they proper court fines? Who knows.\u201d<\/p>\n That 1940s census showed Juneau was 86 percent white, 10 percent Alaska Native, four percent \u201cother\u201d (mostly Filipino and Japanese) and .01 percent black, which translates to around a dozen people.<\/p>\n \u201cRacism and racial prejudice were big issues in Alaska, as they were outside as well,\u201d she said. \u201cRace had a lot to do with who you were and what you could do.\u201d<\/p>\n The language in the blotter was \u201cprofoundly racist,\u201d which Lerman emphasized is not \u201cthem,\u201d but rather \u201cus.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an immensely valuable record,\u201d she said. \u201cIt shows us who we were and therefore it shows us a lot about who we are.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe see the same issues that we are troubled with so much now,\u201d Lerman said at the end of her talk. \u201cI think this is a universal human experience. I don\u2019t think we should demonize it. I think we should accept it or at least understand it. When we understand that what we do is not what we say we do, we are at the beginning of knowing what\u2019s actually real. And if we do know what\u2019s real\u2026 we can decide whether we want to do it that way, or whether we want to do it differently.\u201d<\/p>\n The conference was the first hosted by the Andrew P. Kashevaroff Library, Archives and Museum building since it opened in June. (Historical society talks were at the museum; museum talks were at the Sealaska Heritage Institute\u2019s Walter Soboleff building.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2022 Contact Capital City Weekly editor Mary Catharine Martin at maryc.martin@capweek.com.<\/em> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Do you know which bar is the oldest in Alaska? How about what the relationship was, in the 1940s, between Juneau police and prostitutes? Historians, museum employees, and history-philes from around Alaska gathered in Juneau at the end of September for the Museums Alaska\/Alaska Historical Society annual conference. Two of those talks, by historians Doug […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":7211,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[74],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-7210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-arts-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7210\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7210"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=7210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}