An obscure film dramatizing the lack of modern medical facilities in Haines more than 50 years ago aired on Turner Movie Classics Sunday.
“Alaska Lifeboat,” a 21-minute film released in 1956, features the M/S Hygiene, a medical ship operated by the territorial Department of Health that stopped here to dispense health care. It includes scenes of Fort Seward and Main Street and residents including former Mayor Leonard King.
An episode in RKO Studios’ “Theater of Life” series, the film is the fictionalized account of a public health nurse who arrives in Fort Seward aboard the Hygiene and the opposition she faces when she begins a discussion of improving local health care. It is shot without sound, and includes theatrical music and dramatic voiceover.
The film opens with the arrival of the Hygiene at Port Chilkoot Dock, with Santa Claus Mountain in the background. An unidentified public health nurse, who serves as the film’s narrator, gets off the ship and describes the town as “500 pioneers living in peril for nearly a year since our last visit; frozen in for long periods during the hard winter, when even in the direst emergency we couldn’t reach them.”
The film depicts Haines residents as careless about personal hygiene and skeptical about the need for health care beyond what medicines are available at local stores.
The nurse sees patients aboard the ship, and targets a young Native boy identified as “Ralph Sarlan” for special care and treatment of a deformed foot. After convincing Ralph’s father about the safety of the procedure, the boy is sent away for surgery on Alaska Coastal Airlines.
The nurse later presides over a town meeting to hear from residents who are “dissatisfied with the health services they’ve got…like they were once dissatisfied with kerosene lamps and outdoor plumbing, they want to look after themselves as well as their sick horse.”
A woman asks, “We have modern scientific equipment for breeding our livestock, but what about our best crop? We women are tired of having our babies on the kitchen table.”
Carl Heinmiller, one of only a few characters in the movie identified by name, also stands up to speak to the gathering. “We had medical care in the service,” he says. “We got it in the islands and the jungles, places more remote than Alaska. We’re still Americans and I have a wife and children to think about. I say let’s do what we can to get a hospital here.” His appeal is met with angry grumbling from the crowd about high costs.
The film ends with a hopeful tone that suggests Haines will have the medical attention it needs. “Alaska is a vital part of America, a land with precious natural resources for the future. Without human resources there can be no future. It’s time to see that health is our greatest wealth.”
The M/S Hygiene is an historic fact. The vessel was outfitted for physical exams, X-rays, blood tests and immunizations and first sailed out of Juneau in June 1946. Its original mission was identifying cases of tuberculosis. Besides Southeast Alaska, the ship visited the Alaska Peninsula, Aleutian Islands and Norton Sound.
The CVN this week contacted Don Whiteside, an Oakland, Calif. resident who said the movie nurse is his mother, the then-unmarried Phyllis Parker, who worked in Southeast as a public health nurse and lived in Ketchikan. Whiteside said his uncle, Parker’s brother, reported seeing the film short once while at the movies in Minnesota. Whiteside said he believed the film was shot here in the late 1940s.
Resident Marge Ward, who came to Haines as an adult in 1947, said she remembers visits by the medical boat, which was staffed with a nurse, dentist and doctor. It docked here once every two or three months, she said. “I’m very familiar with the Hygiene. I knew most of the people on there. I took some of them up to Klukwan when they were in.”
Ward said resistance to improved health care seems like a Hollywood touch, used to add drama to the picture. Haines lacked a resident physician from the closure of Fort Seward in 1946 until the arrival of Dr. Phil Jones in the later 1950s.
“I don’t think anyone was hostile to having a doctor. If you got sick, you went to Juneau. If you got pregnant, you went to Juneau to have the baby. I think Tommy (the youngest of her four children) was three when Phil Jones arrived. (Jones) was very popular with people.”
Ward, who lived in Fort Seward until 1953 when she moved downtown, said she’d never heard of the film, though she was busy raising children by the mid-1950s. Sheldon Museum workers and Chilkat Valley Historical Society members also this week said they’d never heard of the film. Haines had a movie theater on Main Street until the early 1980s.
Annette Smith, who was a child when the film was created, said the bit about children born on kitchen tables was true, but that wasn’t due to resistance to medical care – it was the difficulty of getting a doctor to move here.
“Alaska Lifeboat” is not scheduled to air again on TCM but it can be found on the Internet site YouTube in three parts by searching for “Alaska Lifeboat.”