Janine Allen doesn’t get a birthday, per say, this year, but she’s coming up on 27. The leap day baby has spent the past five years in Haines.
Allen was born and raised in Greeley, Colo., and named after a nurse who worked with her obstetrician-gynecologist father and nurse mother in the delivery room where they met.
At age 4, Allen was diagnosed with congenital hearing loss and soon fitted with hearing aids.
In elementary school, she sported a blue box around her neck with coils that connected to her hearing aids to amplify the teacher’s voice. The FM system helped her learn and probably stay out of trouble too, as teachers often forgot about the mic when they took kids in the hall to discipline them.
“That shaped my childhood, alright,” Allen said in an interview last weekend.
The deaf kids in her school let Allen know she wasn’t one of them, but she wasn’t one of the hearing kids, either. She grew frustrated with always being last to recess because of having to remove the box and coils before going out.
“I was starting to feel very different and not liking it,” she said.
In sixth grade, she refused to use the device. “Normal life doesn’t involve people with FM systems, so it taught me how to exist in the world,” she said.
In middle school Allen was grouped with other hearing-impaired students for self-advocacy classes, which she hated and eventually escaped. “I really just wanted to be normal,” she said.
After high school, Allen attended the University of Colorado at Boulder. She majored in history and was very involved with the Center of the American West, which gathers and disperses information on western American issues.
Allen highly regards the Center and its founder Patricia Nelson Limerick, for helping her see the complexities of history and its relationship to current issues.
While Allen was reading a book for her thesis, Erik Stevens biked up and started a conversation. Two years later, in 2010, the newly-graduated pair and friend Jeff Moskowitz drove to Haines to erect a cabin on Steven’s Chilkat Lake property.
“It sounded fun to me to go see a new state, especially one as crazy as Alaska, and build something with my hands,” Allen said.
She didn’t expect to permanently relocate, but when fall arrived, Allen moved from Chilkat Lake to Haines instead of back to Colorado. She waitressed at the Chilkat Bakery, volunteered at the library and house-sat through winter.
Before returning to the lake for the summer, she applied for a job that had opened at the public library. As there wasn’t yet a cell phone tower at Klukwan, her application included instructions on reaching her for an interview: Call a friend, who would bring the message to Christy Tengs Fowler, who had a radio to reach the lake, where a neighbor would hear it and canoe over to deliver it.
In September 2011 Allen started work as a library aide, and has since served as adult circulation services assistant and volunteer coordinator.
The job has suited her: she loves serving the public and she loves books. “They’ve always been a safe place for me,” she said.
“As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that books were a tremendous solace to me because I didn’t have to listen to what people were saying, I didn’t have to work to hear. The words were all just there on the page.”
Allen has shared her love of books with the public at work and on the KHNS public library talk segment as well as with her little sister in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program.
“She’s very well read, always up on the newest books that are out there. She’s a good resource for people who are looking for a book… she’s able to point them in the right direction on that. She knows about a lot of authors,” said library collections director Lisa Blank.
Allen keeps up on new music, too, which she shares with KHNS listeners most Friday nights on the Alternate Currents show. Beginning in March, Allen will start a full-time job as KHNS program director. Her position at the library will shift from part-time to that of grateful patron.
“It hasn’t been an easy decision to make. I wish there was a way I could do both but I’m excited about the challenges and opportunities at KHNS,” she said.
“I love the library very dearly and this community is really lucky to have such an extraordinary library. I also love radio.”
Radio station manager Kay Clements said besides hosting a show and serving on the station’s Community Advisory Board, Allen has shown she’s not afraid of technology.
“It’s important in this position to have a pulse on our community and be connected to different segments of our listeners. Janine also has an established relationship to the community through her work at the library and with volunteers,” Clements said.
Besides books and music, Allen enjoys cross country skiing, Scrabble, playing ukulele, dancing and serving on the Haines Friends of Recycling board.
Allen was an exceptionally accident-prone child, which she said led her to favor more mellow activities as an adult. She cracked open her head, broke one arm in three places, had four permanent teeth knocked out in a bike crash and fell off a friend’s roof onto a stick that punctured her arm.
Fortunately, she also learned how to laugh at herself.
“There’s a lot of humor in a hearing impaired person’s life,” she said. “I’ve definitely had some confusing interactions. Sometimes it’s pretty comical.”
Unlike many with hearing loss, Allen picks up higher pitches better than low, gruff sounds. She relies largely on lip-reading, which makes it especially hard to understand big-bearded men with growling voices.
She served one gruff, mustached man a Mickey Mouse pancake at the Chilkat Bakery. “I told him our cook had a sense of humor,” she said, before realizing he had only ordered bacon.
Allen said Haines feels like home. “I can’t seem to leave. When I travel I just realize that Haines is very special. The quality of people here is high. I know sometimes it’s hard, we all know each other and sometimes it leads to drama, but at the end of the day, I appreciate it.”