I used to be a pretty avid follower of “Dilbert”. Back at one of my previous jobs, the running joke was that “Dilbert” was a documentary about my life. Then something happened. Mr. Adams’s…eccentricities, for want of a better word, got on my nerves. (Remember the “Dilberito“, and Mr. Adams’s idea that we didn’t need to actually, you know, eat food? We could just pills with all the nutrients we needed.)
He was still on my radar, because how could he not be? But he didn’t have the relevance for me that he once had. I’m sad he’s passed on, though.
(These days, the documentary about my life is called “The Wire”.)
Elle Simone Scott, of “America’s Test Kitchen”. I get a kick out of having “ATK” on in the background while I work.
Jirdes Winther Baxter. She was 101.
Ms. Baxter was the last known survivor of the 1925 Nome diphtheria epidemic.
A copy of medical records from 1925, possessed by Mr. Baxter, a retired lawyer, indicates that Jirdes (pronounced JER-diss) Winther, then 11 months old, was hospitalized in Nome on Jan. 30 with diphtheria and what she later called a high fever. Highly contagious, diphtheria is a dangerous bacterial disease that can clog airways, severely restricting breathing, and damage the heart and kidneys.
Jirdes’s Norwegian-born mother, Ragnhild, and one of her brothers, John, were admitted on Feb. 2. Her father, Johan, and another brother, Gudmund, did not contract the disease.
At the time, there was only one doctor, Curtis Welch, in Nome, a gold-rush town of 1,400 inhabitants. After two young children died of diphtheria by mid-January, officials there instituted a quarantine advised by Dr. Welch, who had realized that a pandemic seemed “almost inevitable.”
He sent alerts, by radio telegram, to other towns in Alaska and pleaded for emergency help from the U.S. Public Health Service. The nearest supply of antitoxin, made from the blood of horses, was at a hospital in Anchorage, 1,000 miles away.
They couldn’t fly antitoxin in by plane, the port was frozen over, and there was no train service directly to Nome.
A plan was devised to carry 300,000 units of antitoxin by train from Anchorage to the railhead of Nenana in interior Alaska, about 300 miles north. From there, sled dogs would ferry the serum 674 miles west to Nome, a relay that would involve 20 mushers and about 150 dogs. It would come to be known as the 1925 Serum Run and the Great Race of Mercy.
For days, millions were enthralled by radio and newspaper accounts of the rush to keep a threatened town alive. A front-page headline in The New York Times reported, “Serum Relief Near for Stricken Nome.”
Bill Shannon, the first musher on the relay, retrieved the serum — a 20-pound package containing glass vials housed in a metal cylinder — from the train in Nenana. He insulated the container with bearskin and took off on a 52-mile stretch as midnight approached on Jan. 27.
Mushers handed off the antitoxin and rested at roadhouses along the relay, enduring aching cold and wind and blizzards that sometimes made the trail disappear. On Feb. 2, the serum arrived in Nome after five days and seven hours, frozen but quickly thawed by Dr. Welch and administered to the sick.
Ms. Baxter had a few words to say on a subject of historical interest:
Ms. Winther Baxter believed — as many now do — that Balto, a husky that helped lead his team on the final 55-mile stretch into Nome, received heroic acknowledgment, including a statue in Central Park, at the expense of Togo, another husky who was the lead sled dog for a celebrated Norwegian-born driver named Leonhard Seppala.
Togo led his team for 261 miles — 170 to meet up with the relay and 91 on the longest, most hazardous stretch, involving a treacherous crossing of a frozen bay. Decades later, Togo received his own statue in New York, but in a less prominent location, Seward Park on the Lower East Side.
“No, no, you have it all wrong,” Ms. Winther Baxter corrected people when they mentioned the Balto statue, her granddaughter recalled her saying. “Togo was the real hero.”
