10 YEARS AGO
April 28, 2015 — JUNEAU — After 98 days in the regular session, the Legislature will be back at work this morning by order of Gov. Bill Walker.
The special session proclamation, delivered moments after the Senate gaveled out, includes some of the governor’s top priorities that were left unfinished by the Legislature when it adjourned Monday night.
That includes Medicaid expansion, a sexual abuse prevention program for K-12 students known as Erin’s Law, and funding for the unfunded budget bills the Legislature passed Monday evening.
Walker has made it no secret that he planned to call legislators back “immediately” if they failed to take up Medicaid expansion, a tentpole issue for the independent governor.
25 YEARS AGO
April 28, 2000 — ANCHORAGE — A wolf that bit a 6-year-old boy in a Yakutatarea logging camp this week did not have rabies.
Tests conducted Thursday on the wolf’s head at the Alaska State Virology Laboratory in Fairbanks came back negative for the disease, said lab manager Don Ritter.
Ritter said he can’t remember a similar occurrence involving a rabies-free wolf in Alaska. The last two human deaths in Alaska from rabid wolf attacks were in the 1940s, he said.
The wolf’s body, which was partially burned, was being flown to Juneau for further tests by the Division of Wildlife Conservation. If possible, tests would be done to see if the wolf, which wore a radio collar, had been eating garbage and perhaps had no fear of people.
Victor VanBallenberghe, a retired Forest Service biologist, said the wolf was caught and collared near the mouth of the Copper River in March 1996. At the time the animal was about 10 months old and weighed 77 pounds.
50 YEARS AGO
April 28, 1975 — After day-long discussions on the problems of growth, participants in a community forum here were told the ideas they tossed around don’t fit Fairbanks.
Former Alaskan Joe Meeker told more than 300 citizens and community leaders that Fairbanks might better survive by maintaining its diversity and compatibility with its environment rather than seeking the goals of community growth other cities aspire to.
Meeker, now senior tutor in humanities at Athabasca University in Edmonton, was summing up his impressions at the end of the Forum on Community Growth Saturday at Ryan Junior High School. He said Fairbanks could be the first northern city to meet a boom crisis with a comic, rather than tragic, outlook.
“Fairbanks is one of the hard places of the world to live in,” said the former McKinley National Park ranger and author, whose latest book has earned him a Pulitzer Prize nomination. “Mankind, I think, appeared in hard places. Evolution appears in difficult places, and most of what we have in our minds now emerged in that kind of environment,” he said. “Mankind evolved in hard places to live like Africa and the hunters who inhabited this place before the coming of the white man.”
75 YEARS AGO
April 28, 1950 — WASHINGTON — (AP) — Frederick Vanderbilt Field swore today that to the best of his knowledge Prof. Owen Lattimore and three State Department officials about whom he was questioned are not Communists.
But the alleged “millionaire angel” of Communist causes incurred possible contempt action by refusing to tell a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee whether he himself is or ever was a Communist.
Field joined with ex-Communist Boss Earl Browder and Dr. Bella V. Dogg, a former party member, in defense of Lattimore against charges by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Wisconsin Republican, and Louis F. Budenz. Senator McCarthy has called Lattimore a Communist spy.
100 YEARS AGO
April 28, 1925 — Court convened yesterday morning to attend to legal matters that had accumulated during the last several months. Several civil cases were set for trial during the month of May.
The case of Gustav A. Vedin vs. A.C. McConnell will heard May 25; the case of F.B. Barker vs. Fairbanks Gold Dredging Company is set for May 18; and the case of George Weber vs. D.H. Cascaden et all will be heard May 28.
There will be a naturalization hearing May 11 , at which time applicants will be given their final examination and citizenship papers.