Alaska's Good

From all accounts, a dentist in Alaska has no time for thumb-twiddling. Young Dr. Maxwell Kennedy of Nome found that the "Eskimos hound me to death" (TIME, Dec. 28). Oral Hygiene last week carried the tale of plump, 60-year-old Dr. William Franklin Good, who, until the Japs came, spent his summers practicing from a sailboat and found customers waiting on the docks from Ketchikan to Kiska.

"Just Curious." Seattle-born Dr. Good drifted into his sailboat practices because "I guess I am just curious about what's on the other side of the horizon." After his graduation from the University of Pennsylvania Dental School he went back home and, in 1909, with four friends and five pairs of dental forceps, sailed for Alaska in a 21-foot boat called The Kid. The Gold Rush was on and the boys did a fine business. Dr. Good has been back every summer but three (when he went to see what Europe was like).

He went to Alaska on his honeymoon, and his wife always joined him on his trips until ill health prevented it. His daughter Anna Ellen was born in Alaska. Through the years he had a succession of little sailboats, each needing only two for a crew, each with a dental chair and firm foothold for the doctor on the afterdeck. Finally in 1936 he had one built that exactly suited him--the Cheechako (why Good named her the Eskimo for "tenderfoot" no one knows), a neat, 42-foot, diesel-engined ketch with a hot-water heating system, a bathtub and a small organ for his handsome daughter to play.

"Dentist Jim." In the comic strip King of the Royal Mounted there used to be a character, "Dentist Jim," who visited Alaska's ports on a small ship with a sightly daughter. Dr. Good has heard that he and Anna are the originals but has never bothered to look up the comic. He was continually amazed at the need for dentistry in Alaska and wonders what his old friends do now for their aching jaws. If a dentist's office can be pleasant, the chair on the gently swaying deck, with halyards, birds and daughter Anna to look at, came near it. But when weather was rough and the deck bounced too much for the doctor to brace his stocky body for an extraction, he repaired to the dock and yanked without ceremony.

Nowhere to Go. This year Dr. Good has nowhere to go. The Cheechako bobs at a Seattle dock, where Anna, now married to a Naval officer, keeps an eye on her. Dr. and Mrs. Good live in a bungalow near the sea in Sunset Beach, in Southern California, quietly Victory-gardening with a few Good twists -- such as raising peacocks to eat. The doctor built the bungalow in 1941 because "I saw all this coming. When I was in the Aleutians. I was always running into Jap surveyors." He was in the Aleutians when the Japs took Kiska, departed as fast as the Cheechako would diesel.

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