Alice Josephine “Josie” Keys White was a Charter Member of Juneau Igloo No. 6.
She was born July 7, 1872, in Goldendale, Washington. Her parents were Calvin S. Keys and Jane Freelove Peck Keys.
She married Elmer J. “Stroller” White on December 30, 1891, in Tacoma, Washington. They had two sons, John McBurney White and Albert Hamilton White, and one daughter, Lenora White.
She came to Alaska with her husband, a well-known pioneer Alaska journalist.
The Whites arrived in Skagway when the town was still a tent city of gold-rush stampeders. Mr. White took a job with the Skagway News, a weekly newspaper, and the family remained in Skagway until the autumn of 1899.
They then traveled over the newly completed White Pass Railroad to Lake Bennett. Although they did not have the $500 required to cross the Canadian border, a barge owner told the Canadian officials that Mr. White was working as a cook on the barge. They boarded the barge in October, late in the season, and floated down the Yukon River toward Dawson. They came within fifteen miles of Dawson before the river froze.
“We went to Dawson for the mad excitement of it,” Mrs. White later recalled. “We didn’t know what we would do, but Mr. White got a job with the Dawson Nugget right away.”
The family remained in Dawson until 1905, when they moved to Whitehorse. Mr. White purchased the Whitehorse Star, and the family remained there until 1916. Their son, Albert H. White, was born in Whitehorse on August 7, 1907.
In 1916, they moved to Douglas, Alaska, where Mr. White purchased the Douglas Island News. “Douglas was the big town then,” she recalled. “The Treadwell Mine was going full swing.”
The Whites completed construction of a new newspaper plant in time for the Treadwell mine cave-in of 1917. The new plant included a cast-off press from the Juneau Empire. The press was moved back to Juneau from Douglas in 1920 when Stroller’s Weekly was established.
“I didn’t work much on the paper,” Mrs. White said. “I had two children to bring up and a little grouse-shooting to do. But when Stroller was sick, I would take over.”
Mrs. White was employed as assistant curator of the Territorial Museum in 1925 by the Rev. A. P. Kashevaroff, who had established the museum in 1920.
Her husband died in 1930. “I was the one who always talked about getting out of Alaska,” she later said.
She retired in 1950 and moved to Los Angeles, California, to live with her daughter. She died there on May 26, 1956.
Sources
1920 U.S. Federal Census, Juneau
Biographies of Alaska-Yukon Pioneers 1850-1950, Ed Ferrell, Vol. 2, pp. 344-345; Vol. 1, p. 337
Washington Marriage License
California Death Index