Claire Kopperud

Nearly 100 years ago on June 25, 1914, Claire Kopperud began a journey that would take her a long way from her family’s hard-scrabble farm in western New York.

As a young girl, Claire had both of her grandmothers living in the family home, and they urged her to get an education and try her best to become an independent woman. When she was just 13 years old, she moved into town and took a job taking care of children and doing housekeeping for the family of a chemist. In exchange for room, board and long hours of work, she got a chance to attend high school. Claire graduated with grades that set records, only to find that she was far too young to be admitted into a hospital nursing program. If a student could buy uniforms and books, such training hospitals provided an avenue for higher education to those with limited means.

Undaunted, Claire moved to Detroit in the midst of the Great Depression. There she found work as a housekeeper and saved every penny she earned for two years. When she was 19, Claire was admitted into Buffalo General Hospital’s nurse’s training school. Years later, she remembered that the huge hospital gave her great opportunities to care for all kinds of patients, including some Civil War veterans. In 1937, she became a registered nurse and then finished an additional residency program before going to Herman Kiefer Hospital in Detroit for work and training in the care of communicable disease and tuberculosis patients. At 23, Claire was anxious to see the rest of the world. She wrote away and received offers to work in hospitals overseas and from the Territory of Alaska. She chose Alaska because it was very far away from western New York, people spoke the same language and she received a steamship ticket.

She remembers a beautiful frost on the trees the fall day in 1938 when she arrived in Palmer. At noon, she went to the busy Colony Hospital and began work at 3 p.m. that afternoon. For the next 75 years, Claire would take care of people, seek every opportunity to get more education and try to find a way to travel to the far corners of the world.

In 1938, Colony was the only hospital for many miles. One of the things Claire loved about nursing was that she got to know the old sourdoughs, the new Colony families, coal and gold miners from the mountains to the north, Native families living in the area and the kids that the government brought from distant villages to the BIA school at Eklutna. Claire would later remember the otherwise healthy young miners who were dying of pneumonia and the many kids from Eklutna School who had tuberculosis. Her training proved invaluable in caring for them. Some of the young people could carve a whole sled dog team from a single bar of ivory soap. The old-timers at the hospital were very kind to the children, and she remembers them telling her that if they could get well, they wanted most of all to go back out to the creek and work their claim for one more season.

In the fall of 1940, Claire married Herb Kopperud and together they had four sons. During the war years, Claire worked for a time at the hospital in Valdez, and later the young family moved to a little house on 5th Avenue in Anchorage. After the war, Herb and Claire moved a large Colony house onto their lots in Palmer, beside the tracks where the steam trains passed every day, hauling coal from the mines to Anchorage. Claire worked at Valley Hospital and helped the family found and operate one of Alaska’s oldest trucking companies. She became the Nursing Director of the new Pioneer Home in Palmer and for years considered it a gift of good fortune to be able to take care of the pioneers who had a shared memory of living in a new place at the edge of the wilderness.

She never lost her desire to keep learning. In addition to paying for her own advanced nurse’s training over the years, she amassed an enormous number of credits by taking every community college course that was offered. For years she took women from the Pioneer Home with her so they could also take classes. After she retired in 1981, Claire volunteered as a nurse with Hospice and traveled. She floated down the Colorado River, rode the Trans-Siberian Railroad with Herb, and climbed the Pyramids. After Herb died in 1992, Claire kept busy reading everything, helping her children and grandchildren, and traveling. She went to China several times and to other places far away from Palmer. In later years, Claire learned to play bridge and enjoyed tending huge planters of flowers around the house where she lived for nearly 70 years and died there on Feb. 2, 2014. Claire accepted service to others as a natural way of life. She should be remembered as a woman who brought her most valuable gifts to help build Alaska.

In fulfillment of Claire’s wishes there will be no funeral. When spring comes, the family will gather for a memorial service at Palmer Pioneer Cemetery, where Claire’s ashes will be buried next to Herb.

Claire is survived by her four sons, Leif, Noel, Ross (Candace) and Karl (Melanie) Kopperud; grandsons, Lars, Ainslie, Peter, Alex and Evan; granddaughters, Marta, Daphne, Kristen, Greta and Brittany; and five great-grandchildren.