Today (Jan. 7, 2021), the Wrangell Sentinel ran a photo of mine, of bears and eagles from Anan Creek, across five columns on the front page. My dear friend, Larry Persily, recently bought the struggling small-town paper and wanted to make a splash with the first issue under his new ownership.
I have known Larry for a long time. I came to Juneau in August 1979 to become the Juneau Empire’s first full-time photojournalist, documenting daily life in Juneau. Larry and his wife, Leslie, fresh out of newspaper work in Chicago, bought the Wrangell Sentinel in 1976. In the fall of 1979 they invited me to Wrangell to judge their newspaper’s annual photo contest. That long weekend started a life-long friendship. They sold the Wrangell paper in 1984, moved to Juneau, and Larry later bought a house next door to us. He even ended up as my boss at the Juneau Empire when he became the Empire’s editor from 1990 to 1995. I left the paper in 1993 to start freelancing full time, and Larry left in 1995 to start his weekly Juneau newspaper simply called “The Paper”. Knowing the odds were stacked against him, I volunteered for free to do the photos for him. Sadly, he closed the doors on “The Paper” in 1997 after 15 months of publishing. After a long career with other news organizations and public policy work, Larry has bought the Wrangell newspaper again. Larry loves small-town journalism and is on a quest to do all he can to save the smaller newspapers across the state from failing. I want him to succeed so I am giving him 2021 Alaska Calendars to give out to all his Wrangell subscribers as a way to boost interest in the paper that has been around since 1902. Wrangell and Alaska are fortunate to have Larry doing his best to keep independent newspapering alive and well in Alaska.
