LOEL BURKET SHULER

Loel grew up on the southern shores of Lake Michigan in Benton Harbor, MI. She graduated from Michigan’s Olivet College with a BA in English Literature in 1943. During the WWII she served as Sales Manager for the University of Chicago Press. In that period she met and married Dr. Robert H. Shuler, a professor of physiology who was acquiring his MD under the Army Student Training Program—ASTP.

After the war they moved to Seattle, Washington. While her husband was an intern and resident at King County’s Harborview Hospital, Loel worked as editor and Sales Manager for the University of Washington Press. In 1949 the Shulers left the South 48 and moved to Mt. Edgecumbe, in the Territory of Alaska, resulting in the events and adventures described in Alaska…in the Wake of the North Star.

After several years as Administrator of the Alaska Native Service Hospital in Mt. Edgecumbe Dr. Shuler left the Public Health Service and went into private practice with the Juneau Clinic in Alaska’s capital city. Eventually the Shuler’s returned to Sitka, a place they had both come to love. Dr. Shuler continued private practice in Sitka until his death in 1971

Today Loel lives in Pacific Grove on California’s beautiful Monterey Peninsula, as do her daughter Barbara Rose (the Stowaway) and her son Mark. When people used to ask Loel how she came to live on the Monterey Peninsula she confounded them by saying she chose it because “it's as nearly like Southeastern Alaska as any place in the south 48.” Now retired from years of working in theatre—teaching, acting, and designing costumes—she has found time to return to her early loves, writing and Alaska and its interesting people.