A lot of you know Melinda Munson as the co-owner of the Skagway News, arriving here just as Covid-19 changed the world. What you might not know is that she juggles the life of publisher/writer/teacher with her life as a mother of seven children. Five of whom are adopted and come with special needs.
Munson got a degree in journalism from the University of Washington, but as she tells it, life very quickly got in the way of pursuing a career in the field. She and her husband, who she’d married before college, moved to Las Vegas and realized a different calling.
“You know we started adopting kids with special needs and there wasn’t daycare for them and even if there was I couldn’t have afforded it. My husband worked for Catholic charities there and he did Meals on Wheels and fed the homeless. And I just took care of the kids while he was at work. Then we moved to Alaska, and I just started meeting all kinds of really cool people and I thought, I want to write again,” said Munson.
Melinda and her business partner Gretchen Wemhoff heard the unlikely story about the Skagway News, and how the owner of the paper was looking to give the paper away.
“I saw this article in the Anchorage Daily News that Larry Persilly was looking to give the paper to somebody and it was a dream job that I never thought to dream of, so we applied.”
Then Larry called and said the paper was theirs. The Munson family packed up their possessions and their seven kids and made the trek to Skagway. They weren’t here long before the Covid hammer dropped.
“So we’d been here about a week when school got canceled and all the kids were home and all of a sudden I had to figure out what I was going to do with everybody. For about a day that first week, I thought about getting on a plane and going back because our house was still there. But, we eventually sold the house, and we just bought a house, and we are here to stay.”
Not only did they buy a house, but they bought a house that came with a Church. What does she have planned for that extra building? Considering they have seven children, and the five that were adopted have special needs…
“I’m going to say a majority of them will never be able to live independently so as these multiple children turn 18, and the first set will this year, we will move them over to the church which we’re turning into an unofficial Munson group home, where we’ll get staff and they can have a little bit more independence.”
But until the kids are old enough to move across the yard, they need to be in school.
“Before we came, all the special ed students that Skagway had were pull-out students. So maybe they needed help with math or a certain skill and they’d be pulled out of class and then pulled back in, but several of my kids can’t be in a regular classroom without distracting everybody. So they actually had to create a self-contained classroom just for my kids and hire a special ed teacher just for my kids, which they did, and they did a very great job.”
You may wonder, as I did if the Munson family plans on adopting more kids.
“It’s a hard no. We’re full up.”
Covid-19 has impacted the Skagway News as hard as it has any business in town that relies on revenue from cruise ship traffic. About 80% of their projected revenue typically comes from ad sales in their summer supplement the Skaguay Alaskan. So Melinda will continue to teach high school classes online, co-publish the paper, be a wife and mom to a very large, amazing family, right here in Skagway.
“We love it here. From the minute we got here, just the people. I’m never going to leave. I love it here. I belong here.”
