Kari Lundgren
Jennifer McNichol
Sandy Poulson
By Sentinel Staff
Five Sitka women are to be honored at the annual Sitkans Against Family Violence Honoring Women Celebration 7 p.m. April 22 at Centennial Hall.
This year’s Women of the Year are Jennifer McNichol, Kari Lundgren and Sandy Poulson. SAFV also will commemorate two late colleagues, Deanna Moore and Sharon McIndoo Dawe.
Appetizers by Chef Edith Johnson, a no-host bar with beer, wine and non-alcoholic beverages by Mean Queen, and an honoring ceremony with a slide show of the honorees are planned.
The event will close with drawing in a raffle for a $1,000 cash prize; socializing; and dancing.
Tickets cost $35 each and are available at Old Harbor Books and online at safv.org. For information, call 907-747-3370.
The awardees are:
Kari Lundgren
Kari Lundgren was born and raised in Northeast Wisconsin and attended the University of Minnesota-St. Paul/Minneapolis, graduating in 1985 with a bachelor of science in education degree.
After working for the Australian Outward Bound School, she returned to the United States and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine, graduating in 1992 as a physician assistant. Having done her last rotation in Kotzebue in the NW Arctic, she fell in love with Alaska and was hired by the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium as a community health aide program (CHAP) trainer. In the 27 years with SEARHC, she has held a variety of positions including CHAP director, assistant medical director for Community Health Services and special projects for telehealth and electronic health record installation, and the opening of the Student Health Center at Mt. Edgecumbe High School. She joined the SEARHC Behavioral Health team as a psychiatric physician assistant in 2013, where she is currently employed.
When Lundgren moved to Sitka in 1992 she discovered a vibrant community with many volunteer opportunities, especially in music and the arts. She and Al Katz started the Sitka Contra Dance. They were soon joined by the band Fishing for Cats and other callers, and in 2016 provided technical assistance starting the Sitka Techno Contra. She played cello in the Sitka Community Orchestra and taught beginning cello to a small group of students.
Lundgren joined Sitka Folk and enjoyed producing a number of folk music concerts for Sitkans over the years. She started the Sitka Sacred Harp Sing, teaching traditional a cappella shape note singing, which blossomed to include an annual statewide convention that drew singers to Alaska from far distances.
She volunteered for years at the Alaska Raptor Rehabilitation Center as a rehabilitation assistant. She is a current member of the Sitka Rotary Club, where she served two terms as president and is currently treasurer. She volunteered at KCAW-Raven Radio with a long-standing radio show shared with Tom Crane called ‘‘Skillet Lickers,’’ playing all genres of traditional American music. She eventually joined the Raven Radio board, serving for a time as president, and went on to serve on the regional CoastAlaska board.
She joined the Sitka Music Festival board eight years ago and currently serves as its president. And she has fulfilled one of her longstanding volunteer dreams and is the Monday night cashier at the Sitka White Elephant.
She is married to Ron Handerson Sr. and together they own Coastal Collision Repair. When she has free time, she likes to dabble in gardening and watch the beautiful fluctuations in Sitka weather.
Jennifer McNichol
Dr. Jenn McNichol grew up outside in Essex, Vermont. Her mom, Joan, was a librarian/educator, and her dad, James, was an engineer. She is the youngest of three siblings. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, she loved to read, play outside, and watched way too much bad TV. Jenn was gainfully employed by the age of 16 as a carhop (non-roller skating) at A&W, serving root beer floats and a bevy of other delicious treats to hungry Vermonters.
She attended college at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she initially found adjusting to the far more diverse and competitive academic environment very challenging. At Brown she was involved in a student organization that addressed racial equity and communication. She concentrated in neuroscience but loved the wide variety of other subjects she studied.
Prior to entering medical school, she used her neuroscience degree to work in a lab at the University of Vermont. Among her duties was operating a rat guillotine, extracting rat brains for neurotransmitter research. She started at the UVM College of Medicine in 1989 and in the first week met the love of her life, John Baciocco. Jenn gravitated toward a pediatric specialty because she found working with children rewarding, as well as fun in many instances. It was during medical school that she first came to Sitka for a two-month internship. She was fortunate to meet Dave and Cheryl Vastola – her first salmon ever was served hot off their grill. She was smitten with the beauty of Sitka and its cooperative and welcoming community.
After medical school, McNichol completed a three-year pediatric residency at the University of California/Davis Medical Center in Sacramento from 1993-1996.
“This was a great experience,” she says, “working with a very diverse population of new Americans (Southeast Asian, Russian, Central American), as well as long-time Californians.”
She married Dr. John Baciocco after they completed their training in 1996 and moved to Sitka to work as a pediatrician at SEARHC. She started out full-time and then transitioned to part-time after her children were born in 1998 (Colin Baciocco) and in 2001 (Dominic Baciocco). Between stints at SEARHC, she worked at the Moore Clinic from 1999-2001. Since 2004 she has been back working at SEARHC.
Outside of her work and a busy family life, McNichol has volunteered for numerous Sitka boards and activities. She served two years on the Planned Parenthood board in the mid-nineties. When her children were young, she was on the Mt. Edgecumbe Preschool Board for four years and was an active coach and board member of Sitka Youth Soccer for many years.
From 2006-2010 she served on the Baranof Barracuda Swim Board. A product of, and fervent believer in public education, in 2015 she took on the challenge of being part of the Sitka School Board, where she served for four years. The last two years she was the board president. She advocated aggressively to the Sitka Assembly and the Alaska State Legislature to fund our children’s education.
McNichol is an enthusiastic supporter of Sitka High cross country and track and field, a sport that her children enjoyed and benefited from during their high school years. She currently is a co-director of the Medvejie Solstice Run, a fundraiser for Sitka High running. The run is scheduled for June 24, and includes opportunities for all running ambitions, including a 5k, 10k and half marathon. To sign up, go to runsignup.com, and search for Medvejie.
Sandy Poulson
Sandy Poulson, 83, has been a Sitkan since 1969, when she and her husband Thad arrived, with three small children, to take over the Daily Sitka Sentinel.
Over the past 53 years they’ve put out the paper, raised five kids, welcomed seven grandkids, and been immersed in the community they love.
Amabel Montgomery was born in Texas during a sandstorm, hence the nickname Sandy, and was raised in Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah while her dad was in the “oil business” as well as working on the family farm in Oklahoma. She graduated from Nowata (Oklahoma) High School in 1958, and from the University of Tulsa with a journalism degree in 1962. She was a reporter with the Oklahoma City Times when she met Thad Poulson, who was an editor with the Daily Oklahoman. After they married Thad joined the Associated Press and they moved to Salt Lake City, where daughter Rebecca and son James were born. Sandy began writing a weekly humor column for the Salt Lake Tribune, which ran until 1981.
Thad’s next AP assignment was in New York City, where daughter Cathy was born. In 1968, AP sent them to Juneau, and a year later they got an offer from Lew Williams of Ketchikan to run, then buy, the Sentinel. Lew, who, like Thad and Sandy, was a strong believer in the importance of locally owned newspapers, didn’t want a chain to buy it.
Sons Rob and Dan joined the family in Sitka, and like their siblings were raised at the Sentinel and had paper routes. Rob and family live in Prague and Dan in Anchorage now, but the others are here, with their five kids, and they add greatly to the joy of living in Sitka.
Over the years Poulson has served on the boards of the Salvation Army and Sitka Community College, and been a member of American Association of University, Soroptimist Club and the Woman’s Club. She and Thad received the Chamber of Commerce Cossack Cap Award in 2012, and Sandy was named to the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame in 2020.
The years here have been busy, full of stories and work and memories. Being in one place for so long has meant getting to know the town and the people well, watch families for three, even four, generations. A man with a gray beard came into the Sentinel office recently and said “Hey! Remember me?!?”
“It took a while to place him since we hadn’t seen him since he was 12 and had Route 5,” Poulson said.
Both Sandy and Thad still work full-time at the Sentinel, not as spryly as in earlier years, but still with love for this wonderful town.
