When I was little, I never thought about growing up to be something other than an athlete. Everyone knows those awkward moments when an adult approaches a seven-year-old little kid and says, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Like a kid that age can even conceptualize anything so encompassing.
Although, some people say they’ve always known. I’ve heard interviews on TV where so-and-so says, “I always knew I wanted to sing.” Or be a doctor. Or a firefighter. Or a chef. And on.
After Mark Spitz won all those gold medals in the 1972 Summer Olympics, I was sure I’d be winning like that one day too. It was about the same time I announced that I’d be the first “girl” to play on the Cincinnati Reds.
Of course, neither of those things happened.
When I got to college, I was unsure about majoring in chemistry. I’d been a standout in high school chemistry but wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the rest of my life burning stinky hydrogen sulfide over bunsen burners. My friends at college asked me what I really wanted to do. As I thought back to my childhood days, the only other thing I considered was becoming a policewoman. For a while, at Butler, everyone called me “Copper,” even though I never chose that path.
I thought about all of this early today when I saw the name Alaska P. Davidson. It was on this date, October 11, 1922, that she became the first woman FBI “special investigator.” Appointed and official.
A little shout out to the Buckeye State on this one. Alaska was born in Warren, Ohio, on March 1, 1868, to Warren and Mary Elizabeth Doud Packard. I wonder why they named her so.
If their last name sounds familiar, it is because her two brothers, James Ward Packard and William Doud Packard, founded Packard, the automobile manufacturer. It was later taken over by Studebaker, and then it drifted away. They must not have invited Alaska to be in the car business.
Truthfully, not much else is known about her personal life. She didn’t have much schooling along the way. Alaska only attended three years of public school and never went to college.
She was married twice. Her first husband was Ephraim B. McCrum Jr. in 1893. There’s no telling what happened of him. It seems they had one child named Esther, and she died in 1902. Then she married again to James. B. Davidson, but by 1930, she was listed as a widow.
But somewhere, along the line, with little schooling and no apparent connections to Washington, she was hired — at the age of 54, I might add — by the Director of the Bureau of Investigation (the former FBI). At that time, the Director was a man named William J. Burns. Who knows. Maybe he owned a Packard and loved it. Regardless, Alaska was hired to work as a special investigator — the first female special agent.
It definitely wasn’t an Ohio gig. She trained in New York City and later was assigned to the Washington, D.C. field office. Hold on to your dark gray fedoras. Her starting salary was $7 a day plus $4 when traveling.
Apparently, the Bureau was interested in hiring female agents to work on cases related to the Mann Act. The Mann Act was designed to thwart human trafficking. But, they decided Alaska might be too refined to work on any “rough” cases. This, combined with the fact that she had little schooling, held her back. The Bureau considered her to be of limited use when it came to prosecuting such crimes.
After J. Edgar Hoover became acting Director of the Bureau in 1924, he asked for Davidson’s resignation. It came on a request from the Special Agent in Charge at the field office where she worked. He said he had “no particular work for a woman agent.”
She resigned on June 10, 1924.
Only three women became agents in the 1920s. They were Davidson,Jessie B. Duckstein, and Lenore Houston. The other two resigned before 1928. Then the drought. The FBI had no female agents between 1929 and 1972.
Alaska Davidson died on July 16, 1934, at the age of 66.
And we see another life, another path, in the multitude of lines, spun all around this world of ours. Crossing, intersecting, yet, sometimes seeming never to touch. But they do. We are all connected. Somehow.
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“There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana
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“When the path ignites a soul,
there’s no remaining in place.
The foot touches ground,
but not for long.”
― Hakim Sanai
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Special Agent Alaska. Fired.
