Diane Somers sees a lot of variety throughout her eight-hour days at the Peninsula Clarion.
She is the first face you see when you walk through the door and the voice you’ll hear when you call the main line.
“Currently, I’m working at the front desk shooting the breeze with customers, answering the phones and at the same time working on dummying the Clarion, the Juneau Empire, and Capital City Weekly,” Somers said.
When she’s dummying a paper, she’s setting up the newspaper pages in the Clarion’s system so that everyone knows how many pages and what kind of space is available for news content.
In between answering phones and dummying the papers, she also works on special projects.
“This seems like a lot of responsibilities and variety throughout an eight-hour day,” Somers said. “I like helping the company get their product out to the readers that is interesting for them to pick up.”
Somers moved to Alaska from Michigan, following her mom and dad.
“Most all my family moved up here in the late ‘70s and now most of us are Alaskans through and through,” she said.
Somers spent her summers working at a fish cannery while getting her degree in fine arts.
These days, in her free time, she works on her jewelry business, HeyWire Jewelry.
“I’m a morning person, most days, I’m up at 3 a.m. to have a coffee or two, get my house work done, play with beads,” she said.
She also loves walking her dog, Pete, and spoiling her nieces and nephews.
“I have made sure to take little nieces and nephews to Dairy Queen to lure them into taking care of me when I turn 105,” she said.
Somers and her husband have been married for 30 years after meeting at Faith Baptist Church in Anchorage.
“Meeting at church, we dated for about two weeks and out of the blue he asked me to marry him — I said ‘hang loose baby’ and said ‘yes I think I will,’” she said.
Currently, Somers and her husband attend College Heights Baptist Church on Kalifornsky Beach Road.
“I’m hoping he didn’t marry the wrong one 30 years ago or we’re in trouble,” Somers said.
After a day at work, Somers gets home and hugs her husband.
“And I try not to be asked to cook supper,” she said. “Yep, I bet he married the wrong one 30 years ago, yikes!”
