内容摘要：Youssef Issa, 21, uses fabric to cover a hole in a destroyed wall in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Feb. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Youssef Issa, 21, uses fabric to cover a hole in a destroyed wall in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Feb. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

“It’s hard, and everybody will miss him. But he lived a great life and passed away in his own fashion,” Mitch Seavey said.The Iditarod race organization called Dan Seavey a “true pioneer and cherished figure” in the race’s

and said he was instrumental in the establishment of the Iditarod Trail as a National Historic Trail in 1978. He also wrote a book, “The First Great Race,” which his son said drew on notes Seavey recorded during the first edition of the Iditarod.Dan Seavey in total ran the Iditarod five times. His last, in 2012, was aimed at celebrating and drawing attention to the trail’s history.That year featured three generations of Seaveys, with Mitch’s son Dallas winning the first of his

. Mitch, a three-time Iditarod champ, that year finished seventh.Dan Seavey moved with his family to Alaska in 1963 to teach in Seward, a community about 125 miles (201 kilometers) south of Anchorage. In an interview for Project Jukebox, a University of Alaska Fairbanks oral history project, he recalled being inspired as a kid by a radio program centered on a character who was with a Canadian mounted police force and his trusty sled dog, Yukon King, who took on bad guys during the Gold Rush era.

Seavey said finding time to train to race was difficult.

“Having to make a living, it kind of interfered with my dog mushing,” Seavey, a longtime history teacher, said. He trained on nights and weekends, and around the first two years of the Iditarod he petitioned the school board for time off, he said.Sometimes, when the wind is blowing, the acrid smell of the slaughterhouse signals the town’s biggest employer. The meatpacking facility with more than 3,700 workers is owned by JBS, the world’s largest beef producer.

The loss of immigrant labor would be a blow to the industry.“We’re going to be back in this situation of constant turnover,” said Mark Lauritsen, who runs the meatpacking division for the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents thousands of Panhandle workers. “That’s assuming you have labor to replace the labor we’re losing.”

Nearly half of workers in the meatpacking industry are thought to be foreign-born. Immigrants have long found work in slaughterhouses, back to at least the late 1800s when multitudes of Europeans — Lithuanians, Sicilians, Russian Jews and others — filled Chicago’s Packingtown neighborhood.The Panhandle plants were originally dominated by Mexicans and Central Americans. They gave way to waves of people fleeing poverty and violence around the world, from