Deputy Magistrate Nash retiring after 22 years

After two decades at the Wrangell court, Deputy Magistrate Leanna Nash will retire Jan. 30. Nash first accepted a position in the court back in 1999, she said. Twenty-two years later, she felt that it was finally time to step away, spend more time with family and enjoy life.

"I have a grandchild I want to spend more time with," she said. "I'm going to be babysitting her part-time. I don't want to work until I'm ill or die. I want to be able to still enjoy life while I still have some life in me."

Nash said she first heard about the job opportunity from John Bartlett, at Wrangell High School. She was a single mother who needed new job opportunities. She was working part time at one job, she said, and back then owned the snack machine business in town. Bartlett told her about a job opening at the courthouse while she was at the school refilling a vending machine, she said, and initially she brushed off the idea.

"I sort of laughed at him, because I figured I never had any experience at all with the court system, other than a couple speeding tickets," Nash said. "I figured I didn't have any qualifications. He kept urging me and so I figured well, what the heck, I'll just come up and make an application and see what happens."

She was originally planning to retire last year, around April. However, this plan got put on hold because of a family tragedy. Her husband, Michael Nash, passed away in a plane crash in July 2019.

"That sort of put everything on hold, because of course I had to get his estate done, and I just wasn't sure what my future was holding," she said. "So now I finally I have got pretty much everything done and I'm at a point where I've been wanting to retire for quite a while. I finally just decided this is the time."

Nash was a deputy clerk when she started, with the title of deputy magistrate at the end of her career.

She saw a lot of changes over her 22 years at the court. When she first started, the court was still using WordPerfect, a word processing program that predated Microsoft Word. She also said the court didn't get real PCs until the early 2000s, a few years into her job. The online CourtView system, which the court uses for recording and looking up case numbers, was introduced in 2010.

She described her job as one of wearing many hats and constant evolution. Wrangell's court is pretty small, she said. Where a larger court would have different people to handle different kinds of cases, she has been a one-woman operation. She has constantly learned and adapted during her time at the court, she said, and help was always available from across the wider court system.

"Working here, I've always felt part of a family I guess, especially in First District (Southeast)," she said. "Our courts are extremely tight when it comes to relationships. We rely on each other a lot. That's one thing about this place, you can't do it all on your own. There are people I call when I get something and I'm not sure of how to do it, or it's something brand new I've never seen before. So we use each other a lot, and also to fill in for each other, but it's more of a support system. It actually feels like a family, it really does. It's a very nice feeling, and I'm going to miss everybody very much."

Nash said applications for her position closed Jan. 6, but she is not involved in the hiring process. There will be temporary fill-ins at the court handling things until her replacement is hired, she said.