Once upon a time, in a land far, far, up north, surrounded by snow, glaciers, and more snow, was born a character who could truly epitomize the phrase 'a jack of all trades.' Charles W. Carter, originally christened as the unremarkable Silas Whitfield Carter, was a man of many masks – digger of gold, digger of graves, keeper of the dead, and keeper of a small Alaskan city. This is the gold-speckled journey of our corpse-keeping mayor, who got his hands dirty in more ways than one. Born in 1869 in Canada (yes, there's more snow north of the border than in Alaska), Charles showed his penchant for reinvention without delay when he traded the icy airs of Ontario for the sunny breezes of San Francisco. But the moment news of Klondike's gold strike reached his ears, Charles set out for Skagway, forever leaving behind his erstwhile identity of Silas Whitfield Carter. He was ready for business but had not yet found his true calling. Settled in Juneau in 1899, Charles decided to trade his shovel for politics, serving as the eighth mayor from 1913 to 1914. Funnily enough, despite waving the wand of policymaking, he could never quite wash the dirt off his hands - only now it was not gold, but the dust of the dead. Carter was the founder of the first funeral parlor in Juneau - a business he started after realizing that prospecting gold and grubbing for votes were not his only passions. The Charles W. Carter Mortuary, where he would go on to host many a frozen 'guest,' remained his tombstone legacy until 1950. Quite ironically, Charles, the mayor who burying the dead, became the advocate for the living elderly. Along with his partners in crime, Henry Roden and David Gross, he managed to persuade the Alaskan Territorial Legislature to rename the Pioneers Trust Fund to the Pioneer Memorial Fund in 1947. One would think it was a grim metaphor for his peculiar career - from digging up gold to helping dig graves - but Carter held no such reservations. The man finally swapped his shovels for suits - for death had the last laugh - and he was laid to rest in Evergreen Cemetery, under the same snow-lined fir trees he once marched towards, shovel in hand, a lifetime ago. The Catacomb Casanova, as he was humorously referred to, left us with a fascinatingly morbid example of a life lived in full. So here's to Charles W. Carter - the Corpse-Keeping Mayor of Alaska - always remembered but never mourned, for he turned his gold-dusted journey into a tale of shovels, suits, and the power of unabashed rebranding. Rest in Power, Mr. Mayor. You were truly a golden nugget in the icy wilds of Alaska. Your journey from shovels to suits will forever fuel our fireside tales in the deathly cold.