MEETING IVAN

Shortly after I arrived in Fairbanks, Alaska in September of 1967, to take a job as editor with the Daily News-Miner there, because of my prior experience working with the Pennsylvania state legislature as a press officer, I was assigned to cover a special session of the Alaska legislature in Juneau called by Governor Wally Hickel to deal with the disastrous flooding of Fairbanks by the Chena River in August of that year.

The flood inundated much of Fairbanks and surrounding areas. The special flood session lasted about a week. When I returned to Fairbanks, while walking down a hallway in the News-Miner offices, I encountered a fellow I didn't know who greeted me and introduced himself as Ivan Thorall, then in his early 60s.

Ivan complimented me on my coverage of the special session. He said he parfticularly liked my reporting on a commercial fishing issue known as "incidentally-caught kings." That was a thorny problem in which some, including Ivan, contended that most of the king salmon caught by commercial fishermen while fishing for other inferior species were intentionally targeted because of their high "black" market value.

Soon Ivan and I launched into wide-ranging discussions of other fish and wildlife matters - and the attendant and inevitable "politics" that surcharged them. That was the start of a close friendship that lasted for the next 35 years until Ivan's death in 2009 at age 95.

Because of his wide and deep acquaintance in Fairbanks and statewide among the influential fish and game fraternity (and sorority), Ivan opened important doors to prominent leaders and sources for me that would otherwise have remained forever closed to a "cheechako" newsman from the Eastern seaboard.

Among other things, Ivan introduced me to the family of his dear friends , Gene and Frances Miller and their kids who often invited me over for dinner. Gene, a lawyer who specialized in fish and game matters, was for several years a member of the Alaska House of Representatives.

Twenty years later, after I returned to Pennsylvania to be with my aging parents, Ivan and I kept in touch regularly by phone, except when he stayed for weeks or months at a time at his federal homestead in Chisana, a one-time but now abandoned placer gold-mining boom town in the shadow of the Nutzontin Mountains where there were no phones, keeping in touch by snail mail. There he and his gold-mining partner, Iver Johnson, also from Fairbanks, chased the "mother lode" with limited but moderate success.

When satellite, and later land line phone service inevitably came to Chisana in the late 1990s, we "progressed" to phone communicaions. I regretted the loss of those wonderful letters from Ivan describing his daily life in Chisana. I wished in vain I could turn the clock back to the no-phone days.

A carpenter by trade, Ivan worked in construction, sometimes as a self- exployed contractor, at other times for other contractors, building structures and infrastructure, mostly in remote bush locations in Alaska's sub-arctic or arctic north, "shaking the money tree" in Alaska's burgeoning "oil patch," following the discovery of world class oil and gas reservoirs beneath Alaska's North Slope tundra.

In the years following Ivan's retirement from regular employment on the North Slope and elsewhere, he and I would alternate visitations, summering in his Chisana environs, wintering in my Florida habitat.. During those visits we would take long trips to places like Arizona, Washington state, Idaho (Ivan's home state), Nova Scotia, Labrador/Newfoundland and other Canadian maritime provinces, to the Yukon and Northwest Territories, exploring the four corners of the continent .

On his last trip back East, while I was wintering in Florida, Ivan, a lifetime NRA member, had obtained tickets to the annual NRA convention in Orlando. It was a special convention because the NRA was saying goodbye to its longtime celebrity supporter and president, Charlton Heston, then in the early stages of Ahlzeimer's. Nevertheless, Heston hobbled on stage on the arm of his lovely wife to deliver a brief, halting farewell message. Within months, he was gone.

Whenever we were together, Ivan and I observed a daily ritual involving what we called a "Sundowner," a pre-prandian libation. Years earlier, I had introduced him to a cocktail known as a "Latin Manhattan," made with rum instead of whiskey or bourbon and sweet vermouth, with a dash of Angostura bitters. I had in turn been introduced to it by my younger sister, Fran and her husband, Jim Ferko, a peripatetic chemical engineer who had become acquainted with it during a job tour in Puerto Rico.

Without fail, Ivan and I would have a Latin Manhattan before dinner where ever we were, together or apart. One of the last times I talked to Ivan on the phone, he in Alaska, I in Pennsylvania, it was just before dinner time, and Ivan told me he was in the process of imbibing his daily Sundowner. He said he had mixed two portions, one for him, one for me. But since I wasn't there, he drank both.

'WHITE KINGS are supreme

One hasn't eaten Alaska king salmon until one has feasted on what are known as "white kings,' a rare delicacy which consists of white rather than pink, orange or red flesh.

White kings are accidental, or incidental catches whose white flesh derives from feeding on huge random rafts of tiny shrimplike crustaceans in the ocean deep known as "krill."

Sometimes the white flesh of the white kings may be only partly white, partly colored because their diet on their ocean feeding journeys may have consisted only partly of krill as they outswam or depleted the krill rafts, partly of other fish species.

A popular restaurant known as "Mike's Place" on Douglas Island in Gastineau Channel, connected by bridge to Juneau on the mainland, was the only place I've ever been served white king (it was illegal for retailers or restauranteurs to sell or serve incidentally caught king salmon).

The restauranters would secretly reserve servings of the rare catch ( it was never listed on the menu) for special customers whom they would call whenever a friendly or cooperative fisherman clandestinely sold them the white kings for a high premium.

During my extended residency in Juneau, where I covered the regular and special sessions of the legislature for some 20 years, I happened to be a close personl friend of legendary state senator John Butrovich from Fairbanks, who served in the State Senate for more than 30 years, and his charming wife, Grace.

They would always invite me to join them in one of these rare feasts whenever they were favored with a call from Mike's telling them he'd obtained some white king and would be quietly serving it for dinner that evening.

That was many years ago. I don't know whether these intriguing practices are still ongoing.

WITH HIRING OF NEW COLUMNIST, FAIRBANKS NEWS-MINER ENDS AN ERA

By JOE LaROCCA

With the rehiring of former reporter and columnist Kris Kapps of Denali, to replace longtime columnist Dermot Cole, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner has symbolically severed its last tie to meaningful coverage of energy and related issues linked to Alaska's world class North Slope oil and gas reserves in which it once played a dominant role harking back to their discovery back in the late 1960s.

Ms. Kapps worked for the News-Miner in Fairbanks until some ten years ago, when she moved to Denali, from where she has since  produced a weekly feature column on Denali for the News-Miner as a free lance writer.

A keen observer and fine writer, Ms..Kapps was recently rehired by the News-Miner to write daily columns, including one each week on Denali and another featuring mainly photographs of notable persons and events covering both venues. She fills the vacuum left when Mr. Cole departed the  paper recently after more than 30 years to become a reporter and writer for the Anchorage-based Alaska Dispatch.

Her forte as a journalist has been the gamut of social and artistic movements focusing on the community's people and the events in which they participate. Her writing is distinguished by its compassion for her subjects.

While Cole also wrote prolifically and sensitively about community life and people in the Interior, there was a harder, edgier dimension to his coverage linked to public policy governing Alaska's hydrocarbon resources, or more succintly, the politics of oil, notably the politics of the left.

An unabashed liberal, Cole was frequently and severely criticized for his well-researched  views which favored government control over Alaska's natural resources. He provided a continuum in this regard that historically characterized the News Miner's coverage of oil and gas policy since the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay, often at odds with both newspaper editorial policy as well as the sentiments of many of the newspaper's readers. 

However, his political views  enjoyed the moral support of the most of the University of Alaska's Fairbanks intellectual and academic elites within the community. But with his departure, that half-century continuum abruptly ended. No one on the editorial staff of the News-Miner shares Cole's deep commitment, philosphical bent, writing prowess or in-depth knowledge of energy matters, both local and statewide, not to mention his invaluable sources and contacts.

Ms. Kapps will undoubtedly be a huge asset to the News-Miner's editorial columns.  But neither she nor anyone else on the staff can begin to bridge the gap in energy matters coverage left by Cole's departure. This is an omission top management, which reportedly tried to persuade Cole to stay there, won't bewail, however, often uncomfortable as it was with Cole's liberal socio-political and economic stance. He's the indispenible person with which the News-Miner found it expedient to dispense.

IS THIS OIL TAX CONSTITUTIONAL? Senator Bill Ray, D-Juneau

　

No state debt shall be contracted unless authorized by law for capital improvements and ratified by a majority of the voters of the state who vote on the question.

— The Alaska State Constitution

Today (Sept. 15, 2013) I read in Sheila Toomey's  weekly  "Alaska Ear" column -  consistently the most interesting feature in the Anchorage Daily News - of the death of former longtime Juneau legislator Bill (not William) Ray.  He served several  terms in the House of Representatives  before winning election to Juneau's only Senate seat.

Though virtually unknown to most Alaskans outside Juneau today, Ray was the power to be reckoned with during his heyday in the upper chamber where he ruled with an iron fist, usually as a ranking member or chair of the Finance Committee. He's a sure candidate for Alaska's mythical Legislative Hall of Fame. He was best known for his fierce defense against repeated efforts to move Alaska's capital from Juneau to anywhere else, . 

　

 At the opening of the Tenth Alaska Legislature in Juneau in January 1978, Senator Ray unexpectedly raised an issue not in concert with his strictly southeast Alaska constituency. It was a remarkable moment in a remarkable career, one which had far-reaching and profound implications for the state’s financial condition. .

 Senator Ray’s query centered on the oil and gas reserves tax passed by the legislature in 1975, which had poured nearly half a billion dollars into the state treasury in 1975 and 1976, at the same time plunging the state that far into debt.

In 1975, the state treasury’s balance was shrinking alarmingly, with completion of the trans Alaska oil pipeline—and the massive revenues its operation would bring to the state—still at least two years away. The oil and gas reserves tax was devised as a means of covering the enormous budget deficits that would occur in 1976 and 1977 as a result of both the governor’s and the legislature’s spending excesses and the two-year delay in the pipeline’s completion. It simply imposed a 20-mill tax on the value of oil and gas deposits still in the ground for the two-year period, and was calculated to bring in approximately a quarter of a billion dollars each year, mainly from oil and gas reserves in the Prudhoe Bay field.

But there its simplicity ended. A further provision, in effect, required the state to repay the revenues it received, once oil production began at Prudhoe Bay and oil began to flow through the pipeline. But rather than require the state to repay the reserves tax receipts in hard cash, the act gave to the companies producing the oil a tax credit against future oil production, which is subject to the state’s severance tax and royalty interest.

In effect, the state received during 1976 and 1977 the revenues from the reserves tax that it needed to balance its budget those two years. Then after the pipeline went into operation in mid-1977, the oil companies were able to deduct from the severance tax they would normally pay to the state a credit equal to the reserves taxes they paid during 1976 and 1977, or roughly half a billion dollars. Based on a beginning flow of 1.2 million barrels of oil per day, it was expected that the half billion dollars received by the state in advance reserves tax payments would be fully repaid to the companies owning and producing the oil over the next five years.

But then fate intervened. When first enacted in 1975, the reserves tax assumed that production from Prudhoe Bay would begin in 1977 at the rate of 1.2 million bpd. It also assumed that the tariff which the owners of the pipeline would charge, or be allowed to charge, for transporting oil through their pipeline would not exceed $4 per barrel.

But both those assumptions were knocked in the head, first by the explosion which put Pump Station No. 8 out of commission in the summer of 1977, thus limiting oil production to six hundred thousand barrels per day until spring of 1978. Then, both the federal government and courts granted the pipeline owners authority to charge much higher tariffs than the state anticipated, thus further reducing future state revenues significantly, unless the state were to win a reversal on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Together, these two setbacks—coupled with an impending glut of North Slope oil on the U.S. West Coast which would require up to one million bpd to be shipped through the Panama Canal to more distant markets at a much higher cost—reduced the state’s revenue expectations by several hundred million dollars over the next few years.

In order to make up the impending deficits, it seemed likely that the governor and the legislature would move to extend the reserves tax for at least another year, possibly longer. Which brought to the fore Senator Ray’s rude but relevant question, and one which state as well as industry officials—for their own reasons—had nervously ignored for two years. Was the reserves tax legal under the state constitution, which forbids the state to go into debt beyond the end of current fiscal year without the express consent of the voters, and then only for capital improvements?

Clearly, the state was into its future earnings (and the oil companies’ pockets) for nearly half a billion dollars, which had to be repaid by one means or another. If that wasn’t a debt, I don’t know what constitutes a debt. Yet, it was neither “ratified by a majority of voters,” nor was its expenditure limited to “capital improvements.” While he admittedly voted for the reserves tax when it was enacted in 1975, Senator Ray acknowledged in 1977 that he did so because the state was in an otherwise unsolvable financial bind. He had felt the tax could be justified then on a one-time basis, particularly since rosy predictions of optimum oil flow and minimal tariff charges promised an early end to what even many of its supporters suspected may have been an end-run around the state constitution. And, as noted below, the oil industry in Alaska didn’t oppose it.

But in the aftermath, Ray said, he was no longer prepared to suffer the prospect of extending what was, at worse, an unconstitutional practice and, at best, an unwise one, which would put the state even further into hock to the oil companies. And while I suspect that at least one of Ray’s unspoken motives for raising this question belatedly might have had something to do with the financial issues surrounding proposals to move the state capital from Juneau to Willow, near Anchorage, he should be applauded for asking it nonetheless. For there was not, and never has been, any doubt in my view that the oil reserves tax was as flagrant a violation of Alaska’s state constitution as one can find.

Curiously, the oil companies subject to the reserves tax didn’t vigorously oppose it, as they normally would any other new oil tax proposal. While that may seem out of character, consider their options. They could either accede to the reserves tax, a temporary measure which was really a loan to the state which the state was committed to repay. Or they could suffer a stiff and permanent increase in the state oil severance tax, the cost of which would be irretrievable. Which would you choose?

Needless to say, the proposed extension, briskly promoted by then-Gov. Jay Hammond, was enacted. But it was Bill Ray's first vote against an oil tax increase.

Howard Weaver’s Memoirs: Fiction or Non-fiction

By JOE LaROCCA

Former Anchorage newspaperman Howard Weaver wrote a volume of memoirs published about a year ago by Kent Sturgis’s Epicenter Press entitled Write Hard, Die Free. Howard is a former Anchorage Daily News reporter, later managing editor, then news executive with the ADN’s parent organization at McClatchy Newspapers in Sacramento. Howard,who now lives in California, revisited Alaska last year for a book and lecture tour.

Because of his Alaska celebrity status as a member of Daily News staffs which won two Pulitzer Prizes for public service back in the 1970s and 80s, Howard was deservedly accorded something akin to a hero’s return by virtually all of the news media in Alaska.

The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, for example, published not one, but two rave reviews of Howard’s book. And the Alaska Dispatch, an ambitious online newspaper, ran a long, adoring review written by a former Daily News colleague of Howard. There were many others like them.

Not so deserved, however, was the unanimity of high praise awarded by reviewers and editors who pretty much accepted Howard’s auto-hagiographical version of certain events as he recollected and wrote of them.

After reading Howard’s fascinating memoir, which tells, in part, of the leading role he played in the 20-year “Great Newspaper War” and other epic conflicts in Alaska during the latter part of the 20^th century, I couldn’t decide whether to store his book on my fiction or non-fiction shelf. Certainly there are manifest elements of both within. But Howard is such a clever writer, it’s hard to tell where.

I’m one of the few newsmen still around who personally remembers Howard’s stints as a reporter and editor during his Alaska heyday. Not all is as it seems.

Howard’s tome is cast in bold allegorical terms: St. George (The Anchorage Daily News) versus The Dragon (The Anchorage Times). Would that it were that simple. To the dispassionate observer standing on the sidelines, it was often difficult to distinguish the saint from the dragon. Their parts were interchangeable.

Howard paints the Times and its legendary publisher, Bob Atwood as hard core conservatives who never saw a development or oil prospect they didn’t like, nor an environmental or social cause they could espouse.

The Daily News, on the other hand, especially under Howard’s tutelage, was Atwood’s evil twin, taking the diametrically opposite tack to the same extreme as the Times did, with concomitant offenses against ethical and balanced journalism on behalf of environmental and social causes to the detriment of the broader community.

Weaver’s book puts on full display his erratic and undisciplined genius. He is a devotee of the Bob Woodward school of journalism, fond of quoting protagonists after they’re dead or gone with little or no risk of contradiction, rebuttal or refutation. Witness, for example, his buffoonish portrayal of a job interview early in his career with the late Times Editor Bill Tobin who is characterized as an apoplectic goon. Though it makes good copy, I don‘t buy it. If nothing else, Bill Tobin was a gentleman, whatever one might think of his journalistic slant. As it happens, I , too, was interviewed for jobs by both Tobin and Atwood, although I didn’t get (or want) them, probably for some of the same reasons Howard didn’t, namely professional incompatibility. In my case, both Tobin and Atwood conducted themselves with genial affability. (Full disclosure: they did ask me - and I agreed - to write a weekly Sunday column for the Times, acknowledging up front that it probably would - and did - usually offend their entrepreneurial sensibilities).

Howard is skilled at covering his tracks when reciting transformative events adducing to his credit for which there is no evidence to support his self-centered version except his credibility with readers, or lack thereof. But in some cases enough doubt prevails to cast a shadow of suspicion on his journalistic integrity. In at least one compelling case - and there are others - the known facts forcefully reject his version, more redolent of hypocrisy than integrity. On that occasion, described herewith, I happened to be a firsthand and disinterested observer.

On Page 109, in one of many disparagements of Bob Atwood and The Times sprinkled ad nauseum throughout the book, Howard writes: “His paper clung to its identity as the voice of the Anchorage establishment. Its news coverage was deeply biased in favor of downtown commercial interests and for years it even refused to run letters to the editor critical of the paper or its friends (my emphasis).

And on Page 151, he writes: “Meanwhile the Times was running the same operation it always had, distant, arrogant, aloof. It wouldn’t run letters critical of the paper.” (my emphasis).

Way back on Friday, March 21 of 1986, while Weaver was managing editor of the Daily News, by then the largest newspaper in Alaska, it ran a news story from the state capital of Juneau during the annual legislative session written by the Associated Press correspondent Bruce Scandling.

His article focused initially on speculation that Native leader Al Adams, a Democrat from Kotzebue, chair of the House Finance Committee; Senator John Sackett, another prominent Native, co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Republican of Ruby, and Ray Gillespie, Governor Bill Sheffield’s chief of staff ,had traveled to San Francisco ostensibly to attend a computer conference, but secretly to put the finishing touches to the state budget away from the prying eyes of the Alaska news media.

All three principals later flatly denied they were there to work on the budget, and the AP could produce no proof to the contrary. The article also stated that a lobbyist for the computer company, Kim Hutchinson had paid for Adams’s trip to California.

The following day, Saturday, the Daily News published an article by its Juneau correspondent John Lindback essentially reiterating and expanding upon the AP story reporting that the lobbyist had paid Adams‘s way. Then in its Sunday edition, the Daily News published a scathing editorial condemning Adams for his supposed role in the matter and for pressuring a lobbyist with legislation pending before his, other committees and the legislature to pay his travel fares.

Upon his return to Juneau from San Francisco the following Monday morning, March 24, a furious Adams learned of the two stories and the editorial, told this reporter in Juneau that both the AP and Daily News had erred in reporting that Hutchinson had paid for his travel expenses, and produced a copy of a state “TR” (travel request), and later a credit card receipt indicating the state had paid his way.

He then composed a letter to the editor addressed personally to Weaver which he transmitted electronically to the legislative office in Anchorage, which in turn hand-delivered it to the Daily News that same morning and placed it on Weaver‘s desk.

In the letter Adams told Weaver, among other things, that “your facts are erroneous. While it is true,” he said, “ that Tandem’s lobbyist, Mr. Kim Hutchinson, did make the arrangements for the trip, it is not true that he paid for my expenses. The trip was paid for with state funds, and I would be happy to provide you with a copy of the State Transportation Request if you so desire.”

Adams also explained at length in the letter why he believed his trip at state expense was “entirely justified,” and concluded by telling Weaver “My only regret is that the Daily News failed to verify their facts prior to publishing their stories and editorial.”

However, Weaver was on vacation, and the letter languished unread on his desk. He did not see the letter until his return nearly two weeks later, on April 16. Even then Weaver failed to publish the letter until nearly two weeks after his return from vacation, accompanied by a glib editor’s note asserting - as though to hold the Daily News harmless - that the erroneous articles and editorial were based upon the lobbyist’s alleged but debunked statement to the AP that he had paid for Adams’s travel.

I contacted Howard and asked him why he suppressed Adams’s letter for so long, pointing out that the adage “justice delayed is justice denied” applies to newspapers as well as to jurisprudence. To make matters worse, when it finally published Adams’s letter, the Daily News deleted the date from it, making it appear that Adams had delayed his response to the erroneous coverage for more than a month, not the Daily News. I was left with the indelible impression that Weaver wouldn’t have published Adams’s letter at all if I hadn’t prodded him into it.

There was no apology for the long delay in publishing Adams’s letter correcting a monumental Daily News error, tantamount to not publishing it at all; no apology for engaging in scurrilous “gotcha” journalism by not contacting Adams for comment before running the false stories and errant editorial. Now that’s what I would call “arrogant, distant and aloof.”

The dilemma this narrative presents is whether or when Weaver is credible. He is not at all credible with respect to the treatment of letters to the editor under his management because I had firsthand knowledge of his duplicity in this key case. Yet there are scores of situations in his book where his credibility is crucial to his integrity and where he’s the sole arbiter of the facts. Given his conduct in the Adams case, is he believable in others? Readers must decide for themselves on an ad hoc basis.

In his book Weaver dwells at length on the two Pulitzer Prizes for public service awarded to the Daily News during his tenure. While he bestows lesser credit upon other colleagues who contributed to the award-winning dispatches - one in 1976 purporting to expose corruption and abuses of power within the powerful Teamsters Union in Alaska during the oil pipeline construction era; another in 1989 on the alarming suicide rate among young Native males in Alaska attributable primarily to alcoholism - clearly, he claims the Pulitzers as his personal triumphs.

Page 61: “When you win a Pulitzer at 25, many people think it’s cute to ask, “What will you do for an encore?” Page 61: When told he wouldn’t be getting an expected pay raise: “What do I need to do for a full raise?” I asked friends. “Win a Nobel Prize?” Page 63: “Can you believe it. Twenty-five years old with a Pulitzer Prize in my pocket.”

Weaver’s book is larded with self-congratulatory rhetoric and arm-busting pats upon his ample latissimus dorsi for Pulitzer Prize plaudits based not on merit but on narrow political cultism involving affluent eastern and midwestern liberal elites committed to shield the nation’s unique natural resource values in Alaska from Alaska’s predatory parochial interests symbolized by the Anchorage Times.

The Teamsters’ Pulitzer in 1976 had little to do with journalistic achievement, but was instead aimed by influential antagonists outside Alaska at undermining Atwood’s influence and the dominance of the Anchorage Times in the ongoing imbroglio over the fate of Alaska’s vast natural resources and environmental treasures. The Daily News and the Pulitzer board were merely dupes in that wider universe.

The Daily News’s 1976 Pulitzer purporting to expose Teamster corruption represented a triumph of packaging over performance. Much of the content had already been published over time by other news media.. In ”Write Hard,” Weaver co-opts Teamster misdeeds already widely reported by other news media or common knowledge, implying they were exclusive Daily News disclosures.

For example on Page 53, he writes :”Even more noteworthy were the thugs and felons we discovered working at North Star Terminals, a Teamster-controlled pipeline distribution warehouse in Fairbanks…the warehouse was actually run by the Teamster hierarchy. The number one union official there was Fred Dominic Figone, known to Alaska law enforcement as “Freddy the Fix.” His number three, Bernard House, had been convicted of murder but later was pardoned…The union’s number one yard man was Peter Rosario Buonmassa, another convicted murderer. Teamster boss number four in the terminal was Jack Martin, who had been convicted of violating the Mann Act, better known as the White Slavery Law against interstate tranportation of women for prostitution. About six months after our reporting, Martin’s badly decomposing body would be found not far from a rural roadway near Fairbanks. He had been shot twice in the head.”

Heady stuff, guaranteed to pop the eyes of Pulitzer Board judges when viewed in the vacuum fabricated by Howard, rather than the body of general knowledge from which it was drawn.

The Daily News merely pulled it all together under its imprimatur into a cohesive, be-ribboned bundle and presented it to the Pulitzer committee, whose members had no conception of the considerable work others had done in exposing the Teamsters in Alaska, or the relative role each had played in that process.

But that really didn’t matter. The fix was already on. The Daily News would have been awarded Pulitzer’s public service medallion if it had submitted the Anchorage phone directory. Did Daily News Publisher Kay Fanning, now deceased, with close ties to the Chicago Fields newspaper dynasty and fortune, foster frentic behind-the-scenes lobbying of the Pulitzer board through her connections with prominent eastern and Midwest liberals instrumental in bringing the prize to Alaska? If so, nowhere in his book did Howard mention, much less acknowledge it.

Howard’s erratic genius enabled him to disguise that fact that his, and by reference, the ADN’s contribution to Alaska journalism during his tenure by and large, was negative and corrosive. He sneered at prevailing journalistic conventions, writing and playing by his own rules, a glaring exemplar of the “new journalism,” where no rules applied. This is no idle speculation. Weaver freely admits it.

Howard dismissed as a meaningless bore what is one of the news media’s most important `responsibilities, accurate and comprehensive coverage of the state’s legislative function. It certainly would be boring, given Howard’s disdainful and mindless approach to legislative coverage.

Again, in his words; The Pulitzer “didn’t change my work in Juneau though. I hated it. Covering that legislative session remains the least satisfying newspaper assignment I have ever had,” a betrayal at age 25 of his professional immaturity. Like a kid in a candy shop, Howard craved instant gratification, unwilling to forebear interminable legislative floor sessions, endless committee meetings and elusive legislative politics to bring crucial information about the actions of key political operatives to the Daily News readership.

Howard’s ennui with conventional newspapering relentlessly led to personal successes at the highest level of his trade, but did little to ennoble it.

Joe LaRocca lived and worked in Alaska as a newsman for 20 years, during the ‘60s, 70s and 80s. Joe is the author of “Alaska Agonistes: The Age of Petroleum - How Big Oil Bought Alaska” published in 2003. He now resides in his hometown of North East (Erie County), PA. He may be contacted at jlar5553@verizon.net and 814.725.8926.

Longtime Fairbanks newsman Cole leaves News-Miner for Alaska Dispatch

With a  self-generated drumroll and fanfare, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner's longtime columnist Dermot Cole announced in his August 28 column  he has decided to leave the News-Miner after  35 years, and take a  job with an online paperless news medium, the Alaska Dispatch, based in  Anchorage. Cole, however, will work from his home in Fairbanks, one of the perks of the cyber revolution, as what he calls a "state" reporter, whatever that is, and columnist.

Curiously absent is any word from the News-Miner's publisher expressing any level of regret for Cole's departure from the only newspaper for which he has ever worked since graduating from the University of Alaska Fairbanks with a journalism degree back in the mid-70s.

He did mention, however, that the publisher "has asked me to stay, but I decided to make a change... No one at the newspaper is pushing me out, waving at the exit or suggesting that the jig is up."

Cole's long tenure at the News-Miner - 35 years, 21 of them as a columnist, perhaps the longest such stint in Alaska newspaper history  - was interrupted only by a brief  hiatus in 1988-89 to take a job with the Associated Press in Seattle. But that quickly ended when "My wife and I made the return trip after reaching the belated conclusion that (Fairbanks) would be a better place to raise our children. We have never regretted that decision."

In announcing his departure, Cole wrote in his farewell column: "An illness in the family and the approach of a pivotal birthday (his 60th, next month) have prompted me to take stock of my situation and start out on a new adventure.  This is something I have to try," adding: "Leaving an institution where I have had the pleasure of working for more than 35 years is not easy, but I’m at an age where if I don’t try something a little different now I may never get the chance.

"I began working here at age 22 in 1976, a callow youth who expected to stay a year or two before moving on to bigger and better things." He added: "I attribute my longevity at the News-Miner to a good working environment and readers who encouraged me at times, tolerated me on many occasions and allowed me the privilege of becoming a small part of their daily routine.

"I have long been grateful that my ambition to leave Fairbanks gradually turned into a more focused desire to do the best job I could at something I loved in Alaska. And I wanted to learn how to write." Self-deprecatingly, he adds:" Millions of words later, learning to write remains my overarching goal."

In the comment segue to his column, 63 readers bade Cole goodby. About two-thirds of them expressed regrets at his leaving and reflected sentiments like this: "Best wishes Dermot! I'm going to miss your column. I didn't always agree with you, but appreciated your perspective and attention to important community and State issues. I loved the recognition you gave deserving individuals and the warm human interest stories."

Or:"Dermot, I want to thank you for your integrity, clear writing, and community-building all these many years. You exemplify the kind of qualities that I seek out when perusing a local paper.
Although my family and I hitched ourselves to some migrating geese a few years ago (for the tropics of Whidbey Island), Fairbanks in many ways will always be home. Thank you for helping to make it such a good place to grow up.

 Or: "Dermot's column was the one thing everyone in Fairbanks read out of the NM. Agree with him or not, you always stopped to read him. Rarely a day went by that I didn't have a conversation with someone that included the line, 'did you see Dermot's column today?' 
He was a great source for answering those nagging little questions like what is that new building going to be? He was always quick to give a pat on the back to those who helped make the community a little bit better place to live. He also was willing to call those out that needed to be.
I wish him all the best in his future endeavors. I know he will be great there. I also know the NM will be truly be the news minus without him.

A few others were not so kind, even cruel. RextrailBigfoot, for example, dissing Cole's perceived liberal, anti-corporate bent, sarcastically commented: "If I was Dermot I would apply for jobs with Al Jazeera or Pravda and get away from the US corporate controlled media."  

Or: "It's too bad that Dermot never had any real-world job experience. He would have been more well-rounded. A newspaper tends to have the viewpoint of the Collective because news must appeal to the community as a whole. Dermot never saw a problem that didn't have a government solution. He will fit in well at the Alaska Dispatch."

Or: "This proves what we've always suspected: Alice doesn't have a brain. "State reporter?" Nope. Dermot cannot "report" anything except his neurotic feelings on a given subject."

Dermot and I have a shared history. I toiled as a reporter, editor and columnist at the News-Miner in the late 1960s and early '70s, and later at Tom Snapp's All-Alaska Weekly. During his student days at the UAF where he was on the staff of the campus newspaper, I wrote a column disparaging what I perceived to be the poor quality of the journalism department at the university. I've forgotten the details, but I recall that Dermot indignantly wrote back demanding to know my qualifications for making those judgments.

There's no question that Cole served a valuable purpose at the News-Miner, despite a pronounced tilt to the left. His talents and prolixity as a journalist, despite his shortcomings, are undeniable. He'll be impossible to replace. Most News-Miner readers regret that, a few others applaud it. After I left Alaska, I relied heavily on his reporting and writing to keep abreast of public affairs in Alaska, while occasionally correcting his historical and, sometimes, grammatical perspective.



 

 

THE ALASKA HIGHWAY HOAX: An exercise in mythlogy

　
 A recent article in the Anchorage Daily News, “Unsung heroes built WWII lifeline through Canada” by Christopher Cussat, correctly portrays Henry Geyer of Pittsburgh, PA and others who helped build the Alaska Highway (initially known as the Alcan Highway) as courageous pioneers and heroes.

But Cussat strays into mythology when he writes that “President Franklin D. Roosevelt stressed the need to construct the highway after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.” Cussat wrote that the Alaska Highway was “one of America's earliest and most dramatic efforts to increase national security. With reasonable fears of a Japanese invasion through Alaska and Canada, the United States felt that our distant military contingent in the northern territories desperately needed a highway to connect air bases to one another and to fundamental resources.”

The article perpetuates the persistent myth that construction of the Alaska Highway was essential to the military defense of western America and Canada after the bombing of Pearl Harbor precipitated war between the U.S. and Japan. This erroneous notion also pervades the PBS documentary, “The Construction of the Alaska Highway,”  first aired in February, 2005. It continues to spawn one of the more enduring hoaxes in U.S.-Canadian history.

Contrary to longstanding and widespread misconceptions, which have been driven by official but misguided sources, the Alaska Highway, financed mostly by the U.S. and built primarily with U.S. military labor and equipment, was not vital to national defense nor security in the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and declaration of war with Japan.

Indeed, the U.S. War Dept. was opposed to construction of the road for military purposes. Though subsequently used extensively for military and civilian purposes, in 1942 it was mainly a hidden pretext for prospectively opening up and developing northwestern Canada's and Alaska’s rich natural resources on behalf of special entreprenuerial interests, and to provide the U.S. with terrestrial access to its far-flung territory.

U.S.. military forces, along with a handful of civilian contractors and Canadians launched an heroic, even sacrificial effort to complete the road in less than a year to accommodate its alleged military necessity. But their Herculean efforts and sacrifices were squandered on the political pretensions of some of America’s top government leaders.

Foremost among them was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As Commander-in- chief, he ordered construction of the highway against the recommendation of some of the nation’s key military officers, and despite deeply expressed skepticism by Canadian officials.

Alaska's late U.S. Senator Ernest Gruening. discussed the genesis of the highway, which he proposed and justified on grounds of national defense, in his autobiography, Many Battles:  (Liveright, 1973),  In it, he addressed on-going negotiations with Canada government officials. They hinged on whether the Canadian government would permit and support construction of the proposed highway through Canada to Alaska. Gruening had already won support for the highway by President Franklin D. Roosevelt BEFORE Roosevelt consulted with his military leaders.

Gruening wrote: "(In late 1940), Negotiations were reopened, and several months later when I was in Washington again, I had a phone call from Assistant-Secretary (of state) Adolph Berle, who had been conducting the negotiations.. He was one of the ablest men in our foreign service. “The Canadians really don’t want us to build that highway.” he said, “but if we can assure them that it has military value, they’ll let us go ahead.”
(Gruening): “Well, it’s obvious that it has military value.”

“You may think so, and I may think so,” Berle said, “but the Canadians will not accept that unless we can get the Army to say so.”
“Of course I can,” I said confidently.”

"I reported this conversation to (U.S. Senator, D-Washington) Warren Magnuson and together we drafted a letter to the secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson. It gave a detailed description of both the A and B routes with the arguments for each, stating our preference for the former, and asked that the War Department express an opinion as to which of the routes would be preferable from the Army’s standpoint. Two weeks later on April 26, 1941, the reply came.

“The War Department considers that the construction of such highway cannot be justified on the basis of military necessity. Because of that view , it is believed that it would be inappropriate to comment upon the relative merits of the two suggested routes.” The letter was signed “Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War.” "We were momentarily stunned, Gruening wrote.

Gruening attributed the War Department’s continuing opposition to construction of the highway to military “ignorance.” Nevertheless, he wrote in Battles, “the Alaskan highway was brought up at the next Cabinet meeting and the President appointed a committee of three - the Secretaries of War (Stimson), Navy (Knox) and Interior (Ickes) - with instructions to proceed at once with the construction of the highway.”

Ironically, however, the Canadian government vetoed both Routes A and B proposed by the Americans, ordering one instead which substantially deviated from both and better accommodated Canada’s commercial rather than U.S. military objectives, robbing the highway of much of the U.S. sponsors’ alleged grounds for military necessity. Gruening wrote in Battles that Senator Magnuson “denounced the new route as a 100-million dollar blunder.”

One Canadian historian, Captain M.V. Bezeau , a specialist in the study of the highway’s history,　has speculated that Roosevelt seized the opportunity to capitalize on the moment to obtain concurrence from Canada for construction of the road through its territory at a time when there may have latent wartime concerns among the Canadians not extant during peacetime.

Although the PBS characterized the construction of the highway as "the first step" in America's defense strategy, the project wasted unfathomable resources - natural, military, human and monetary - which could arguably have been more productively and strategically deployed elsewhere, and significantly shortened the war against Japan, saving countless thousands of lives.

The highway was largely irrelevant to America's overall defense strategy except to detract from it. 　
An unimpeachable authority for this position may be found in "The Alaska Highway: Papers of the 40th Anniversary Symposium,"　 Kenneth. Coates, editor; Captain M.V. Bezeau, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 1985.

The　 U.S. War Department, Capt. Bezeau wrote, "repeatedly examined these suggestions　 (to build　 the highway on grounds of national defense) and rejected them." The Canadian-American Joint Board on Defence concluded from the outset that the defensive value of building the proposed highway to Alaska was "negligible," and construction on the basis of military necessity alone was "unjustified and unsupportable." Nevertheless, in the end, a political rather than a strategic agenda prevailed, and the road was built and paid for mostly by U.S. taxpayers.

Bezeau concluded that the highway was “a magnificent achievement carried out as a military project in time of war, but it was not needed for defence. The highway was actually planned and built for other reasons.”

DRIVING CANADA'S DEMPSTER HIGHWAY:

 The Dempster Highway, a 500-mile gravel road through the Canadian Northwest, provides umparalled views of the wilderness

(This article first appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
 By JOE LaROCCA

THE DEMPSTER HIGHWAY, Canada -- A roadway through the wilderness may seem a contradiction in terms, but at least one road in North America fits that description. It's the Dempster Highway, a relatively obscure roadway in the Canadian Northwest Arctic and sub-Arctic that a companion and I drove last summer.

This narrow, unpaved gravel road stretches for nearly 500 miles from a point near Dawson City in the Yukon Territory to Inuvik in the Northwest Territories. Inuvik, a few dozen miles short of the shore of the Arctic Ocean, is an Inuvialuit Eskimo community that includes Dene Indians and whites among its population of some 3,300.

The Dempster, named after a heroic, turn-of-the-century Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer (in those days they were known as the Northwest Mounted Police), snakes through several mountain ranges and major river drainages spanning two time zones and virtually untouched wilderness.

En route, it crosses the Continental Divide three times before ending at Inuvik, a trade and government center about 60 miles south of the Arctic Ocean/Beaufort Sea coast.

My journey, with an Alaska friend, Ivan Thorall of Chisana, began at Forty-Mile Junction, where the Alaska Highway and the Taylor Highway intersect, about 300 miles southeast of Fairbanks.

Back door to Canada

We turned northward onto the Taylor, an unpaved frontier road that leads to a relatively little-known and rarely used backdoor access into Canada. It's a shorter route to our starting destination of Dawson City than if we had followed the Alaska Highway into Canada by way of Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territory.

The Taylor, itself a unique travel experience, meanders northward for about 100 miles before splitting into two prongs. The trail north leads to another famed Alaska community, Eagle, on the Yukon River, popularized most recently by John McPhee's 1977 best-selling book, "Coming into the Country." About 10 miles short of the forks, the road leads us through yet another colorful and historic Alaska gold mining town, Chicken, the setting for the true-to-life best-seller "Tisha."

Several miles beyond the forks lies Boundary, Alaska, consisting of a barroom, a gift shop and a single, ancient battered gas pump, which is so outdated that the analog price-per-gallon readout maxes out $1.50 per gallon. A scribbled note has been taped to the pump which advises serve-yourself customers to double the purchase price readout to compute the gas bill at the rate of $3 per gallon.

The U.S./Canada border stations are nearby. There, in order to enter Canada, we must stop to report in at Canada Customs.

Proceeding east into Canada from the border, we unravel one of the travel world's most remarkable but best-kept travel secrets, the 100-mile drive over the aptly named "Top of the World Highway." It's a part of this back door route linking Alaska with Dawson City in Canada's Yukon Territory. This section is a spectacularly scenic waltz along high ridges and over the towering tops of the Ogilvie Mountains where the narrow, rail-guardless road often drops breathtakingly on one or both sides to valley bottoms and river gorges far below.

Legions of surrounding mountaintops level with my eyeballs march in cadence to the distant horizons in every direction, fading into an azure infinity. Incredible vistas surfeit the senses. It's impossible to drink them all in.

After several hours, we leave this exalted mountain splendor, descending gradually to the broad Yukon River plain below, then to the river's edge. There, the government-operated ferry hauls us and vehicle, free of charge, to the opposite bank.

Colorful Dawson City

Strategically situated at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers, Dawson was at the very heart of the world-famous gold rush of 1896-98 immortalized by writers like Jack London, Robert Service, Joaquin Miller and others including, in more recent times, noted Canadian author Pierre Berton.

We overnight about 14 miles east of Dawson at the outwardly imposing Klondike River Lodge, a rustic and picturesque log structure. This junction is the jumping-off point for the trip up the Dempster north to its terminus at Inuvik, some 460 miles, distant.

Despite its prominence, we're disappointed with the accommodations, services and food at the generally unclean lodge .

The lodge's only saving grace is that it's handy to the starting point for the Dempster Highway at its junction with the Klondike Highway (Milepost 0). Nevertheless, we won't stay there again, if we can help it.

We get a late start in the morning, planning to travel roughly half the distance to that day's destination. It's some 230 miles to an area called Eagle Plains, where we find the only roadside services and accommodations to that point.

In a couple of hours, traveling at a respectable 35 to 55 mph on the dry, well-maintained gravel road, we reach North Fork Pass Summit, a continental divide about 4,000 feet above sea level, the highest point on the Dempster. From there, most water runoff to the north eventually drains into the Arctic Ocean; south of here, into the Bering Sea to the west.

Where's the Moose?

Half hour or so later, about 100 miles up the Dempster, we reach a small water body called Two Moose Lake, because two moose are often seen there. (We see none, either coming or going. My traveling companion wryly renames it No Moose Lake.)

Continuing on, we're now approaching an area where, in the late fall, up to 40,000 caribou cross the road en route to their wintering grounds, members of the fabled international Porcupine herd, currently numbering some 170,000 animals.

But it's early July, and we see none. (They may have crossed the border into Alaska already, en route to their calving grounds on the arctic plain there.) Nor do we see any of the grizzlies and wolves that prey upon them.

We encounter little wildlife along the way, mostly small birds and mammals like sharptail grouse, squirrel, raven, pika, marmot, gray jays, an occasional hawk or peregrine falcon and grouse-like ptarmigan (Alaska's state bird -- the "p" is silent).

A brochure on the Dempster tells us to look for Dall sheep as we drive along Engineer Creek. Sure enough, on cue, we see a young ewe with half-curl horns busily engaged at a salt lick in the creek bed, close enough to the road for passable photos with a medium-range zoom or telescopic lens. She ignores me as I snap off a few exposures. We spot a small family group further up the mountainside, and I click off a couple more shots.

The traffic along the highway is sparse. I count 25 oncoming vehicles all day until we reach that day's destination, a vast mountaintop plateau known as Eagle Plains. There, a surprisingly luxurious and commodious hotel and road service complex materializes, mirage-like, from the unbroken boreal wilderness like an oasis in the midst of the Sahara.

Legends of the North

The legends are the tragic yarn of "the lost patrol," and the epic pursuit of Albert Johnson, the so-called "mad trapper of Rat River" who was killed in the ensuing shootout after killing two Mounties, and others.

Both true-to-life legends of the north country were popularized by an old writer acquaintance of mine from Whitehorse, Dick North, in his two nonfiction books, "The Lost Patrol" and "The Mad Trapper of Rat River," the definitive retellings of those dramatic episodes. ("Mad Trapper" was made into a Hollywood action movie that barely resembled North's book.) Both events took place along routes of old dogsled trails covering thousands of square miles generally paralleling the Dempster corridor.

The Eagle Plains Hotel's mountaintop aerie offers a spectacular view of the surrounding wilderness. Unlike many remote lodges, the Eagle Plains Hotel, located some 20 miles south of the Arctic Circle, is open year-round.

The next morning, we resume our trip northward up the Dempster, planning to reach Inuvik by evening. Within a couple hours, we reach the border dividing the Yukon Territory and the Northwest Territories on a high mountaintop promontory where commemorative plaques and illustrated historical markers trace the archeological and cultural genesis of that immense area, which encompasses nearly half of northern Canada, from the Yukon on the west to Hudson Bay to the east.

Athapasakan Indian Villages

The mountain scenery grows increasingly more picturesque and rugged, while the roller-coaster-like roadway dips, turns, curves, climbs, switches back and descends with dizzying monotony, each succeeding vista seemingly more spectacular than the last.

Soon we reach the next major point of interest, the mostly Athapaskan Indian community of Fort McPherson, on the banks of the Peel River.

We pick up a few token souvenirs there, then continue north, soon reaching, on the bank of the Peel River, the second of two river ferry crossings we must make along the Dempster, this one near the small Athapaskan Indian village of Arctic Red River..

In many respects, the Dempster is the Canadian counterpart of the James W. Dalton Highway, which now serves mainly as a resupply route for the North Slope oilfields, as we well as for the pipeline and road service facilities along the way. Unlike the Dalton, the Dempster had no clear-cut raison d'etre such as construction of an oil pipeline, but mainly reflects Canada's national obsession for building frontier roadways.

The rest of the drive from the Arctic Red River ferry crossing to Inuvik, about 130 miles, covers mostly flat tundra blanketed with scraggly anemic black spruce, a sure sign of the continuous subsurface permafrost that inhibits the growth of their root systems, hence the trees themselves.

Inuvik, the end of the road

The only mountains we see now are the Richardsons, a northern extension of the Rockies, in the far distance, to the north/northeast. We're now within the vast floodplain of the mighty Mackenzie River, the Mississippi of the north. On its sprawling east channel -- larger than most river mainstreams -- the relatively new "model" arctic community of Inuvik was sited. In the Inuvialuit tongue, Inuvik means "the place of the people." It was built by the Canadian government some 42 years ago as a grand experiment for acculturating the indigenous peoples. We've reached the end of the road.

Inuvik's founding was intended to lure the residents of the ancient native village of Aclavik just to the east, perennially wiped out by the thawing Mackenzie River's spring floods, to safer habitat on higher ground. And while many relocated to Inuvik, a handful of diehards remains at the old Aclavik town site, clinging to their aboriginal abodes and culture.

From my perspective, at least, that one's arrival at Inuvik is anti-climactic to the trip up the Dempster itself, which is sufficient reward, although the community does have its interesting points.

Most restaurants in Inuvik and throughout the Northwest offer indigenous fare, such as caribou and musk ox, as a novelty, which is generally palatable. The best dining establishment in town is the Mackenzie Hotel, where superior food and service were provided by the regulars there -- Carrie, the hostess and Rudy, the bartender.

Most of Inuvik's trade and commerce, even in this day of jet aircraft, relies primarily upon riverboat and barge transport up and down the Mackenzie River and its numerous channels, as does its recreation. Most residents own either a boat, a small plane or both, which they use for work and play. One couple we met combined both in a custom-designed log cabin boat with upper and lower sundecks which they built to live on, as well as to charter to groups for river cruise parties and dinners on the Mackenzie.

As a confirmed bookhound, one of my first impulses when traveling is to seek out the local bookshops, particularly those which deal in used books. Didn't have to look far for Boreal Books on the main drag, managed by Bob Rowe, a tall, soft-spoken and articulate bookseller, well-stocked and informed on the literature of the north, including Dick North's books, two of them on Albert Johnson, alluded to earlier.

Johnson is believed to be but has never been definitively proven to be the mad trapper of Rat River. North, among other things, is still assiduously pursuing his investigations into that subject, Rowe told me. Johnson, who was shot and killed after a prolonged chase by Mounties in the early 1900s, is buried in a cemetery at nearby Aclavik. North is trying to get permission from tribal leaders there to exhume Johnson's body so that it can be DNA-tested to establish once and for all whether he was, indeed, the legendary mad trapper.

Throughout our trip in Alaska, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, temperatures in July were generally consistent with but somewhat lower than the extreme highs that prevailed throughout most of the United States and Canada at the time, ranging from the low 60s at night to the mid-70s and low 80s during the day, even at Inuvik, some 200 miles above the Arctic Circle.

The weather was superb and the unpaved road conditions generally excellent due, in part, to the absence of rain throughout which would otherwise have rendered the gravel road muddy, unstable, even hazardous. We considered ourselves lucky in that regard, as less hospitable road conditions are more often the rule than the exception.

Widespread forest and brush fires in the upper Yukon around Dawson City produced generally smoky atmospheric conditions in that area for several weeks, which tended to dissipate outside radii of 20 to 30 miles. Long daylight hours in the northern latitudes enhanced our enjoyment of the trip, and the further north we drove, of course, the longer the days waxed. At Inuvik, the sun doesn't set at all between around the May 21 and the July 19.

Driving the Dempster is not a road trip to be taken lightly, and some advance planning is advisable. Accommodations and services along the road are few and far between, and may not be available at times without advance arrangements. Carry at least two spare tires and survival gear, including ample mosquito repellent, drinking water or other beverages and grub in the event of an extended breakdown. No emergency road or medical services are generally available, although ad hoc assistance could conceivably be provided randomly where the Samaritan impulse stirs rare passersby.

Although various official and unofficial informational sources assert that Royal Canadian Mounted Police vehicles patrol the road regularly, we didn't see a single one on our trip, going or coming back, so if you have a roadway problemyou can assume you're pretty much onyour own, (No cell towers out here)! and I suspect that these assertions more reflect glib Department of Tourism affectations than public policy.

A trip up the Dempster Highway is not for those who seek night lights and hot spots, creature comforts and cheap thrills. Rather, it's a rare opportunity to contemplate at leisure a largely unspoiled wilderness environment which, except for this narrow thread of gravel road on which we travel, and a few sparse niches of civilization along the way, looks pretty much as it has for millions of years.

GOING UP THE "GOODY" WITH JOHN & GRACE BUTROVICH

The single-engine float plane wagged its wings twice, then circled for a landing on the placid surface of the Goodpaster River, a clearwater tributary of the Tanana River teeming with northern grayling and other anadromous and catadromus species. It flowed into the Tanana about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, near Delta Junction, where the Alaska Highway ends and joins the Richardson Highway. Tilting slightly on its horizontal axis as it skimmed over the water, the aircraft’s left float gently kissed the glassy surface a millisecond before the right one, settling into a virtually splashless touch down.

As he powered the plane towards the bank where I awaited him, I immediately recognized through the approaching windshield pilot Dick Wien, member of an internationally famous Alaska family of aviators. Stilling the engine, as the propeller spun slowly to a halt, he slipped out of the cabin, stepped onto the port float and tossed a rope to me to draw the plane into shore.

I sensed this was no social call. It came in late summer of 1978 when a prominent charter bush pilot from Fairbanks would be too busy hauling passengers and cargo to deadhead into this remote river valley for an aimless tete a tete.

UP THE GOODY
Luxuriating in splendid isolation, I was in the first week of a planned month-long sojourn in a rustic cabin on what locals fondly called “The Goody,” about a 2 ½ -hour water jet boat drive from its mouth on the turbulent Tanana. The cabin’s owners, John and Grace Butrovich, and I had come upriver several days earlier from our homes in Fairbanks on one of our regular summer weekend sorties to soak up the pastoral ambiance of this remote riverine setting, brimming with wildlife, both land and waterborne.

John and Grace had been coming “up the Goody” nearly every weekend during Alaska‘s brief hiatus between winters - weather and the politics in which they were usually immersed permitting - for more than four decades to their federally patented homesite, ritually shedding the cosmopolitan personae they affected in town to bask in primal simplicity in this bucolic paradise. We drew our water directly from the crystal clear river, boiling it for drinking and cooking on a classic but simple Klondike wood-burning stove, fed from the woodpile out in the yard which I replenished daily..

John and Grace had gone back to Fairbanks after the weekend, leaving me here alone to work on a writing project undistracted by phone, television or casual drop-ins. The only concession to modernity was a cheap battery-powered am/fm radio connected to a simple wire antenna hooked onto the tip of a skinny black spruce towering above the outhouse over which, if necessary, urgent messages could be wirelessed to me from KFAR Radio in Fairbanks.

Whatever mission on which Dick Wien had been dispatched was obviously too important or private to be broadcast over public airwaves. I had a sinking feeling my cherished solitary stay on the Goody would be short-lived. Before he had said a word, Dick, I was sure, was going to haul a passenger back to Fairbanks, and I was the only available candidate.

Compared to the Butroviches, I was a relative newcomer to these environs. This was in the late 70s, about ten years after I had come into the country from my home in Pennsylvania to work as an editor at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. I had met John and Grace early on, barely a month after I arrived in Fairbanks. A special session of the legislature had been called by then-Governor Wally Hickel to deal with the aftermath of the destructive August,1967 Fairbanks flood, when the Chena River, which courses through the center of Fairbanks, overflowed its banks up to 12 feet or more.

John had been a territorial legislator, then a state senator after Alaska attained statehood in 1959, for decades one of Alaska’s most respected political leaders. At the apogee of his political career, he was the longest serving state senator in. U.S history, some 30 years. I had been assigned by my editor to cover the special flood session of the Alaska legislature in the state capital of Juneau, which lasted about a week. Upon its completion, I elected to return to Fairbanks via a northbound state ferry along Alaska’s Inside Passage to the Lynn Canal’s end of navigation at the tiny former gold rush town of Skagway.

There I boarded a coach of the historic White Pass and Yukon Railway, built between 1898 and 1900, in the wake of the Klondike gold rush, the oldest and only industrial narrow gauge railroad then operating in the U.S. It would carry me 110 miles from Skagway through the coastal mountains over the White Pass beyond the international boundary to Whitehorse, the capital of Canada’s Yukon Territory. From there I planned to fly to Fairbanks.

That’s where fate intervened. In Fairbanks, just prior to, then during the Special Session, I had made passing acquaintance with John Butrovich, in my untutored eyes, a virtually mythic presence because of his revered status within the state. But after the legislative session, on the daylong train ride north from Skagway to Whitehorse, in those confined circumstances, he, Grace and I met and were thrown together socially, forming an almost immediate mutual connection, and discovering a rare commonality of sensibilities, among them a shared taste for rum (Latin) Manhattans and Dry Sack sherry.

In Whitehorse, after spending several days sightseeing together, they invited me to drive up the Alaska Highway with them to Fairbanks in their car, which had also made the trip from Juneau to Skagway aboard a state ferry, then lashed to a flatcar aboard the WP&YR. John and Grace had made this trip many times over the years, but this was my virgin jaunt up the Alaska Highway from Whitehorse to the highway’s northern terminus at Delta Junction, thence north on the Richardson Highway to Fairbanks. Both skilled raconteurs, John and Grace enthralled me with wise and witty anecdotes of landmarks, legends and historical ephemera pertaining to the famed road, once known as the Alcan Highway.

In short order, they, their extended family - their daughter Jan, her children and husband, Hawley Evans, Grace’s mother, Mary Brown - became my surrogate family in Alaska. Rarely, if ever, has a newcomer to Alaska , a “cheechako,” been so lucky and privileged to form such a rewarding bond.

Their salutary friendship and familial affection aside, John and Grace’s social and political connections quickly opened to me doors that would otherwise have remained forever closed, a motherlode of insider access for a newly arrived newsman. Before long, I was sharing their long summer weekends “up the Goody,” a tradition that lasted nearly 20 years.

There we would spend halcyon days exploring the upper reaches of the Goody as far as The Forks, where John and Grace had inherited a homestead established years earlier by a longtime trapper on the river they had befriended, Lawrence Johnson. We would clean weeds from the yard and repair the crumbling cabin and cache, contemplating his elaborate tombstone there, buried by his friends where he lived and died. An irrepressible optimist, Johnson recorded his quotidian activities in a journal which ended each evening with the entry, “Fine Day,” notwithstanding the sometimes life-threatening challenges and travails he overcame.

Lawrence Johnson hadn’t quite died with his boots on, but came close to it. One friend, the late Paul “Doc” Haggland of Fairbanks, an MD and one-time state senator, had flown in on skiis one winter day, landing on the Goodpaster ice in front of Lawrence’s cabin to check on him, a ritual Johnson‘s close circle of pilot friends in Fairbanks regularly observed. He found him slumped over, sitting on the edge of his bunk in the act of donning a boot, frozen in that position. He’d suffered a fatal heart attack. Rigor mortis had set in. Doc had literally to break a couple of Lawrence’s stiffened limbs in order to get his frozen corpse inside his small plane to take him back to Fairbanks for thawing and embalming.

Among the antiquarian curiosities we found at Lawrence’s homestead at The Forks were artifacts dating back to a bygone era around the turn of the 20^th century when a 21-year old army lieutenant by the name of Billy Mitchell led a contingent whose orders were to survey a route for a proposed intercontinental telegraph line through Alaska to Russia. We found military matchbooks still functional, glass electrical insulators, cans of still edible and tasty unhomogenized peanut butter, electrical wiring, and others from that long ago foray.

A couple hours each day on the Goody with the Butroviches were spent fly fishing for grayling, a dinnertime delicacy. While Grace and I waved off clouds of mosquitos, John, covered with the pests, defiantly refused to acknowledge their existence. He would grunt: “What mosquitos?” We gathered wild strawberries, red raspberries and blueberries in the woods, low bush cranberries in the late summer. Evenings after supper were often spent in quiet contemplation of the pastel sunsets suffusing the ivory peaks of the distant Alaska Range

One of our favored evening pastimes was flinging shards of remembered poetry at each other, from Shakespeare to Bryant, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelly to Dickenson and Frost, among others. John affected a distaste for classical　music, for which Grace and I shared a passion, regaling us with his mock contempt for "Stravinsky Korsakoff."

John learned to fly in his 60s, acquiring a Piper SuperCub. While he amassed many hours of flight time, he never progressed beyond a student license to obtain his pilot’s license, hence was not legally certified to carry passengers on his flights. Nevertheless, he frequently took me upstairs with him without telling Grace, who frowned upon, nay, forbade the illegal practice. One Easter Sunday, snow and ice still covering the Interior, John and I took off for the Goodpaster cabin without telling Grace I was with him.

We landed in front of the cabin on the river ice, which was just beginning to melt along the edges. He taxied too closely to the edge of the stream. One ski broke through the rotting ice, imprisoning the plane. While we worked to free it by building a rough log ramp with cut firewood, I took a series of photos, carelessly tossing a film wrapper into a wastebasket inside the cabin. By the time we freed the plane, darkness was approaching.

Back in Fairbanks, Grace, concerned over John’s failure to return before dark, had sent their son-in-law Hawley Evans, a well-known and accomplished Alaska bush pilot, into the darkening skies to see if he could find John’s plane. Within a few minutes, Hawley passed us airborne from the outgoing direction.

Fast forward to a couple months later. After snow and ice had disappeared from the Interior, John and Grace made their first weekend trip “up the Goody.” As she entered the cabin, Grace, an impeccable house tidier, spotted the film wrapper in the otherwise empty waste basket which she knew had not been there when they had closed down the cabin at the end of the previous season, and instantly divined the situation. She knew, intuitively, that John, who didn’t use a camera, and I had surreptitiously flown to the Goodpaster cabin that Easter Sunday several months earlier. She never said a word, and wouldn’t speak to John for days. Eventually, she forgave him, but never forgot the incident. In later years she could joke about it.

With one harrowing exception, the few days after John and Grace had left me alone on the Goody before Dick Wien appeared were uneventful. Few boats heading up or down river came by; one or two river rats who knew I was there alone stopped to make sure I was okay. One warm afternoon, as I studiously contemplated the bare inner plywood walls of the outhouse, I heard a tremendous ruckus and crashing of brush just outside the door, which I hadn’t closed, as no one was around for miles.

An instant later, a cow moose shot past the door, headed for the river about 20 yards away, followed closely by that year’s calf, barely six months old. They were frantically fleeing from a pursuing grizzly, whose hairy bulk seemed to fill the outhouse door as he too careened past in hot pursuit of the cow and calf. I sat there frozen for uncounted minutes, petrified, incapable of moving. By the time I did, the pursuer and pursued were nowhere to be seen, and I never knew the outcome of that frantic dance of life and death between predator and prey.

* * *

“John asked me to come and get you and bring you back to Fairbanks,” Dick Wien told me as he stepped ashore from his float plane. “He didn’t tell me why, but he said it’s important.” I quickly put the bear-proof shutters up on the cabin windows, locked the door, fastened it with a chain loop, gathered up my typewriter, papers, clothing and other effects and climbed into Dick’s plane for the brief flight back to Fairbanks.

In that year’s Republican primary election, August 22, 1978, former Governor Wally Hickel had challenged the re-nomination of the incumbent, Jay Hammond. It was a tight race, but in the end Hammond appeared to have prevailed by a narrow margin of fewer than 300 votes. But there were obvious discrepancies, even apparent fraud in the counting of the votes, several hundred of which had been lost or temporarily misplaced. It was clear that Hickel would challenge the election in court.

A number of Hickel’s leading supporters, including the Anchorage lawyer who had served as his appointed attorney general during Hickel’s first term as governor back in the late 60s, Edgar Paul Boyko, had formed a group they called “The Honest Election Committee.” It’s goal was to investigate the election’s proven and suspected irregularities and collect data to bolster their impending case in court. In that context, they had sought someone known to be politically independent of both candidates to launch a detailed investigation into the circumstances surrounding the election and the counting of the votes. I was the only prospect in Alaska upon whom the members of the bi-partisan committee could all agree.

They learned I was remotely ensconced in John Butrovich’s Goodpaster River cabin, and asked him if he could contact me to ask me if I’d be interested in undertaking an independent inquiry into the election for them. John asked Dick Wien to fetch me back to Fairbanks. Upon my arrival a day or two later in Anchorage, I told the committee I would agree to do so only if I were guaranteed complete freedom in conducting the investigation without any interference from the committee, and sufficient resources to conduct a creditable investigation. The members agreed. I reluctantly decided to forego my sojourn on the Goodpaster River to undertake the investigation. But that’s another story.

I climbed into the passenger’s seat of Dick Wien’s Cessna 180, we roared down a straight stretch of the river, got up on the step, then rose above the black pines, cottonwoods and alders that laced the river banks, the plane’s shadow flitting below on the serpentine river’s mirror surface, and headed north towards Fairbanks, towards a new adventure that would plunge me into the inner recesses of one of Alaska’s convoluted and storied political battles.

_____________________________________________________________________________

　

Joe LaRocca was a newsman in Alaska in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, covering the legislature, state government, politics and the oil industry for various Alaska news media and The New York Times. His book Alaska Agonistes: The Age of Petroleum - How Big Oil Bought Alaska is an anecdotal political history of Alaska’s modern oil industry. He now resides in his hometown of North East (Erie County), PA and may be contacted at jlar5552@verizon.net or 814.725.8926.

CAL LENSINK, WILD MUSKOXEN AND AN AMAZING CONSERVATION SUCCESS STORY

by JOE LaROCCA

Cal Lensink, now deceased, is one of Alaska’s unsung heroes. He died several years ago in his native state of Minnesota after a long career as a wildlife biologist in Alaska for he U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

I first met Cal back in the 1970s when he was manager of the federal Yukon-Kuskokwin National Wildlife Refuge, which included Nunivak Island in the Bering Straits just off Alaska’s western coast near Bethel. He was one of the key figures in the management of the wild muskoxen herds on Nunivak Island in the Bering Strait and one of the nation‘s great conservation success stories.

After the last muskoxen had been extirpated from its mainland Alaska habitat by hunters in the mid-1800s, about 30 muskoxen had been transplanted onto Nunivak Island from Greenland in the 1930s, reproductively increasing to about 700 by the late 1960s.

At that time, the island herd was in danger of crashing from overpopulation by the early 1970s. Cal was one of the leaders, along with the late Ivan Thorall and Glen DeSpain of Fairbanks, who mounted a controversial campaign to remove the long-standing ban on muskox hunting on Nunivak Island.

They and others advocated sport hunting of surplus bulls, while at the same time proposing the transplant of small family groups at various locales on the mainland where it was hoped they would re-establish permanent herds on their historic habitat.

There are more than 3,000 of their descendants on mainland Alaska. Defying his political bosses in the U.S. Interior Dept., including former governor and interior secretary Wally Hickel who opposed the hunts, Cal helped provide the moral authority and biological expertise needed to overcome the wrongheaded political inertia and environmental opposition to the hunts, which were initiated on Nunivak Island in 1975 as the herd faced certain extinction from natural causes.

Today, the hunts, both subsistence and trophy, are a valuable management tool in the maintenance of both the island and mainland herds. I was the first newsman allowed to accompany the first legally permitted muskox hunter (an Anchorage refrigerator salesman) to Nunivak Island in 1975 to report on and photograph his successful hunt for a bull muskox.

After Cal retired from the US F&WS, he returned briefly to Alaska to supervise, pro bono, the cleaning and salvation of thousands of Alaska’s sea mammals and waterfowl in Prince William Sound which had been immersed in the Exxon Valdez’s disastrous oil slick.

RE-VISITING THE HISTORIC 1969 VOYAGE OF THE SS MANHATTAN

 Breaking Ice for Arctic Oil: The Epic Voyage of the SS Manhattan through the Northwest Passage, by Ross Coen, 2012, University of Alaska Press, 215 pps, U.S. $24.95

Reviewed by JOE E. LaROCCA

(This review originally appeared in the Anchorage Daily News)

A University of Alaska scholar at Fairbanks has plucked a rare gem from the dust bin of Alaska’s relatively brief but colorful petroleum history and endowed it with a fresh voice that speaks to a new generation of adherents largely unaware of its historic genesis.

In his new book, Ross Coen, a university professor, revisits the legendary ice-breaking supership’s remarkable experimental journey more than 40 years ago from New York Harbor through the ice-choked waters of the Canadian arctic archipelago’s mythic Northwest Passage: Its destination, Prudhoe Bay in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska’s then-newly discovered North Slope oilfields.

(Full disclosure: As one of the few survivors who sailed aboard the Manhattan during part of her spectacular trip in 1969 through the dazzling labryrinth of arctic ice, I was interviewed by Professor Coen online during research on his book. He has favorably cited some of my Alaska writings).

The story of the SS Manhattan has been told in various contexts over the years, most notably in a book published in 1970 by New York Times Reporter William D. Smith, “Northwest Passage: The Historic Voyage of the SS Manhattan.” Smith, flaunting the Times’ prestigious clout, was the only reporter allowed to cover the ship’s entire voyage round trip. I was there covering for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

Prof. Coen and Smith have penned powerful and nuanced descriptions of the supership’s tumultuous east and west voyages through the Passage from totally different perspectives: Prof. Coen, from exhaustive research into the ship’s voluminous paper trail and insightful interviews of some of the surviving crew members and officers, an exemplar of investigative inquiry; Reporter Smith, from his perceptive, often emotional/aesthetic personal observations aboard ship during his unprecedented experience. Both deserve a full reading.

Prof. Coen readily acknowledges that “Bill Smith’s book is a superb contemporary account of the voyage,” but notes that his own “has the advantage of coming 40 years later when I could place these events in an historical context.”

That’s an understatement. Prof. Coen’s book is arguably the most important book written by an Alaska author on any subject. It’s a must read for anyone dealing with or engaged in the far-reaching implications of the overarching state, national and international issues it explores. These include conflicting claims of governance of the Northwest passage waters and their disputed status, and growing concerns over the creeping pollution of global oceans by petroleum products.

Prof. Coen’s meticulously researched book ventures well beyond the adventurous Manhattan narrative to explore in depth many of the geopolitical public and corporate policy issues it aroused which broadened the context immeasurably.

He observes, for example, that as part of its legacy, the Manhattan’s voyage “provoked intense reaction in Canada with regard to environmental protection, economic security, maritime safety regulation, and ultimately the very question of who owns the Northwest Passage.” These are wrenching geopolitical issues which the passage of time and complicated emerging national and international legalities have intensified.

Prof. Coen notes that “Humble Oil did not request advance permission from the Canadian government before sending its tanker north. Neither did the U.S. Coast Guard in the case of its (cutter) Northwind (to escort the tanker)…nor the U.S State Department.”

For the U.S. “To formally ask for permission,” Prof Coen writes, “would be to acknowledge that the waters of the Northwest Passage indeed fell under Canadian jurisdiction.” While conceding that the scores of archipelagic islands scattered throughout the Canadian portion of the Passage belong to Canada, Prof. Coen notes, “American officials instead believed the route qualified as an international waterway” open to all nations.

According to Prof. Coen, the U.S. has based its position in part on a ruling by the International Court of Justice in 1949 which held that a strait qualifies as international when it connects two high seas (i.e., the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans0, and which falls outside the jurisdiction of adjacent states, although Canada disputes this claim.

When the prospective voyage was first announced in 1968, then-Canada Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau “stated his intent to assert ‘stewardship, if not sovereignty’ over the passage.” His “soft language” Prof. Coen writes, angered some Canadians “who desired a firm stance on the issue and possibly a showdown with what they perceived as the arrogant neighbor to the south.”

But, according to Prof. Coen, Trudeau’s secretary of external affairs, Mitchell Sharp, “advised restraint.” ‘This is not a time for wide-ranging assertions of Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic made without regard to the international political and legal considerations (and) there is no necessity for us to make sweeping assertions to reinforce our position,’ Sharp declaimed. ‘That might satisfy our ego but would not add a whit to the international acceptability of our position’.”

Nevertheless, Prof. Coen writes, these comments “belied a firm resolve to assert functional authority over the Canadian Arctic by assuming environmental stewardship of its waters.”

By unilaterally assigning Canada’s Coast Guard ship, the John H. MacDonald to escort the Manhattan, a move the Manhattan’s officers heartily welcomed, Canada “signalled its intent to pursue an overall strategy of cooperation designed to avoid direct confrontation with the U.S.,” Prof. Coen writes, “and allow time to develop an internationally defensible plan for achieving de facto control” over the Northwest Passage within her sovereign sphere.

“While the John A. MacDonald had been assigned to the expedition in part to wave the Canadian flag,” Prof Coen writes, she steadfastly “would guide the supertanker through the passage, repeatedly rescue her from brutal ice conditions and generally prove indispensible to the entire mission” at times even at her own peril.

The Manhattan’s voyage was launched in August, 1969 to test the operational and economic feasibility of shipping North Slope crude oil from Alaska’s Arctic Ocean shore eastward to refineries and markets on the U.S. East Coast and beyond. Another alternative: pumping it through the proposed trans Alaska oil pipeline, if and when completed, to the port city of Valdez on Alaska’s south coast for transshipment by ocean tankers to U.S. refineries on the West Coast, Gulf of Mexico coast and the Bahamas.

At the outset, proponents of the ocean-only option prefigured by the Manhattan voyage claimed the oil could be delivered by tankers larger and more powerful than the Manhattan much more cheaply to markets on the East Coast, where it would be needed, than to the West Coast, where it wouldn’t - where, indeed, there would be a projected half-millon barrel per day glut of oil once North Slope crude came onstream.

While that calculation may have been valid at the time it was rendered, the economics of both alternatives changed drastically by the time both projects were completed, even reversing the logistics in favor of the pipeline, whose completion was ultimately delayed nearly a decade after the Manhattan’s voyage.

The $52 million Manhattan project was the brainchild of a Humble Oil/Standard Oil of New Jersey transport executive, Stanley B. Haas, now deceased. Humble was concurrently one of three ranking proponents of the proposed trans Alaska oil pipeline. Haas sold the maritime project to his company’s Board, contending that Humble’s share of the then-estimated ten billion barrels-plus of recoverable oil which underlay the Prudhoe Bay oilfields would justify two divergent transport streams serving discrete market venues.

After an extended period of corporate gestation through the 1960s, the decision was taken in late 1968 to proceed with plans for a voyage shove-off by mid-1969. Prof. Coen’s incisive account of the convoluted decisional process is just one of numerous fascinating aspects of his book, remarkable for the vivid color and quality of his writing, as well as the depth, detail and precision of his research.

Haas’ first chore was to find or have built a suitable ship with configurations which would enable her to sail through the Northwest Passage year-round.

Humble, Prof. Coen writes, initially “proposed to build an ice-breaking tanker weighing 250,000 deadweight tons with an engine room capable of 100,000 horsepower…the largest of its kind in history. If this test vessel of an arctic transportation system demonstrated both technical and economic feasibility, Humble would follow with an entire fleet of tankers of comparable size and power,” he writes.

Then reality intruded with the realization that no such ship could possibly be built in time for the scheduled voyage date the following summer, timed to coincide with the first prospective flow of oil from Alaska’s new world-class North Slope oilfields, and a couple years before the then-expected completion of the alternative transport system, the trans Alaska oil pipeline.

The search began for an existing ship “that resembled (the hypothetical ship’s design and could be quickly renovated for the journey.” That led to the Manhattan, constructed in 1962. “Straight off the rack, “ Prof. Coen writes, “the Manhattan already possessed many characteristics of a good icebreaker” - extreme size (longer than three football fields; tonnage (115,000 deadweight tons) and power (100,000 horsepower ahead, 40,000 hp astern).

He tells a fascinating tale of how the Manhattan came to be financed and built - a highly unlikely ship owner’s investment - too lengthy to relate here. The owner, Seatrain, leased her for two years to Humble, which began a unique and all-encompassing whirlwind six-month modification program no single U.S. shipbuilder could handle alone.

Humble docked the ship at Sun Shipyard in Chester, Pa, where she was cut into four sections, with the bow and the stern remaining in Chester; a new ice-breaking bow to be constructed in Maine; the after- bow towed to Newport News in Virginia, and the midship section towed to a Mobile, Alabama shipyard. “Haas joked at the time that the Manhattan was truly the longest ship in the world, stretching from Pennsylvania to Alabama,” Prof. Coen writes.

“The most innovative and visually distinctive renovation to the tanker,” he notes, “was its brand new ice-breaking bow.” Constructed at the Bath, Maine Iron Works, “the bow was made of steel capable of withstanding nine hundred pounds of pressure per square inch, and featured a sharp 18-degree curve calculated to allow the hull to ride atop the ice…the sheer bulk of the vessel” would cause a “tensile failure and a clean split in the ice sheet” and toss small-house-sized chunks of ice cavalierly aside.

Inevitable delays in shipwork led to postponement of completion dates from early June, 1969 to July 15, then end of the month, then August 2, when the ship was at last ready for sea trials. One goal forfeited by the delays was to sail the ship into the arctic ice pack at its peak strength in late Spring and early summer to challenge the Manhattan’s ultimate toughness and her officers’ resolve. But that could be compensated for by running more tests through the ice pack the following Spring of 1970, which ultimately ensued.

Despite serious performance deficiencies at sea trials, the Manhattan was set to begin her illustrious voyage from the Sun Shipworks at Chester, PA on August 26 , with brief celebratory stops at New York and Halifax, Canada.

Eleven weeks later, in the early morning hours of Sept, 15, Humble issued a press release stating that “The most talked-about ship in the world today, the SS Manhattan, slipped quietly into the frigid waters of Amundsen Gulf late last night and became the first commercial vessel in history ever to traverse the Northwest Passage.”

Humble “stated its belief,” Prof, Coen wrote, “that the Manhattan had proven the feasibility of using such tankers in the Arctic, yet the Alaska pipeline now appeared to have an economic edge.” On Oct. 21, 1970, Humble announced “that it was suspending its icebreaking tanker project, Prof. Coen writes. “From this point forward, Humble would focus its efforts only on the design and construction of the Trans Alaska Pipeline.”

It’s unlikely anyone under the age of 60 other than historians, select professionals and mariners has ever heard of the Manhattan. But during her arctic voyage in 1969, she was the most famous and largest non-military ship operating in the world. Newspapers, magazines and electronic media around the globe heralded her name on an almost daily basis, endowing her with household familiarity.

Now, some four decades later, the Manhattan has ignominiously ended her checkered existence, far from her glory days, on a scrap heap somewhere near Hong Kong. “What is certain,” Prof. Coen regretfully notes, “is that no part of the first commercial vessel to complete the Northwest Passage was saved for its historical value.

“The ship that had survived the arctic ice pack and was once the most famous vessel in the world finally went the way of countless others that sailed the Northwest Passage - crushed and dismantled and ultimately lost to history.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally from North Dakota, Prof. Coen came to Alaska in 1995 where he earned degrees in English and Northern Studies from The University of Alaska at Fairbanks, and where he now teaches Sociology and Political Science as an adjunct professor. He‘s a rural Energy Specialist the the Alaska Center for Energy and Power, and served as climate change policy analyst for the late U.S. Senator Te d Stevens and the Saenate Commerce Commitee. He is president of the Alaska Historical Society. He may be reached at racoen@alaska.edu.