By ART CHANCE
In August of 1974, I put Atlanta’s violence and racial strife in my rearview mirrors and struck out “North to the Future” with wife, 3 year-old daughter, dog, a Toyota Landcruiser, some camping gear, and something of a stash of cash.
We were astoundingly naïve about Alaska; we had a couple of National Geographic books and a copy of “The Milepost.” We made a leisurely diagonal trip across the country to Seattle. From there, we drove to Watson Lake and connected there to the Alcan, still dirt in those days except for about 40 miles around Whitehorse. Somewhere along the way we heard that President Nixon had resigned (Aug. 8, 1974); we still had enough college in us to think it was a good thing.
It was late August getting into September and it was raining and snowing from time to time. I spent a lot more time in four-wheel-drive mode than I would today but we made it to pavement at the border uneventfully. It cost $20 to get some of the mud off at the quarter car wash in Tok. In those days a vehicle that had come over the Alcan was never clean again.
We spent our first night in Alaska at The Big Timber across from Merrill Field, which had a better reputation than it later acquired, and we had our first meal at Peggy’s Café.
We looked around the next day and the line from The New Yorker about how “the people who built Anchorage, Alaska should never be allowed to build anything again” ran through my head. Anchorage was a scruffy place in 1974.
It became apparent that we had to either give away our beautiful Norwegian Elkhound or give away our kid in order to get a place to live. Housing was cruel in Anchorage. The dog went.
Like everybody else, I wanted a pipeline job, but it wasn’t yet spinning up very much in late 1974 and you had to have a very low union seniority date, which I didn’t have, or know somebody, and I didn’t. I didn’t yet know that $500 in the right hand would get you a dispatch. I wasn’t dumb enough to sit around union halls polishing pine; I’d long ago learned that when you needed a job, take the first one you can get.
I’d learned to walk in a retail store so I went to work at Stallone’s, then in University Center mall. I’d been selling high-dollar fashion to the pimps, prostitutes, gangsters and professional athletes in Atlanta, so University Center was a piece of cake. My few months with Stallone’s was a very good Alaska 101 course; you saw everyone from every social status and walk of life there. I quickly learned how different Anchorage was from rigidly class-conscious Atlanta. That tattered brown outfit that old guy is wearing is a Filson that costs as much as the most expensive suit on your rack.
I had a problem; Stallone’s paid well and I was a good commission salesman, but I needed benefits. My daughter needed surgery and I needed good health insurance. That meant the union or public employee or better yet, union public employee kind of health insurance.
I started paying “dobie dues” to the Laborers’ Union looking for a State, Municipality of Anchorage or school district job. The first dispatch was to a graveyard shift custodian position at Dimond High School. It was 40 hours at a good wage, overtime, leave, holidays, and full-ride health insurance after 30 days and no pre-existing conditions restrictions. Hell, yes, I’d sweep and mop floors for that.
After I’d stayed around long enough, I began to dabble in union politics. It didn’t take long to become a shop steward, then executive board member, then vice president. I ultimately wound up with a seat on the Central Labor Council, the District Council of Laborers, head of the Central Labor Council’s Committee on Political Education, their PAC, and more.
Don’t let the fancy-sounding titles fool you; I served at the pleasure and was mostly just a high-status briefcase toter. My daughter’s medical issues were resolved and I had gotten far enough up the ladder to get myself in serious trouble and not nearly far enough to get myself out of it. It was time to arm myself with the “courage of my connections” and move on.
Along the way I’d had considerable involvement in political action. Blue collar organized labor in those days wanted nothing to do with white collar public employee labor. The long-established trade unions represented most of the blue and gray collar unionized employees and the white collar unionized employees were represented by their independent employee associations; they didn’t want to condescend to being unions.
The trade union leadership was generally conservative. All were Democrats and most were the Democrat version of Catholic and at least went to Mass on Christmas and Easter. The AFL-CIO of the 1970s was mostly anti-communist. Social justice wasn’t a part of the vocabulary. They were social conservatives and really only cared about the wages, hours and conditions of their members; their mantra was Sam Gomper’s: “More.”
I was younger and much further left than most of the people whose briefcases I toted. Even back then it took several semesters of Life 101 to get over going to college.
The Democrat Party of those days was going through a schism. The old “New Deal” coalition of FDR’s time had broken in the streets of Chicago in 1968 when the Students for a Democratic Society and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin’s “Yippies” had clashed with Mayor Richard Daley’s cops during the Democrat Convention. “Four Dead in Ohio” at Kent State University pretty much put an end to Democrat unity for the better part of a generation.
Here in Alaska we’d had little of the civil rights and anti-war conflict, but the Great Society programs had brought us a flock of fresh-faced college graduates as Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and others working for all the “community action” programs created by The Great Society.
The majority of the Democrat politicians of the 1970s came to Alaska as a VISTA volunteer or as an employee of one of the community action programs. The hot ticket seems to have been to come to Alaska as a VISTA volunteer, marry an Alaska girl who was either Native or who had good Democrat bona fides, and pursue your rocket to stardom. If you don’t believe me go check out the bios of most of the Democrat office-holders of the day.
That cadre of Great Society emigres and some local talent created “The Ad Hoc Democratic Coalition” in the early 1970s. They were what the media and political scientists styled “The New Left.” Few of them knew it, but they were mostly Trotskyite communists. Many of them still had the marks on the pocket of their Levis from the copy of Mao’s “Little Red Book” that they’d carried through college.
I knew a lot of them and had even spent time sitting cross-legged on the floor smoking dope and planning the revolution with them.
They took over the Alaska Democrat Party and in 1974 defeated the Democrat nominee, the legendary Gov. Bill Egan, by supporting a Bush Republican, Sen. Jay Hammond. Gov. Hammond may have been a Republican, as that was understood in Alaska in those days, but his administration was mostly Ad Hoc Democrats and just this side of openly communist.
Today’s Alaska was formed during their time in power. They controlled the Legislature in the middle 1970s and many maintained power into the 1980s. Rep. Hugh Malone, House speaker who many consider the father of the Permanent Fund, wasn’t a “Ad Hoc’er,” but he worked with them and the Permanent Fund and the dividend are products of their time in power.
The 1970s and 1980s were a time of great growth in the size and power of state government and most of the laws and regulations that direct it are products of that era. The best indicator that the government was controlled by a bunch of hippies is the statute from the 1970s that prohibits the State from imposing a dress code.
To my point: We’ve been here before, and we’re here again. The barbarians are inside the gate. I’ve railed in these pages for years about the false flag Republicans, and even going back to the 1990s and the Gingrich Revolution and candidates who flew an R as a flag of convenience.
Think about it folks; the thing that most motivates you politically is the dividend. The whole Permanent Fund and dividend scheme is from a time when state government was run by a bunch of communists. They’re back; think about what you’re going to do.
Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.
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