‘Alaska’s Sweetheart’ celebrates 92 years

WASILLA — The daughter of a runaway cabin boy from Norway, it was a fateful December day when Territorial Gov. Ernest Gruening hired 19-year-old Olga Katherine Torkelsen as a clerk/stenographer in 1940.

Three young women applied that day in Juneau for a job in the Governor’s Office. With a high school education and a year of business school to recommend herself, surely one of the other two would be hired.

That a young Katie Hurley was hired to work in the Territorial Governor’s Office changed her life and has bettered Alaska for the past seven decades. Hurley celebrated her 92 birthday March 30 and is an important part of this year’s celebration of the 100th anniversary of the gaveling in of the first Alaska Territorial Legislature.

Hurley is notable for her length and breadth of service as well as serving as the chief clerk to the Alaska Constitutional Convention in Fairbanks from Nov. 8, 1955 to Feb. 6, 1956.

As chief clerk, she took notes using shorthand during the 75-day convention and transcribed her notes each night so staff could cut stencils and make copies for the delegates the next morning.

“Toward the end I got about four hours sleep a night,” Hurley recalled during an interview at her home on Friday.

She was born in Juneau March 30, 1921, the middle child of Norwegian immigrants. Her father was a fisherman and her mother was a frugal housekeeper. Life changed for Hurley when her father died at age 46 from colon cancer when she was 14.

Four years later in 1939, she had graduated from Juneau High School as salutatorian and spent a year at businesses school in Portland, Ore., before returning to Juneau in the fall of 1940 to search for work.

Hurley said she worked a number of temporary assignments before she was hired Dec. 2 1940, to work full-time as a clerk/stenographer in Gov. Gruening’s office. She advanced to secretary to the governor in 1945.

“I learned so much from him,” Hurley said. “He encouraged me to ask questions. If I didn’t understand something, he’d tell me everything. As I said, he educated me.”

Hurley and Greuning’s time in the Governor’s Office ended with the election of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the appointment of Territorial Gov. B. Frank Heintzleman in March 1953.

“That summer he wrote this book and I did the typing of it,” Hurley said, holding up a well-worn copy of Greuning’s 1954 “The State of Alaska” with dozens of notes — some decades old — tucked into its pages.

Making Alaska history

By November 1955, Hurley’s life was once again charting a parallel course with state history. This time, she was picked as chief clerk to the 55 delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Fairbanks.

Looking back across the years, Hurley said the recording technology installed in the meeting room has proven a stroke of genius decades hence.

“The greatest thing that happened was that they set up in the meeting room this recording system,” she said. “So everything from the very beginning had been recorded.”

Years later, the Legislative Council had the tapes transcribed and bound into a five-volume set. More recently, digital copies of the recordings also were made and are now available online at 1.usa.gov/XPBFcR.

“Wherever it says ‘Chief Clerk,’ that’s me,” Hurley said Friday, pointing to one of the bound volumes. “Without the taping system there would have been nothing but the minutes.”

But Hurley said she doesn’t need to hear the recordings for the memories to come rushing back.

“I have the transcripts. When I read them I hear those people’s voices and see their expressions,” she said.

During the convention while Hurley worked in Fairbanks, her husband, Joe Alexander, and son, David, stayed in Juneau. The couple was married in 1944 and David was born in 1946.

Hurley served as Secretary of the Territorial Senate in 1957 and then as Secretary to the first state Senate in 1959 and 1960.

After marrying convention delegate Jim Hurley, who was later elected to the first state Legislature, the Hurleys moved to the Butte in 1960, where they raised their family and continued to be involved in local politics and public service. In May 1963, the family moved to a two-story yellow home on the shores of Wasilla Lake, which remains the family’s residence.

Decades of service

During the Constitutional Convention, Bill Egan was the presiding officer. He went on to serve as governor from Jan. 3, 1959 to 1966 and again from 1970 to 1974.

Hurley said she knew Egan’s chief of staff and so she asked why she had not been appointed to serve on any boards or commissions. She was told people had to request such appointments. So she did.

“Tell Egan I want to be on the State Board of Education the next time there is a vacancy,” Hurley said.

She was savvy enough to know she would need to be board president in order to have much sway, though. Hurley was appointed by Governor Egan in 1971 and confirmed by the Legislature, and was later reappointed by Gov. Jay Hammond.

She served as president throughout her career on the board.

“Those seven years I was on there I accomplished a lot,” Hurley said.

She stepped down from the board to become the first woman to win a statewide partisan race in her first bid for election. Although she won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor in 1978, she and gubernatorial candidate Chancy Croft were defeated.

During her decades of service, Hurley served in countless leadership roles at the state and local levels, including as executive director of the Alaska Commission on the Status of Women from 1980 to 1984; as a legislator in the state House of Representatives from 1984 to 1986, where she was chair of the state Affairs Committee and a member of the House Education Committee; on the Alaska Judicial Council; the Matanuska Electric Association board; the Commission for Human Rights; the state Personnel Board; the Alaska Judicial Council; and the Matanuska Telephone Association Board of Directors.

She earned a stack of accolades along the way for her public service, including a 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award for the Humanities, induction into the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame in 2009 and at her 90th birthday in 2011, Palmer Mayor DeLena Johnson crowned her “Alaska’s Sweetheart.”

Get involved

Of all the challenges that come with ageing, Hurley said it’s her loss of independence that is the hardest for her.

“It’s the pits to get old,” she said. “Politics has been my life.”

Sharing in her ringside seat to history are her three children — David Alexander, Susan Derrera and Mary Hilowitz — and four grandchildren, who all live in Anchorage and Wasilla. For the younger set, Hurley offered some advice: “Be involved.”

Too often people still come to Alaska to make their fortunes, not to stay and help build the Last Frontier, she said.

She said the present crop of partisan Alaska politicians are a far cry from the leaders she worked with during the state’s early days.

“Elected officials work for us. Hold their feet to the fire,” Hurley said. “We need to remind people.”

Contact managing editor Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.