Exciting days of yore

The beginning of the year 2022 is now upon us and it’s time to begin procrastinating about the things we intended to do this year and never got around to.

Those who can’t think of anything along those lines are fortunate, generally not because they didn’t have anything to regret but because they have forgotten.

It’s that time of year when most of us clean off their calendars and begin their procrastinating all over again. If that seems pessimistic, so be it. I’m at the age when I’ve earned that right and so have most of my friends.

Right at the top of my list this year, as it is pretty much every year, is to set aside more time for fishing trips. Those are among my favorite activities and, though many of my old fishing buddies have fished their way around the last bend in the river, I am determined to continue for as long as I can.

And in case you were wondering, my wife holds similar hopes for me for the year ahead. One of the benefits to her of my fishing ventures is that it gets me out of her hair for a few days.

One thing I have done over the last few weeks is to reread some of my favorite books. And that includes books by my old friend Joe McGinniss, including his highly entertaining book about Alaska’s own Sarah Palin, The Rogue.

Joe first came to Alaska in 1975 when he was working on his first book about our state, Going to Extremes.

That book and his later work about our former governor, Sarah Palin, are Alaska classics and both worth reading.

Joe McGinniss’ first trip to Alaska occurred when his earlier book, The Selling of the President 1968 (about the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon) was selling vigorously and his reputation as a writing talent was gaining steam. He needed a change of pace and was interested in Alaska, so his publisher agreed to publish a book about Alaska, which became titled Going to Extremes.

Joe and I were friends from the time a few years earlier when we were both working as reporters at the Massachusetts daily newspaper The Worcester Telegram. When he sought an opportunity to escape while the Nixon book gained momentum, Joe decided to visit Alaska and see what it had to offer.

At the time I was working for ARCO, the Texas-based company that made the historic oil discovery at Prudhoe Bay in 1968. Because of a quirk of fate, I had access to an eight-passenger Lear Jet so one of the first in-state trips that Joe got to take was a visit to Prudhoe with me.

The quirk was that many of the world’s top reporters and editors wanted to visit Prudhoe Bay and see what all the excitement was all about. And since the company wanted the newsies to get to the discovery site, and once there the priority was to show them around and get them off the slope as quickly as possible, I was allowed to use the manager’s Lear to take them. Management wanted them to come and go quickly since having reporters hanging around at loose ends made the oilmen understandably nervous.

The first newsman I took to Prudhoe on the Lear was Wallace Turner of The New York Times, a trip I greatly enjoyed since Wally was one of the more colorful members of the news media of that era.

So my old friend Joe McGinniss became one of the next to visit the North Slope oil field. The trip, perhaps especially because of the Lear jet, dazzled Joe and he talked about it for the rest of his unfortunately short life.

Those were exciting times and I was in an excellent position to both enjoy them and to accompany interesting people on their visits to Prudhoe Bay.

I made the most of them.