Joe Manchin a key Alaska ally

Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan are knocking on wood in hopes of keeping alive hopes of opening the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

Our two United States senators, both Republicans, are hoping their Democratic colleagues won’t kill chances of drilling on the coastal plain. So the wood the two senators are knocking on presumably includes the heads of some of their fellow senators.

On the other side of the ledger are the Senate’s Democrats who are under pressure from the environmental community to keep drilling rigs out of the refuge. Among them are Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia who supported Alaska when the bill opening the refuge to drillers passed in 2017.

Manchin is a moderate Democrat but West Virginia is an energy-producing state and Manchin has been a key ally to Murkowski and Sullivan in critical ANWR votes.

Opening the coastal plain of ANWR to drilling could be Alaska’s best hope for reviving its oil industry, which is now dealing with North Slope oil fields that are well past their prime production years.

Lets hope that Murkowski and Sullivan can convince their friend Joe Manchin that supporting Alaska once again is important to both the 49th state and to West Virginia. Our two states have many common interests and we need to support each other on such critical issues.

I’ve never been to West Virginia but my family moved to Virginia after my wife and I headed off to Alaska in 1967, the year after our wedding. We almost settled down in Massachusetts, where we both worked as reporters at The Worcester Telegram. Actually she was an editor and outranked me but she never flaunted her rank at home.

We had put money down on a house in Massachusetts but chickened out on the deal when we realized it was going to tie us down for years to come and we had never really been anywhere.

We talked it over and decided we should either move to Australia or to Alaska, the two most desirable distant places we could think of. We decided on Alaska since it was one of the United States and we could drive here. I also knew enough about Alaska to know it offered great hunting and fishing, two of my favorite pastimes.

I was in The Telegram’s library reading up on Alaska newspapers when our managing editor, Frank Murphy, spotted me trying to hide behind a copy of Editor and Publisher Yearbook. When Murphy saw me with E&P Yearbook he knew I was doing research for a new job.

He walked over and asked me where I was going. When I sheepishly said Alaska, Murphy said: “Write to Bob Atwood at The Anchorage Times. He used to work for me.”

Atwood was then editor and publisher of The Anchorage Times and had worked at The Worcester Telegram years ago before marrying Evangeline Rasmuson, member of an Anchorage banking family. Her parents wanted Evangeline to return to Alaska so they bought The Anchorage Times and offered it to Bob if he and Evangeline would move to Alaska.

Bob jumped at the chance and considered moving to Alaska and owning a newspaper would be a great way to get started here. In 1967 I wrote to Atwood and he offered me a job as a reporter if I could get to Alaska.

My wife and I decided to take the great leap, canceled plans to buy a house, drove the unpaved Alaska Highway and have been here ever since.

Tom Brennan is an Anchorage columnist and author of six books. He was a reporter/columnist for The Anchorage Times and an editor and columnist at The Voice of The Times.