Taking the Alaska challenge

The other day I noticed a book on my shelf that I should have read years ago — Bob Atwood’s Alaska.

I opened it up and started reading. Almost immediately I was struck by how Atwood’s introduction to Alaska was similar to my own. That seems strange since Bob got rich and I didn’t but our first days here, at least, were similar.

Bob Atwood was editor and publisher of the Anchorage Daily Times, now defunct but at one time Alaska’s largest newspaper. Before moving to Alaska, Bob was a reporter at The Worcester Telegram in Massachusetts, the newspaper my wife and I were working at when we got married and decided to move to Alaska.

Bob met Evangeline Rasmuson when she was attending college in Massachusetts. They were married while Bob was still working at The Telegram but Evangeline’s banking family wanted her to move home to Alaska. So they financed Bob’s purchase of the Anchorage Daily Times, a struggling daily newspaper that Bob and history eventually made successful.

Coming to Alaska was a great adventure for Bob Atwood, as it was for my wife and I. Marnie and I arrived in Alaska shortly before the start of a major oil boom (the Prudhoe Bay discovery). Bob and Evangeline got here 22 years before the discovery at Swanson River on the Kenai Peninsula. Swanson River was the real start of the oil industry in Alaska and gave Alaska the economy that made statehood possible, among other things.

Atwood became a real community booster in both his work and civic lives. He used his family ties to the community and its economic and political leaders to build his newspaper and in the process he helped build the economies of Southcentral Alaska and the territory that became the State of Alaska.

Bob and Evangeline arrived in Alaska in 1935. They didn’t come planning to get rich. It was for an adventure, the same motivation my wife and I had (though we didn’t get rich). In retrospect his accomplishments were remarkable.

As an example of the excitement and opportunity that developed after Richfield’s discovery at Swanson River, Bob wrote in his book about the experience of his friend Locke Jacobs, a store clerk who grew knowledgeable about oil leases.

When the news hit about the discovery, Jacobs quit his store job and began brokering oil leases surrounding the area where the discovery was made. “For the next few days,” Bob wrote, “he told me that he was making as much as $1,000 an hour in commissions for as many hours as he could stay awake, filling out lease forms for oil companies and individuals.”

When Atwood himself heard of Richfield’s discovery, he rushed to his typewriter and pounded out an editorial that said, in part, “This may be the Discovery Day everybody has been waiting for ... Hang on ... Alaska is going around a sharp curve and is heading down a new road of development such as has never been seen before.”

I was on the oil beat at The Anchorage Times when the big discovery was announced at Prudhoe Bay in 1968. I don’t remember anything I wrote then but the following year ARCO, the discovery company, offered me triple my newspaper salary to manage its public relations in Alaska.

That job changed my life and led to many new adventures over the next 30-plus years. Despite the differences, the experiences of Bob Atwood and Evangeline were remarkably like those my wife and I experienced.

Coming to Alaska can be a life-changing experience. It was for Atwood and his family, for me and my family and presumably for many of my readers as well.

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.