Music in the cafes at night
(A chapter reprinted from my memoir, Write Hard, Die Free)

Much of my generation’s youth was spent in a kind of extended masturbation: we did things that felt good at the time but produced no lasting results. Our declarations about ending war and sexism, saving the planet, and changing things forever look pale and jejune to me now.

But some of what we tried worked, and some of it mattered. To me, Alaska mattered, and the Alaska Advocate made a difference.

Looking now at the state in its post-Palin phase, it’s hard to imagine the political climate of the 1970s, an era in which a cadre of progressive young Democrats controlled the legislature and allied with a progressive Republican governor to adopt strict environmental regulations, raise oil taxes, and enshrine a constitutionally protected savings account that has since accumulated almost $40 billion in reserves even while distributing $18.4 billion in dividends to Alaska residents.

Alaska politics always comes down to debate over resource development—mainly about oil. The adversaries in the argument in those days were evenly matched and the body politic was a hormonal adolescent, undergoing great changes and still coming to grips with what it wanted to be. The decade in which Bob Dylan sang “there was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air” was a heady, optimistic time to come of age in Alaska.

The razor’s edge on which the outcomes of such battles balanced was demonstrated in the Republican gubernatorial primary of 1978, when pro-development candidate Walter Hickel lost to environmentally progressive Jay Hammond by ninety-eight votes. (Alaska has a tradition of such cliffhangers; in 1966 Hickel was elected governor with an edge of just 1,008 votes, and in 1974 Hammond won by a 287-vote margin).

However, when Hammond eventually was declared the winner, Hickel sued, enlisting the help of his former attorney general Edgar Paul Boyko to argue that widespread and ruinous mistakes by state election workers should invalidate the results.

As the case wound its way to the Alaska Supreme Court, the Times did its best to trumpet Hickel’s cause. Every allegation of voting irregularity, every hint that Hickel might run a write-in campaign if he lost in court, was given a 96-point headline in the state’s largest newspaper.

VOTE AUDITS DON’T JIBE, one Times banner proclaimed, falsely equating the official state audit with one done internally by Hickel campaign staff. OFFICES TO BE SEARCHED screamed another, hanging the story on another Hickel campaign claim. Still another Times story reported ominously about discovery of “a brown paper bag with some possibly questionable ballots.” In fact, the bag was simply sitting just outside the room where Alaska State Troopers were guarding all the ballots. Those in the bag already had been tallied.

In waded the Advocate. In a series of stories over August, September, and October, we reported in detail on the allegations of election irregularities and the court arguments, especially important because Hickel, Boyko, and the Times continually discredited Hammond’s win in the court of public opinion even before the legal arguments were over.

In the heat of the growing debate, I tried to spell out just why those tactics were wrong:

“There is no kinder word for it: the tactics employed by Edgar Paul Boyko in support of his election challenge are filled with the dangerous demagoguery Americans know as McCarthyism.

“It’s a serious charge to raise against a respected public servant and officer of the court; it’s a sad realization to come to about a man I have always counted as a friend.

“But the facts in this case bear no other conclusion.”

Few were aware that Ed Boyko owned the modest old house on L Street that the Advocate was then using as offices—and, for some, dormitory. He was a good, fair landlord, and that didn’t change after I wrote about him.

As a weekly, the Advocate had the advantage of examining the tense legal fight between Hickel and Hammond with a bit more perspective than many daily reporters could muster. We also had an edge in talent and experience. I had covered Hickel and Boyko for years; Greely was by far Alaska’s best political reporter and had written about Governor Hammond when Hammond was a legislator and senate president; staffer Clifford John Groh grew up in Anchorage and was well-connected in the Alaska legal community; and an investigative bulldog named Bill Lazarus, who later became a lawyer himself, served as a one-man truth squad for claims and counter-claims as they emerged in court. All contributed to coverage of the case as it finally emerged from the Supreme Court in a legal victory for Hammond, who was elected governor that fall despite Hickel’s vain attempt to win as a write-in candidate.

That outcome mattered. Over the next four years of his second term, Hammond gave his blessing to a federal bill setting aside eighty million acres of national land in parks and refuges; championed the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend as a way to protect the account that now manages $40 billion in oil revenues politicians otherwise would have surely spent; opposed a wide range of scatter-brain ideas, from carving a new capital city out of the wilderness north of Anchorage to handing out free state land to would-be settlers. Much of that would have ended far differently if Hickel had been elected governor.

I don’t know that the Advocate ever articulated a position on journalistic objectivity, but we didn’t have to. Frustration with journalism’s rituals of detachment, balance, and disinterest had been prime motivations for the weekly’s founding. It’s no accident that most of us involved in the startup had been political and legislative reporters; there’s probably no arena in which the distance between what reporters know and what they tell is greater.

I didn’t feel objective. I cared about all kinds of things: journalistic things, naturally, like truth and openness and fair play, but also public policy, things like environmental protection and equality under law and getting a fair return for the riches the oil companies were pumping out of Alaska.

Somebody asked me when we started the paper, “What will you be biased about?” I decided to answer in a brief statement of purpose that ran on our opinion page:

“We are against all lies, and their more vicious stepchildren, the half-truths. We are against shadow in the conduct of public business, secure in our belief that there is no public affair best handled in the dark. We are against that which is dull or stifling. We oppose any limit or barrier to the exercise of talent. We believe that in the honest, unimpeded exchange of ideas the best course is to be found. We believe we can play a part in that process.”

In a subsequent column I tried to spell it out another way: “We will resemble, on balance, more the guerrilla soldier than the regimented Redcoat. We see ourselves not as part of the organized system but as an alternative to it. We will be civilization’s cheerleader and society’s scold.”

As a native son I felt particularly protective about exploitation of Alaska by what we called “Outside interests.” (By Alaska journalistic convention, the O in Outside is always capitalized when used to mean “anywhere that’s not Alaska.”) Since the first Western contact, Alaska served mainly as a resource colony for whatever nation controlled it; the indispensable Alaska historian Stephen Haycox later would make that case authoritatively in Alaska: an American Colony. The Russians came, killed every fur seal they could find, and then abandoned the place. After the U.S. purchase came the gold rush, attracting tens of thousands of naive boomers to the north. When the easy gold played out after a few years those exploiters, like the Russian furriers, packed up and went home without worrying what they left behind.

Salmon was next on the exploitation agenda and, to a lesser degree, timber. In all cases Alaska’s natural resources were plundered on behalf of rich owners thousands of miles away with little or no regard for sustainability or the damage done during extraction. Alaskans’ desire to control development of their natural resource became a leading impetus behind the movement for statehood and self-determination. Particular passion arose over use of fish traps that scooped up every returning salmon in nets stretched all the way across stream mouths, a practice that led to precipitous declines in salmon stocks in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Banning fish traps was one of the new state’s first actions; since then, local management has sustained the healthiest wild salmon industry in the world, perhaps Alaska’s greatest sustainable resource success story.

I knew this history of Outside domination well and it seemed obvious to me that the same pattern was destined to repeat itself following discovery of the massive oilfields surrounding Prudhoe Bay. Their development raised two issues that dominated all others: environmental protection and fair taxation. In each fight, the basic split was between interests seeking the cheapest, quickest exploitation (and thus the highest profits) and those who took a longer view. Despite the bogeyman constantly thrown up by the oil industry and its friends, there was no meaningful “environmental extremist” or lock-it-up opposition to development in Alaska. The central debates weren’t over “yes or no” issues but about how fast and furiously drilling could happen, and how much of the value the state would retain from lease sales and taxes.

I started writing about that theme almost from the Advocate’s first issue. This is from February 1977:

Alaskans must work and eat and so there will be development. Thinking people do not believe that will or ought to be stopped. But the growing fear in the soul of Alaska is that such decisions will be orchestrated far away, by those with an eye only to the profits and products, with no feeling for the life we choose. As the wealth we shelter becomes more dear, the price we must pay for our values becomes immense. The pressure is on, and growing. If there is something worth fighting for, prepare to start now.

At the time, I wrote most of my stories and columns on a metal, muddy-green Olympia typewriter decorated with quotations, such as John Donne’s admonition to “observe the physician with the same diligence as he the disease.” (That’s good advice for any journalist.) Another was more overtly political: a weathered bumper sticker with the legend SECEDE OR SUCCUMB emblazoned against the Big Dipper symbol from Alaska’s flag.

I didn’t actually believe Alaska should leave the union; on a lot of issues that mattered to me, federal policy in those days was often more enlightened and balanced than local interests. But I did think Alaska should take greater control over its economic future, and that meant taking responsibility for oil development. It was a feeling widely shared at the Advocate, and by readers who turned to us for information.

After the Daily News’ Pulitzer in 1976, an ad hoc “Hippie Caucus” of young legislators and their aides had presented me with a mock proclamation, complete with multiple “whereas” and “therefore” clauses, that described me as “a simple tundra boy.” I took great pride in that.

As I would throughout my career, I wrote tirelessly about Alaskans’ propensity to roll over for the promise of a quick, easy payday from Big Oil. I was especially infuriated by the slick public relations campaigns the industry employed—a relatively new phenomenon in Alaska’s unsophisticated political culture. It seemed to me they were parlaying a few donations to the food bank and an orchestrated chorus chanting “jobs” into one of the sweetest deals they’d found anywhere on earth.

Alaskans were being played for suckers. Again.

I remember being particularly insulted by a 1977 Arco television commercial I described as “The Oil Boom Boutique Blues.”

The woman, who looks like a natural for the Petroleum Wives Club, stands at the cash register next to a little boy who could be anybody’s little league champion.

… this is the basic pitch: ‘When Arco first sent us up here umpteen years ago, this was a real hole. Nothing to do, nothing to buy. Now, thanks to oil companies, there are boutiques and everything.

At this point she spins halfway around to display a pretty new outfit. The sales clerk, eyes glazed in delight, delivers the punch line: ‘I guess this is what oil impact is all about. Horse puckie.

… This [commercial] says to us that our life was worthless before oil came and brought the fruits of the good life to this backwater burg … That is a lie. It is the lie that has been force fed to Alaskans ever since the big puddle of oil at Prudhoe Bay was discovered; the lie that is the real foundation of the trans-Alaska pipeline, the off-shore platforms and the mirror-windowed headquarters buildings in Anchorage.

Doesn’t anybody else remember that this was a good place to live BEFORE oil? This was a land of promise long before the discovery of fossil fuels beneath the ground…

We will never live in a ‘before oil’ time again, of course. Even if Alaskans were not hungry for the quick fix of dollars oil development brings, we would be unable to slow the energy greed that compels other states to want our oil despite our concerns.

Since we cannot stop the development of our oil, we can at least make sure that it pays us well. Perhaps we can, by asserting our rights as landlords here, dim the companies’ flashing arrogance a shade or so.

I also wrote in those early days about predictions I hoped would never come true—but which, tragically, did.

In May 1978—eleven years before the Exxon Valdez was crashed into Bligh Reef and poured the largest crude oil spill ever in North America into Prince William Sound—I watched with foreboding as the Amoco Cadiz spilled its crude off the coast of France.

This was not a rusty-bottomed, vintage Liberian tanker … It was instead an American-registered supertanker, a world class rig much like those commissioned to transport Alaska’s pipeline bounty southward from Valdez…

Alaskans are well advised to listen carefully to the lessons of Normandy, for there has seldom been a clearer parallel for us to observe…

Those who carry oil will spill it. And, since there is no apparent way to slack the world’s thirst for oil, I suppose it will always be carried from wherever it is found to wherever it is sold. There is a sad ring of inevitability to all that…Music in the cafes at night (A chapter reprinted from my memoir, Write Hard, Die Free)
Much of my generation’s youth was spent in a kind of extended masturbation: we did things that felt good at the time but produced no lasting results. Our declarations about ending war and sexism, saving the planet, and changing things forever look pale and jejune to me now.

But some of what we tried worked, and some of it mattered. To me, Alaska mattered, and the Alaska Advocate made a difference.

Looking now at the state in its post-Palin phase, it’s hard to imagine the political climate of the 1970s, an era in which a cadre of progressive young Democrats controlled the legislature and allied with a progressive Republican governor to adopt strict environmental regulations, raise oil taxes, and enshrine a constitutionally protected savings account that has since accumulated almost $40 billion in reserves even while distributing $18.4 billion in dividends to Alaska residents.

Alaska politics always comes down to debate over resource development—mainly about oil. The adversaries in the argument in those days were evenly matched and the body politic was a hormonal adolescent, undergoing great changes and still coming to grips with what it wanted to be. The decade in which Bob Dylan sang “there was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air” was a heady, optimistic time to come of age in Alaska.

The razor’s edge on which the outcomes of such battles balanced was demonstrated in the Republican gubernatorial primary of 1978, when pro-development candidate Walter Hickel lost to environmentally progressive Jay Hammond by ninety-eight votes. (Alaska has a tradition of such cliffhangers; in 1966 Hickel was elected governor with an edge of just 1,008 votes, and in 1974 Hammond won by a 287-vote margin).

However, when Hammond eventually was declared the winner, Hickel sued, enlisting the help of his former attorney general Edgar Paul Boyko to argue that widespread and ruinous mistakes by state election workers should invalidate the results.

As the case wound its way to the Alaska Supreme Court, the Times did its best to trumpet Hickel’s cause. Every allegation of voting irregularity, every hint that Hickel might run a write-in campaign if he lost in court, was given a 96-point headline in the state’s largest newspaper.

VOTE AUDITS DON’T JIBE, one Times banner proclaimed, falsely equating the official state audit with one done internally by Hickel campaign staff. OFFICES TO BE SEARCHED screamed another, hanging the story on another Hickel campaign claim. Still another Times story reported ominously about discovery of “a brown paper bag with some possibly questionable ballots.” In fact, the bag was simply sitting just outside the room where Alaska State Troopers were guarding all the ballots. Those in the bag already had been tallied.

In waded the Advocate. In a series of stories over August, September, and October, we reported in detail on the allegations of election irregularities and the court arguments, especially important because Hickel, Boyko, and the Times continually discredited Hammond’s win in the court of public opinion even before the legal arguments were over.

In the heat of the growing debate, I tried to spell out just why those tactics were wrong:

“There is no kinder word for it: the tactics employed by Edgar Paul Boyko in support of his election challenge are filled with the dangerous demagoguery Americans know as McCarthyism.

“It’s a serious charge to raise against a respected public servant and officer of the court; it’s a sad realization to come to about a man I have always counted as a friend.

“But the facts in this case bear no other conclusion.”

Few were aware that Ed Boyko owned the modest old house on L Street that the Advocate was then using as offices—and, for some, dormitory. He was a good, fair landlord, and that didn’t change after I wrote about him.

As a weekly, the Advocate had the advantage of examining the tense legal fight between Hickel and Hammond with a bit more perspective than many daily reporters could muster. We also had an edge in talent and experience. I had covered Hickel and Boyko for years; Greely was by far Alaska’s best political reporter and had written about Governor Hammond when Hammond was a legislator and senate president; staffer Clifford John Groh grew up in Anchorage and was well-connected in the Alaska legal community; and an investigative bulldog named Bill Lazarus, who later became a lawyer himself, served as a one-man truth squad for claims and counter-claims as they emerged in court. All contributed to coverage of the case as it finally emerged from the Supreme Court in a legal victory for Hammond, who was elected governor that fall despite Hickel’s vain attempt to win as a write-in candidate.

That outcome mattered. Over the next four years of his second term, Hammond gave his blessing to a federal bill setting aside eighty million acres of national land in parks and refuges; championed the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend as a way to protect the account that now manages $40 billion in oil revenues politicians otherwise would have surely spent; opposed a wide range of scatter-brain ideas, from carving a new capital city out of the wilderness north of Anchorage to handing out free state land to would-be settlers. Much of that would have ended far differently if Hickel had been elected governor.

I don’t know that the Advocate ever articulated a position on journalistic objectivity, but we didn’t have to. Frustration with journalism’s rituals of detachment, balance, and disinterest had been prime motivations for the weekly’s founding. It’s no accident that most of us involved in the startup had been political and legislative reporters; there’s probably no arena in which the distance between what reporters know and what they tell is greater.

I didn’t feel objective. I cared about all kinds of things: journalistic things, naturally, like truth and openness and fair play, but also public policy, things like environmental protection and equality under law and getting a fair return for the riches the oil companies were pumping out of Alaska.

Somebody asked me when we started the paper, “What will you be biased about?” I decided to answer in a brief statement of purpose that ran on our opinion page:

“We are against all lies, and their more vicious stepchildren, the half-truths. We are against shadow in the conduct of public business, secure in our belief that there is no public affair best handled in the dark. We are against that which is dull or stifling. We oppose any limit or barrier to the exercise of talent. We believe that in the honest, unimpeded exchange of ideas the best course is to be found. We believe we can play a part in that process.”

In a subsequent column I tried to spell it out another way: “We will resemble, on balance, more the guerrilla soldier than the regimented Redcoat. We see ourselves not as part of the organized system but as an alternative to it. We will be civilization’s cheerleader and society’s scold.”

As a native son I felt particularly protective about exploitation of Alaska by what we called “Outside interests.” (By Alaska journalistic convention, the O in Outside is always capitalized when used to mean “anywhere that’s not Alaska.”) Since the first Western contact, Alaska served mainly as a resource colony for whatever nation controlled it; the indispensable Alaska historian Stephen Haycox later would make that case authoritatively in Alaska: an American Colony. The Russians came, killed every fur seal they could find, and then abandoned the place. After the U.S. purchase came the gold rush, attracting tens of thousands of naive boomers to the north. When the easy gold played out after a few years those exploiters, like the Russian furriers, packed up and went home without worrying what they left behind.

Salmon was next on the exploitation agenda and, to a lesser degree, timber. In all cases Alaska’s natural resources were plundered on behalf of rich owners thousands of miles away with little or no regard for sustainability or the damage done during extraction. Alaskans’ desire to control development of their natural resource became a leading impetus behind the movement for statehood and self-determination. Particular passion arose over use of fish traps that scooped up every returning salmon in nets stretched all the way across stream mouths, a practice that led to precipitous declines in salmon stocks in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Banning fish traps was one of the new state’s first actions; since then, local management has sustained the healthiest wild salmon industry in the world, perhaps Alaska’s greatest sustainable resource success story.

I knew this history of Outside domination well and it seemed obvious to me that the same pattern was destined to repeat itself following discovery of the massive oilfields surrounding Prudhoe Bay. Their development raised two issues that dominated all others: environmental protection and fair taxation. In each fight, the basic split was between interests seeking the cheapest, quickest exploitation (and thus the highest profits) and those who took a longer view. Despite the bogeyman constantly thrown up by the oil industry and its friends, there was no meaningful “environmental extremist” or lock-it-up opposition to development in Alaska. The central debates weren’t over “yes or no” issues but about how fast and furiously drilling could happen, and how much of the value the state would retain from lease sales and taxes.

I started writing about that theme almost from the Advocate’s first issue. This is from February 1977:

Alaskans must work and eat and so there will be development. Thinking people do not believe that will or ought to be stopped. But the growing fear in the soul of Alaska is that such decisions will be orchestrated far away, by those with an eye only to the profits and products, with no feeling for the life we choose. As the wealth we shelter becomes more dear, the price we must pay for our values becomes immense. The pressure is on, and growing. If there is something worth fighting for, prepare to start now.

At the time, I wrote most of my stories and columns on a metal, muddy-green Olympia typewriter decorated with quotations, such as John Donne’s admonition to “observe the physician with the same diligence as he the disease.” (That’s good advice for any journalist.) Another was more overtly political: a weathered bumper sticker with the legend SECEDE OR SUCCUMB emblazoned against the Big Dipper symbol from Alaska’s flag.

I didn’t actually believe Alaska should leave the union; on a lot of issues that mattered to me, federal policy in those days was often more enlightened and balanced than local interests. But I did think Alaska should take greater control over its economic future, and that meant taking responsibility for oil development. It was a feeling widely shared at the Advocate, and by readers who turned to us for information.

After the Daily News’ Pulitzer in 1976, an ad hoc “Hippie Caucus” of young legislators and their aides had presented me with a mock proclamation, complete with multiple “whereas” and “therefore” clauses, that described me as “a simple tundra boy.” I took great pride in that.

As I would throughout my career, I wrote tirelessly about Alaskans’ propensity to roll over for the promise of a quick, easy payday from Big Oil. I was especially infuriated by the slick public relations campaigns the industry employed—a relatively new phenomenon in Alaska’s unsophisticated political culture. It seemed to me they were parlaying a few donations to the food bank and an orchestrated chorus chanting “jobs” into one of the sweetest deals they’d found anywhere on earth.

Alaskans were being played for suckers. Again.

I remember being particularly insulted by a 1977 Arco television commercial I described as “The Oil Boom Boutique Blues.”

The woman, who looks like a natural for the Petroleum Wives Club, stands at the cash register next to a little boy who could be anybody’s little league champion.

… this is the basic pitch: ‘When Arco first sent us up here umpteen years ago, this was a real hole. Nothing to do, nothing to buy. Now, thanks to oil companies, there are boutiques and everything.

At this point she spins halfway around to display a pretty new outfit. The sales clerk, eyes glazed in delight, delivers the punch line: ‘I guess this is what oil impact is all about. Horse puckie.

… This [commercial] says to us that our life was worthless before oil came and brought the fruits of the good life to this backwater burg … That is a lie. It is the lie that has been force fed to Alaskans ever since the big puddle of oil at Prudhoe Bay was discovered; the lie that is the real foundation of the trans-Alaska pipeline, the off-shore platforms and the mirror-windowed headquarters buildings in Anchorage.

Doesn’t anybody else remember that this was a good place to live BEFORE oil? This was a land of promise long before the discovery of fossil fuels beneath the ground…

We will never live in a ‘before oil’ time again, of course. Even if Alaskans were not hungry for the quick fix of dollars oil development brings, we would be unable to slow the energy greed that compels other states to want our oil despite our concerns.

Since we cannot stop the development of our oil, we can at least make sure that it pays us well. Perhaps we can, by asserting our rights as landlords here, dim the companies’ flashing arrogance a shade or so.

I also wrote in those early days about predictions I hoped would never come true—but which, tragically, did.

In May 1978—eleven years before the Exxon Valdez was crashed into Bligh Reef and poured the largest crude oil spill ever in North America into Prince William Sound—I watched with foreboding as the Amoco Cadiz spilled its crude off the coast of France.

This was not a rusty-bottomed, vintage Liberian tanker … It was instead an American-registered supertanker, a world class rig much like those commissioned to transport Alaska’s pipeline bounty southward from Valdez…

Alaskans are well advised to listen carefully to the lessons of Normandy, for there has seldom been a clearer parallel for us to observe…

Those who carry oil will spill it. And, since there is no apparent way to slack the world’s thirst for oil, I suppose it will always be carried from wherever it is found to wherever it is sold. There is a sad ring of inevitability to all that…

Don’t you see? The only variable is time. Alaskans are not waiting to see IF a major tanker spill will strike; the only question is WHEN…

If we can do nothing else, we can at least recognize that hard fact. As we watch oil company advertisements advise us of their concern for Alaska, we can remember their concern for France. And when it is time to tax them for the wealth they export, we can take full measure of the costs they will certainly visit on us.

Oil companies and their Alaska allies didn’t like the Advocate’s coverage or that kind of commentary, and there were surely a few smiles in their tall office towers when we announced, in March 1979, that we were folding.Don’t you see? The only variable is time. Alaskans are not waiting to see IF a major tanker spill will strike; the only question is WHEN…

If we can do nothing else, we can at least recognize that hard fact. As we watch oil company advertisements advise us of their concern for Alaska, we can remember their concern for France. And when it is time to tax them for the wealth they export, we can take full measure of the costs they will certainly visit on us.

Oil companies and their Alaska allies didn’t like the Advocate’s coverage or that kind of commentary, and there were surely a few smiles in their tall office towers when we announced, in March 1979, that we were folding.

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