Alaska
Arctic Alaska House race focuses on issues that candidates say unite the remote region • Alaska Beacon
The person who represents the nation’s northernmost legislative district in the Alaska House of Representatives is tasked with achieving a special balance.
Sprawling and remote House District 40 encompasses both the oil-rich North Slope and the less-wealthy Northwest Arctic Borough. That means it has two separate hub communities – Utqiagvik and Kotzebue. While both regions are majority Inupiat, they have significant differences in their economies, histories and cultures.
The incumbent House member, who is from Kotzebue, and the two candidates challenging him, one from Kotzebue as well and the other from Utqiagvik, acknowledge that the district’s makeup creates a special challenge. But all three – all of them Inupiat — say there are ways to bridge those differences.
Properly representing the district, with all its diversity and remoteness, requires working with cities, tribes and any organizations that represent residents, said Thomas Baker, the incumbent.
“You’ve got to work with each community individually, see what their wants and needs are, and then you work bigger and then you see what the overreaching, overarching needs are,” said Baker, whom Gov. Mike Dunleavy appointed to the seat in November to fill the vacancy left when then-Rep. Josiah Patkotak,I-Utqiagvik, was elected mayor of the North Slope Borough.
Despite the differences, there are common interests, said Baker, who was a Republican when appointed but is now unaffiliated. “We are the isolated north. We are the northern end of everything,” he said.
Democrat Robyn Niayuq Burke of Utqiagvik said a key difference is the wealth gap. Communities in the North Slope have the advantage of decades of oil money.
Burke, who is president of the North Slope Borough School District Board of Education, said she is keenly aware of how oil money has allowed her home borough to provide services that are unavailable in parts of the Northwest Arctic Borough. “It’s not lost on me, especially when I go to the Northwest Arctic and see that there are so many communities that don’t have water or have problems with their water,” she said.
Some of her understanding of needs outside the North Slope comes from her service as an officer with the Association of Alaska School Boards, she said.
Democrat Saima Ikrik Chase, currently Kotzebue’s mayor, also pointed to those wealth differences. That gives the North Slope communities more focus on policies, while the Northwest Arctic communities are more dependent on state-provided services, she said. Still, there are common concerns, like housing, education funding and teacher retention, she said. “They have the same issues. It’s just that they have more resources to depend on to get to where they need to get to,” said Chase, whose professional experience is in health care and emergency services.
Resource money is the obvious difference between the North Slope and the Northwest Arctic. The North Slope, site of Alaska’s big oil fields, has a vast borough infrastructure and service network built on oil money. The Northwest Arctic does not have nearly the same deep pockets, though it benefits economically from the Red Dog mine, one of the world’s largest zinc producers.
Some other differences stretch back further in history. Subsistence food gathering on the North Slope, which has shaped the culture, is largely about hunting bowhead whales and other marine mammals, while terrestrial mammals like caribou and fish, including salmon, make up the bulk of the subsistence harvests in the Northwest Arctic region, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Even though the Inupiaq language is spoken in both parts of the district, there are different regional dialects.
In the past, the North Slope and Northwest Arctic have been represented by some legendary and powerful lawmakers, like Al Adams and Frank Ferguson, both of Kotzebue.
Decades ago, each borough had its own representative in the state House. Now, they share one.
Effective advocacy for the district requires looking past whatever splits might exist between localities, corporations, nonprofits or other entities, said another of those powerful lawmakers who represented the district in the past, former state Sen. Willie Hensley.
“We need to not confine ourselves to our individual cells,” said Hensley, who is also from the Kotzebue region. Doing so in that Arctic region requires special skills. “You really need to put your best people in there,” he said.
Primary results suggest Chase-Burke contest
Results from the primary suggest that Baker faces an uphill climb. Chase and Burke finished in a near-tie at about 35% each, with Chase eking out a three-vote margin over Burke. Baker lagged with 29% of the vote. Since Burke and Chase have similar positions on the issues, ranked choice voting in this three-way contest is expected to be important to the outcome.
All three candidates noted that turnout in August was low, and that results could change considerably in November, when voters will also consider the presidential candidates. Additionally, the two Democrats also noted that during the primary election, there were malfunctions at certain outlying communities that either interfered with people’s ability to vote or impeded the vote count.
Burke pointed to three North Slope precincts that failed to open. “I had people who reached out to me and said, ‘I tried to vote for you, but I just couldn’t,’” she said. Chase pointed to delays in counting votes in some outlying Northwest Arctic precincts.
While they come from different regions in the district, Burke and Chase have similar positions — and similar complaints about Baker’s record.
Possibly topping that list is Baker’s vote in March that upheld Dunleavy’s veto of a permanent increase in the base student allocation, core of the formula that decides the per-student funding provided by the state. The override failed by a single vote.
For Burke, who had traveled to Juneau to lobby for the increase, Baker’s action on that issue was a tipping point in her decision to run for the seat.
She blasted the action in an op-ed published days after the veto override failed.
“Baker’s vote virtually assured deep education cuts that make it improbable to adequately staff our schools or provide basic materials. As damaging as his vote is for the North Slope, it is even more devastating for the Northwest Arctic Borough, which does not have our property tax base from oil infrastructure,” she said in the op-ed, published in the Arctic Sounder and Anchorage Daily News.
Chase, too, said she was upset with Baker’s position, as were many of her neighbors.
“A lot of our residents here in the north were like, ‘What?’ Because, Number 1, he comes from a family of teachers and it’s like, ‘Come on, man, your sibling is a teacher, and your grandmother was a teacher.’ So I guess his actions speak louder than his words on that,” she said.
Baker, defending his decision on that vote, said it would have been pointless to override the veto because Dunleavy would have simply vetoed the money for the next year needed to pay the increase in the formula.
It isn’t clear whether that hypothetical would have come to pass. Dunleavy ultimately signed a budget containing a one-time funding bonus equivalent to the permanent boost envisioned by the Legislature. But the failure of the bill means that there is no long-term change.
His vote on the veto override notwithstanding, Baker said he supports an increase in the BSA, which is why he voted for the final budget and its one-time $680 boost. But addressing education challenges in the far-north district will require more adjustments, he said. “The BSA does need to be higher, but at the same time, the cost of fuel needs to be lower, the cost of energy needs to be lower,” he said. “We deal with a lot of issues in rural Alaska that other parts of the state and the country don’t deal with.”
Splits with Native leaders
Another point of criticism is Baker’s attempt to rejigger the state’s subsistence policies, a subject on which he clashed with Native organizations.
Baker introduced a bill to amend the state constitution, House Joint Resolution 22, that was aimed at unifying state and federal subsistence management — but his version omitted the word “rural,” in contrast with federal law’s requirement for a rural Alaska subsistence priority. Baker’s effort got pushback from the Alaska Federation of Natives, creating an unusual situation in which Alaska’s largest Native organization, along with other prominent Native organizations within his district, opposed legislation sponsored by a Native lawmaker.
“Rep. Baker’s bill came out of the blue,” Julie Kitka, then AFN’s president, said in a March 20 hearing at the House Resources Committee.
AFN and other Indigenous organizations, though they advocated in past decades for a state constitutional amendment, have come to prefer federal management as more dependable and more supportive of Indigenous rights.
Baker, who is on the council that advises the federal government on subsistence management in the Northwest Arctic, defended his constitutional amendment idea, adding that he, too, favors a rural priority.
“The main goal with that piece of legislation was to get the conversation started because it is an ongoing issue that no one was really addressing in the legislature,” he said.
Both Burke and Chase criticized Baker’s effort as ill-conceived and lacking proper consultation with affected people and organizations.
The proposed constitutional amendment lacked support from any other Native lawmaker, and it died in committee.
Election legislation is another area where Baker split from Alaska’s other Native legislators.
Those members staunchly supported a legal change that would have removed the requirement that absentee voters secure witness signatures from designated officials. That witness-signature requirement has proved to be impractical and burdensome in rural Alaska and effectively discriminates against Native voters, said lawmakers who favored the change.
In floor debate on May 15, Sen. Lyman Hoffman, D-Bethel, defended the elimination of the witness-signature requirement. Hoffman referred to the high rate of rural mail-in votes that were invalidated during the 2022 special election to fill the vacant U.S. House seat. “Because of the witness verification provision, I’ve had 15 percent of my voters – 15 percent of my voters — their votes were thrown out. Imagine how you would feel if that happened in your district,” he said.
But when the Senate-passed bill came to the House floor, Baker voted against taking it up, splitting from the other Native House members. The tally was 20-20, so Baker’s vote on the matter was criticized as the decision that killed a bill with a provision important to his own rural constituents.
Months later, Baker said the amended version of the bill was rushed, and he remains unsure of his position on it. “I can’t say that I would have supported that bill because there was no time to review it,” he said.
He also noted that it reached the floor after the midnight adjournment deadline, making it possibly invalid even if it has passed. Dunleavy vetoed several other bills that passed the Legislature after midnight, saying they were unconstitutional.
Burke, in contrast, has been adamant in seeking changes to help rural voters. The current system is plagued with problems, like the lack of polling place access experienced in the primary, she said. And Alaska Natives pay the price, she said in another op-ed essay published in the Anchorage Daily News.
“Barriers to voting in rural Alaska are persistent and glaring, including limited access to early voting tablets, the inability to translate official election information into Alaska Native languages, and the failure to receive absentee election materials before the voting window opens,” she said in the op-ed.
Party affiliations and trends
Baker has another distinction from other legislators representing predominantly Native districts.
He was the first Republican in more than six decades to represent his district or any part of it. The only other Republican representing the Northwest Arctic region was John Curtis, who served one term in the first legislative session after statehood.
After the legislative session, Baker switched his registration to nonpartisan, something that he said was spurred by his experience in the House representing the district. Party allegiances can get in the way of serving the district, he said. “Sometimes there’s going to be a more conservative way to tackle a District 40 problem. Sometimes there will be a more liberal way to do it,” he said. Seeing how much work goes into the job “that was the reason — becoming someone that could work in the middle of the road.”
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Chase said she too sometimes feels like she doesn’t belong to a political party, though she generally sides with Alaska Democrats.
“I feel like I’m always teeter-tottering, with kind of being a Democrat or going, kind of, towards independent,” she said. That is especially true this year, “when the presidential election is happening, and people are so extreme on both sides.”
By extreme, she said, she is referring to policies on mining or other resource development. Extreme Democrats, she said, are “very against any mining or any resource development that could possibly, you know, tarnish the land,” she said. Republicans are extreme in the other way when it comes to mining and other resource development, she said. “That’s all they want to do,” she said.
Burke, who has served on the board of the pro-oil organization Voice of the Arctic Inupiaq, said she remains a loyal Democrat, but of the Arctic Alaska variety.
“You can’t be a Democrat from the North Slope without being pro-resource development,” she said. “So I would probably consider myself a little more moderate.”
Hensley said the region used to be overwhelmingly Democratic, and the meaningful contests were the primary elections.“If you got through the primary, basically, you were in,” he said.
However, the Republican Party label may not be as much of a detriment as it used to be, at least in half of the House district.
While most of rural Alaska remains solidly Democratic, there has been a shift within the North Slope Borough over the last few presidential cycles, according to results from the Alaska Division of Elections.
That is evident in results from the North Slope’s major population center, Utqiagivik, even as voters in the Northwest Arctic’s major community, Kotzebue, remain heavily in favor of Democrats.
In the 2012 election, voters in Utqiagvik’s two precincts preferred President Barack Obama to GOP challenger Mitt Romney by a 2-to-1 margin. Four years later, the majority of the presidential votes in those precincts went to Democrat Hillary Clinton over Trump, but the margin was narrower, under 12 percentage points.
In the 2020 election, Trump received 52.6% of the vote in the two Utqiagvik districts.
Hensley attributed that trend to the North Slope’s increasing dissatisfaction over national Democrats’ oil development positions and policies.
“Without oil production, they’re toast,” Hensley said. “That is what fuels their entire economy.”
Burke said it would not surprise her if the North Slope Borough tilted to Trump in this election. However, she would not be part of that trend, she said. “I can’t vote for Trump,” she said.
Baker, as of early September, said he had not made up his mind about how he would vote in the presidential election.
“The concern for me is who is going to do what they can to support the Alaskan economy, who is going to support our Alaskan way of life and who is going to make sure that their administration listens when a community says, ’This is what we need, please work with us this way,’” he said.
In another example of the diversity within District 40, Kotzebue, the other hub community, remains a Democratic stronghold in presidential elections, similar to the patterns in most parts of rural Alaska.
The “Build the Line!” pressure campaign against the Legislature by Glenfarne and the Republican Party is oversimplified gasbaggery.
The company and the GOP are trying to con Alaskans into strong-arming legislators under the cover of the “Build the Line!” slogan, insinuating that there is nothing for the Legislature to do but cut taxes and get out of the way.
It’s an attempt to get lawmakers to sign off on Dunleavy’s proposed tax break with no delay and no questions asked. Anyone who asks too many questions risks being denounced as an enemy of the people, an opponent of the gas pipeline and a scoundrel.
“Alaska LNG. Built for Alaskans. Benefits for Alaskans. Call your legislators now and tell them to build the line,’” says Glenfarne Alaska LNG, LLC, a company owned by Glenfarne Services LLC, a New York company that does not show up on the state’s corporate database.
“Alaskans can’t afford to pay more for energy. Alaska can’t afford to wait when a real solution exists now,” says Glenfarne.
“75% of Alaskans support Alaska LNG and more than 400 signed a full-page ad in the Sunday Anchorage Daily News and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner telling policymakers they want reliable, affordable energy,” says Glenfarne.
Free advice to Brendan Duval, the founder of Glenfarne and Adam Prestidge, the president of Glenfarne Alaska LNG LLC: Knock it off.
“Build the Line!” is code for demanding that the Legislature approve the Dunleavy tax cut bill now.
The Legislature’s job is to review what Dunleavy and Glenfarne are asking and make a decision based on numbers and analysis, not on a trite public relations slogan.
Just about everyone in the Legislature and just about everyone in Alaska wants to “Build the Line!”
But Glenfarne has refused to release basic financial information that the Legislature needs to see. There are serious questions about protecting the interests of Alaskans that must be answered. There are serious questions about whether Glenfarne plans to “Build the Line!”
Glenfarne is scheduled to appear before the Senate Finance Committee Wednesday at 9 a.m. Its executives need to be held accountable and admit the deception at the base of the “Build the Line” political signs, buttons and newspaper ads.
Duval and/or Prestidge should explain why they never mentioned the property tax situation last year when they were claiming they would reach a final investment decision by December 2025 with no legislative action needed. Did they forget to ask?
Instead of justifying their tax cut plan, Duval and/or Prestidge are trying to get the public angry and spread the lie that the only thing blocking cheap gas is the Alaska Legislature. Thus they say, “Call your legislators now and tell them to build the line.”
This hides the policy questions facing Alaska and makes it appear that a vote for Dunleavy’s bill will bring lower energy costs and a guarantee that the pipeline will be built.
Duval and/or Prestidge will dodge these questions, but legislators should keep asking.
Glenfarne is promoting public opinon polls that show overwhelming support for a gas pipeline as proof that Glenfarne should get the Dunleavy-approved tax break supported by Glenfarne.
“Alaskans have spoken: Build the Line!” Glenfarne claims.
“Do what’s right for Alaska – Build the Line!,” says UA Regent and contractor Seth Church, who is promoting this line of attack on the Fairbanks Facebook page with 217,000 members that he controls.
Church is also using that page to promote his brother, lieutenant governor candidate Josh Church, who testified Saturday that legislators need to stop asking questions about the gas pipeline tax cut.
“You guys need to stop arguing about whether it pencils or not,” said Church, who is running with Dave Bronson. Josh Church falsely claimed that the trans-Alaska pipeline “didn’t pencil.”
“You’ve had months, months to get this done. Alaskans have been wanting this for years. Quit wasting time. Pass the gasline. I don’t care whether it’s 8 cents or 6 cents or zero cents. Alaska needs this. There will be so many benefits beyond just the tax revenue to this state. You have the chance to be a hero or you have a chance to be a villain. Be a leader and let this bill go through. Pass this gasline. Get a good bill through that allows this project forward. If you don’t I will pledge to make sure you’re thrown out of office. I will work tirelessly because you will destroy this state,” Church said.
“It’s not your job to figure out the financing and all that. Glenfarne is here, willing to do the work. Be a leader and get a clean bill out so we can have jobs and growth again. This is crucial. Do your damn job,” he said.
This situation is far more complicated than that. It appears that Dave Bronson doesn’t understand this either, claiming that Church’s criticism of the legislators was exactly what was needed. “It’s time to stop talking, start building and put Alaska First!” says Bronson.
Anyone running for state office who thinks this is simple has not been paying attention. The candidates should start with this report by GaffneyCline from December.
Part of the Glenfarne lobbying campaign is to insinuate that people who answer public opinion surveys and say they want a gas pipeline are supporters of the Dunleavy/Glenfarne tax cut. That’s the hidden message here.
Here is a full-page ad that appeared in Fairbanks and Anchorage that claims, “HUNDREDS OF ALASKA’S BUSINESS AND COMMUNITY LEADERS AGREE: IT’S TIME TO BUILD THE LINE!”
Some of the 400-plus names on the ad were collected on the website supportaklng.com by people who simply clicked the box that said, “I agree to have my name/business and city listed publicly as a supporter of AKLNG.”
Supporting the Alaska LNG project is not the same as saying, “I agree to have my name/business and city listed publicly as a supporter of the Dunleavy tax cut for Glenfarne.”
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Alaska
After dispute, Assembly allows small-scale farmers to continue selling hay and feed in Anchorage neighborhoods
A land-use dispute between the municipality, a small family farm tucked off of O’Malley Road and its neighbors recently gained the attention of the Anchorage Assembly.
Dalton Baines started helping his family distribute hay in South Anchorage more than two decades ago, when the bales weighed more than him. Now 32, he owns the family’s farm and runs a secondary small business called Alaska Hay & Feed Supply.
After numerous visits from code enforcement for suspected land-use violations, Baines said the municipality had threatened fines and to shut down his operations.
The Assembly on Tuesday unanimously passed an ordinance reaffirming that the retail sale of hay, feed and compost — at businesses like Baines’ — are allowed under city code.
Baines and other horse and livestock owners said they hope the ordinance will help promote food security in Alaska and ensure the thousands of horses, cows and other livestock on the Anchorage Hillside stay fed when local supplies run low.
“It’s an ecosystem to stay alive up here in Alaska,” Baines told the Assembly on Tuesday during a public hearing.
“(This ordinance) ensures that all animals are protected and able to be fed, especially when barges are late, or crops are late, like this year,” he said.
City code allows on-site feed storage and transactions for animal boarding and training and horse riding lessons. It did not, in “plain language,” permit the retail sale of hay, feed and compost at those facilities, said Assembly member Keith McCormick, who represents South Anchorage. He co-sponsored the ordinance with member Zac Johnson.
“This omission otherwise leaves compliant operators exposed to code enforcement for activity that Anchorage has allowed in practice for decades,” McCormick said.
Baines finished building a new warehouse space, which looks like a set of large garages with a loading dock, last spring on one of his Gander Street properties. The warehouse is usually full of pallets of alfalfa hay bales he imports from Washington state, but his stock was thinner than usual on Wednesday, he said.
After burning through his last shipment, he said he had decided to wait to order more until he knew the outcome of the ordinance.
Livestock facility limits
Baines built a new warehouse space, which looks like a set of large garages with a loading dock, last year on one of his Gander Street properties. The warehouse is usually full of pallets of alfalfa hay bales he imports from Washington state, but his stock was thinner than usual Wednesday, he said.
After burning through his last shipment, he said he had decided to wait to order more until he knew the outcome of the ordinance.
The dispute between Alaska Hay & Feed Supply and the municipality’s Development Services Department began almost two years ago with a noise complaint.
According to a June 2025 memo from former Planning, Development and Public Works Director Lance Wilber, it eventually raised the question: “Does commercial activity associated with large domestic animal facilities include the retail sale of hay and feed?”
Any property with four or more animals, such as cows or horses, falls into that category. This included Alaska Hay & Feed Supply.
The short answer, Wilber said, was “yes, with limitations.” Commercial sales should serve the animals kept on-site and are intentionally limited because livestock facilities are allowed in a number of Anchorage’s residential areas, the memo stated.
Repeated encounters with a code enforcement officer spurred Baines to file a lawsuit.
The municipality put the debate in front of its Zoning Board of Examiners and Appeals in September. During the hearing, neighbors said they believed the hay and feed business had lowered property values and complained of noisy delivery trucks and equipment.
The board ultimately decided Baines’ hay sales violated city code, an action that led to the Assembly ordinance.
In addition to feeding his own black Angus cows and horses, Baines supplies hay and feed to hundreds of customers in Anchorage. Many simply don’t have enough acreage to support livestock, and Alaska’s harsh climate presents another set of challenges for hay growers, he said. His customers range from those with a couple of chickens to horse barns with as many as 40 horses.
Rose English, the owner of Rockin’ B Ranch in South Anchorage, said there have been times in the past when the weather did not allow Alaskans to grow hay, forcing farmers to import hay and feed. She shared containers with neighbors so they could also feed their animals, she told the Assembly on Tuesday.
During the pandemic, her farm also raised pigs, chickens and dairy goats they used to provide meat, eggs and milk to residents when the shelves at the grocery store thinned. It’s necessary for places like her ranch to provide when and where gaps exist, she said.
“It’s going to be very difficult in the future, if anything ever happens, like an earthquake,” English said. “These situations need to be available to help people make ends meet.”
In a written letter from the Hillside Home and Landowners Organization, President Katie Nolan said the recent interpretation of Anchorage’s large domestic animal facility rules created “untenable situations within the agricultural community.”
Nolan encouraged the adoption of the ordinance on Tuesday, citing all the work that had been done under previous mayoral administrations on Anchorage’s animal control laws.
“We ended up with something that worked for our city for decades,” she said. “Unfortunately, along the way, somebody reinterpreted code, and because of that, we had a glitch that needs to be fixed.”
The new ordinance became effective immediately.
What follows is not Elstun’s life story, but a snapshot of events from 1958 that laid the foundation for Lauesen’s career as a crusader, dreamer and political activist. Though he often labored in the service of lost causes, he had more than his share of victories as well.
Here is his full obituary. His family and friends will celebrate his life Sunday at 3 p.m. in the Wildbirch Hotel in Anchorage.
My favorite line in his obituary is the one that says, “After graduating from Lathrop High School in 1963, Elstun traveled around the United States philosophizing,” but that is too modest. He philosophized on a daily basis at any time, any place.
One of the first times Elstun’s name appeared in the Daily News-Miner, he was identified as “Elson Jr.” in a story that said he was fishing with his parents at Fielding Lake when the family home burned down in August 1958 near North Pole.
His 17-year-old sister Juanita, the future borough mayor of Fairbanks, and his brother Ray had to flee their 13-Mile Richardson Highway home at 5 a.m., alerted to the danger by their Cocker Spaniel.
Elstun Jr. was known to his family and friends back then as Butch, while Elstun Sr. went by Bud.
Bud was the chief engineer at Eielson Air Force Base, as well as a geologist, artist, entrepreneur, entertainer and later—owner of the Sourdough Roadhouse. Bud and Butch were both men of the word, storytellers supreme.
“You sit down and ask him about Alaska. Two hours later, he’ll stop for breath,” is how Edward Strunk of Glennallen described the oratorical gifts of Bud Lauesen, quoted by Debra McKinney in the Anchorage Daily News.
Not long after the 1958 house fire, Butch Lauesen entered the eighth grade at the North Pole public school, a pivotal year in the development of a guy who was just learning to speak his mind. The school operated that fall in rooms provided on a temporary basis by the First Baptist Church of North Pole.
On the first day of school, Lauesen met an inspirational new teacher, Dave Ray, a Baptist minister who had just come from King Cove with his wife. She taught first-grade. Elstun always said that Dave Ray helped him learn how to think for himself—the greatest lesson any teacher can impart.
Ray moved quickly and started a student council, a literary society and a school newspaper. “A good school paper is worth as much to the school as an extra teacher,” Ray said.
In that enterprise, Butch Lauesen, 13, emerged as editor-in-chief. Pat Carter, a lifelong friend of Lauesen’s, was the assistant editor.
It was the second issue of “The Long Look,” dated October 17, 1958, that gave indigestion to adults in North Pole and helped energize Elstun as a political activist.
Adult readers today might regard the assortment of school tidbits in this ancient mimeographed sheet as hardly worth a quick glance, but it marked a milestone in Lauesen lore.
As soon as the four pages of the October 17 “The Long Look” reached the eyes of North Pole’s illuminati, there was hell to pay.
The paper, printed in red and green ink, revealed plans for a Halloween Carnival, mentioned that first-graders were learning their numbers, how a school play was bound to be funny and that a checker tournament was in the works. “See Butch or Pat, they are The Moguls” for the tournament.
While the checker moguls served in management, Gloria Burger and Susan Slifer were the reporters for “The Long Look.”
Lauesen opined in his editorial that the school of 80 was improving, but there was more work to be done.
“Now then. We need ‘More Room.’ The need is greater than you people think,” Lauesen wrote. “We sure appreciate the church for letting us use these two rooms.”
“We need a GYM. We need a playground level enough so a fellow can run across it without stumbling and breaking his neck in ‘7’ pieces. We feel that someone could crank up a ‘Cat’ and level off the ground. Maybe that our new appointed Trustee to the Board will read this and THINK?”
It wasn’t the THINK editorial that irked North Pole’s elite—it was an ad for Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Ernest Gruening and some text in the paper supporting his election.
The Democratic Party paid $10 for an ad that was supposed to say, “Vote Straight Democratic. November 25, 1958. Paid political adv.” The kids had been encouraged to get ads to pay the bills.
But the newspaper did more than make that announcement. It ran a few paragraphs heralding the accomplishments of Gruening and took shots at his opponent, Republican Mike Stepovich of Fairbanks.
About one-quarter of an inside page featured a political ad that called on readers to not throw away their “birth-right by sending down to Washington a Republican to work with Bartlett.”
Bartlett was E.L. “Bob” Bartlett, a Democrat who had wide support from members of both political parties.
“The Long Look” political ad called former Gov. Mike Stepovich a “Johnny Come Lately” to the statehood movement, borrowing an attack line against Stepovich that Washington columnist Drew Pearson had created.
This took place a month before the first election in Alaska to choose U.S. senators. It was a tense political campaign and the stakes were high.
North Pole Mayor Con Miller, the Republican owner of Santa Claus House, was enraged. So was Jack Jenkins, president of the North Pole school board.
The News-Miner, which had gone all out to promote Stepovich and attack Gruening on its news and opinion pages, denounced the school publication in a high-handed editorial.
The News-Miner said this was propaganda that had no place in a school paper. The students “and those of their elders who planted political propaganda in the school paper have done a great disservice to their school and to their country.”
Stepovich’s supporters wasted no time in calling for Ray to be fired.
Miller said this was no way to treat a future U.S. senator and that it was illegal. He was wrong on both counts. Gruening won the election and it was not illegal to express a point of view.
The adults all assumed that 13-year-olds couldn’t possibly have opinions of their own and that Butch Lauesen and Pat Carter were innocent babes manipulated by Ray into doing something inappropriate.
One of the offending passages was this, completed with random capitalization and language that is the work of a 13-year-old mind: “Switzerland, said ‘If ALASKA had the ROADS it would be our greatest rival as a GREAT SHOW PLACE OF THE WORLD.’ Who has the road-building plans? Ernest Gruening, ELECT HIM TO U.S. SENATE.”
Miller was a friend of Stepovich’s and was embarrassed to have the hometown Republican hero targeted in a school sheet in North Pole.
The North Pole school board called a meeting five days after publication and told Ray to be there, but he said he couldn’t make it because he had a church meeting to attend.
That school board meeting and others that followed quickly turned into anger mismanagement sessions directed at Ray.
“He should not be tried in absentia,” said Jim Ford, the only board member who opposed firing Ray.
‘We are not trying him,” said Jenkins. “We are firing him.”
“It’s like totalitarianism,” said Ford.
The board fired Ray, which was not the first or the last overreaction in the history of North Pole.
Butch Lauesen, Pat Carter and the other North Pole students decided to fight back on behalf of their teacher and quickly organized a protest.
“Yesterday noon 25 of the 80-some pupils of the school let it be known on whose side they stood,” reporter Albro Gregory wrote in the News-Miner. “They paraded in the business area, wearing placards. One read: ‘Unfair school board,’ and another ‘We want Mr. Ray’ and another, ‘Dear North Pole, we would like Mr. Ray to continue as our school teacher.”
In the News-Miner coverage by Gregory, Lauesen was incorrectly identified as “Butch Carter,” a student editor, an amalgamation of Butch Lauesen and Pat Carter.
The children also distributed flyers thoughout North Pole, saying they needed Ray because of the newspaper, the student council and he has “helped us in our public speaking by starting a literary society.”
The local Boy Scout leader said he would banish any boys who took part in the protest. Two boys did, including Lauesen. The scout leader backed off the threat because they were not wearing scout uniforms.
One protest card was attached to Con Miller’s station wagon pleading for Ray to get his job back. I would be surprised if Butch and Pat didn’t have something to do with the placement of that notice.
Ray hired attorney Warren A. Taylor, who spoke to the school board and said the firing was illegal. Ray did not get proper notice and the board would be on the hook for paying his salary if they did not reverse the firing.
The board complied, Ray returned to the school, but the board members were not happy and continued to argue about all this.
The adults didn’t distinguish themselves with their comportment. “This meeting is about as orderly as a fistfight,” Pat Carter complained to the board.
At one meeting board members Jenkins and Ford were each arguing for the right to speak when Jenkins screamed to “local gendarme” Walter Durham to remove Ford from the meeting. There was pandemonium, Gregory wrote, and shouts of “liar” emanated from various parts of the room.
(The Baptist Church later cited this exchange as a reason for ordering the school to vacate the building, writing: “A meeting was held when U.S. Marshals were said to have been standing by with loaded guns in case of trouble.”)
When Jenkins demanded that Durham arrest Ford, a man in the crowd, wrongly identified by the News-Miner as “Elton Lauesen,” a “bewhiskered property owner and Ray backer,” warned that Durham “wouldn’t go out in one piece,” if he accosted Ford.
Jenkins’s wife leaped up to defend her husband, who the News-Miner said was shouting at the red-faced bewhiskered property owner Lauesen.
“Stop acting like a bunch of kids,’ thundered Lauesen as he lumbered to his feet. Then, speaking more calmly, he said, ‘Let’s bury the hatchet. Let’s carry on from here.’”
“I’ll be happy to,” said Ray.
“Lauesen smiled.”
Jenkins was not ready to do so, however, the News-Miner wrote.
There were more harsh words and back-and-forth and the meeting ended after midnight. “About par for the course at North Pole,” Gregory wrote.
Sixty-odd years after this contretemps, Elstun wrote about how that year with Ray made his life better than it would otherwise have been. “Dave Ray shall always be my favorite teacher, he said.
“When I was 12-ish I fancied myself something of a tough guy. It turns out nobody else saw me that way at all. I was told by Dr. Ray that while I tried to be a tough guy, I was a tender-hearted boy. I was so embarrassed by that assessment that my face burned. But it turns out he was correct,” Elstun wrote.
He always remembered that on the first day of eighth grade, Ray taught him some lines from Tennyson:
“That beauty, Good, and Knowledge, are three sisters that doat upon each other, friends to man. Living together under the same roof and never can be sunder’d without tears. And he that shuts Love out, in turn shall be Shut out from Love.”
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