October 08, 2003
Wednesday - 12:50 am

In 1985 the Alaska State Legislature named October 8 each year as William A. Egan day, "to honor the first governor of the State of Alaska for a lifetime of service to the Territory and State of Alaska." Bill Egan was Alaska's first - and to this date - only Alaska-born governor. He would have been proud of that honor. He died in 1984 at age 70. At his

William A. Egan - Alaska's First Governor Photo date unknown- from: "Bill Egan And Alaska: a pictorial tribute to a gallant leader of a courageous state" a book prepared and printed through the efforts of the many friends of Bill Egan on the occasion of his birthday, October 8, 1965. Photograph courtesy Ketchikan Museums

Anchorage funeral he was eulogized by public officials but perhaps would have been more pleased by the many oldtimers who slipped in to pay their last respects almost unnoticed - fedoras, wool watch caps or ear-flapped fur hats in hand - as they bowed their heads in silent honor to the "people's governor."

Bill Egan was a remarkable man. He was neither a large man nor a jovial one and television cameras didn't do him any favors. He suffered from the most common of all phobias, glossophobia, the fear of public speaking - a serious hardship for a man in public life. But he also had a fierce determination to finish anything he started, an almost encyclopedic knowledge of government structure and responsibilities, and of Alaska's century-old political history. And he also had a trait that made him famous with the people - he was a born campaigner. He was known as someone who never forgot a name!

In 1965, as an awed and almost tongue-tied Ketchikan Daily News cub reporter sitting next to a governor (!) at a ballgame at Walker field while he spoke with then-Ketchikan mayor Jim Pinkerton, I was hardly a memorable constituent! But seven years later, on the sandy bank of the river at Nenana, he walked up to me, took my hand, and said, "Hello, June. Are you happy to be living back in Fairbanks again?" For a second time I was tongue-tied!

However he obtained that memory skill, it was amazing. A Ketchikan woman named Mary Hahn, who was active in the Democratic party in Ketchikan back in the '60s, asked Gov. Egan, who was traveling south, where he was headed? When she learned that it was to a small town in Washington State, she said, "Oh, my parents live there! You ought to stop in and say hello." They chatted for a few more minutes. Imagine her surprise a little later when her mother called in a state of excitement and said, "Mary, your governor knocked on our door and stopped in for a cup of coffee!" That was Bill Egan.

Seattle Times Alaska correspondent Stanton Patty once noticed Gov. Egan sitting in coach on an Alaska Airlines flight. Patty, smiling, said, "Governor, you could be sitting up in first class!" Egan smiled and replied, saying, "Yes, but the voters are back here." He was a campaigner!

William Allen Egan was born Oct. 8, 1914, in Valdez, the sixth child of William Edgar Egan, a miner, and his wife Cora Allen Egan. The family had come to Alaska after a stint in the Montana copper mines and a few years in the Juneau gold mines, and in 1903 to Valdez, which was experiencing a mining boom. When they arrived in the little town they already had eldest son Clinton (nicknamed Truck), son Emmett and daughter Ethel. By the time Billy arrived in 1914, he joined his three oldest siblings as well as brother Alaska and sister Alice. A final child would be born later to the Egans, son Francis.

By the time of Billy's arrival in 1914, Valdez, the little saltwater port town on Prince William Sound, surrounded by steep and gold-bearing mountains, had grown to be one of the largest communities in Southcentral, beating out Cordova and Seward in present prospects and future possibilities. At the time Anchorage was not yet a town, being merely a cluster of railroad-worker tents on the banks of Ship Creek off Cook Inlet. With the advent of territorial status in 1912, Valdez was a natural for establishment the Third Division courthouse in its town center. The two-story, deeply hip-roofed building - necessary in a town that receives astonishing winter snowfalls - was a landmark until it burned in 1940.

All was well with the family until 1920 when William Edgar Egan perished in an avalanche. He had been working with three other mining company employees shoveling out a tramline on Shoup Glacier some seven miles back from the saltwater town. All four were buried and the three others were dug out safely, but when rescuers reached William Egan, he was already dead. He left a widow and seven children behind.

Cora Egan coped. Hers was not an unusual story in the history of Alaska. Eldest son Truck was crippled from a fall when he was five years old, but he went to work in merchandising and would later own a store and then a popular Valdez bar and live to a ripe old age. Emmett and Alaska took off but were not successful enough to help their mother to any degree; they fade from the Egan family album. Cora rented rooms, took in laundry, sold house plants, did home nursing, and served part-time occasionally as a jail matron when needed. Even Billy chipped in. At age 10 he worked in a cannery, making enough to buy his own school clothes. A little older, he learned to drive - there was no restriction on driver's age then - and chauffeured tourists around in the summer (yes, there were lots of tourists around then only not quite as many as there are now) and drove dump truck for the Alaska Road Commission when he was only 14!

Bill Egan was a good enough student and a steadfast and dependable basketball player in high school. He wanted to quit and work full-time but his brother Truck said absolutely no way! Bill's grades were good, he was excellent writer and he was named salutatorian for his class of 1932. That honor required a speech. Egan worked manfully on his address, but halfway through the speech he froze and panicked. But the class valedictorian, George Ashby, smoothly addressed and seamlessly finished Egan's speech. Bill improved his skills by practicing in front of a mirror. But even many years later, during one of his speeches, even Republicans could be heard to mutter, "Come on, Bill, you can do it!"

The same year that Bill graduated from Valdez High, his godfather and mentor Tony Dimond decided to run for Alaska's delegate to Congress. In territorial days Alaska was in a curious spot. It had a self-elected territorial Legislature. But the governor could accept or veto any of its legislative actions, and, the governor was appointed by the President in power! Alaskans couldn't even vote for President until Statehood was granted in 1959. The entire Territory was at the mercy of the machinations of the federal government in one way or another.

So Alaska had adopted the "Tennessee Plan" first introduced many years before by that Southern state-to-be and elected a "delegate to Congress who could not vote but could address the members and thus lobby for Statehood for Alaska." That was the job that Tony Dimond was campaigning for in 1932, held at the time by 75-year-old Republican Judge James Wickersham. Democrats at the time dubbed him "the old windbag." Tony Dimond, a

Gov. Egan & President Lyndon B. Johnson Photo date unknown- from: "Bill Egan And Alaska: a pictorial tribute to a gallant leader of a courageous state" a book prepared and printed through the efforts of the many friends of Bill Egan on the occasion of his birthday, October 8, 1965. Photograph courtesy Ketchikan Museums

young Valdez lawyer crippled from a gunshot wound to his leg, won the race. He was the consummate campaigner, the man who never forgot a face or a name to match it, the man young Bill Egan so admired and emulated. Dimond won.

In a television interview many years later, Egan described with pride his godfather Tony Dimond's easy ways and his gentlemanly manners, his refusal to sling mud. It was the beginning of the "more modern" era of politics. Delegate Dimond routinely sent copies of the Congressional Record home to several folks, including Truck Egan. Young Bill Egan read every copy and began the process of storing facts to be retrieved from his remarkable memory. Bill learned a great deal about American politics and saved a file of those records, readily debating issues at the Pinzon Bar which actually became a bar again at the end of Prohibition in 1933.

In 1940 Bill Egan successfully ran for the Territorial House of Representatives, using the same campaign strategy that had worked for Tony Dimond. A year later he married a new school teacher to Valdez, a Miss Neva McKittrick, formerly of Kansas. And with her support Bill's tenure in Alaska politics was just beginning. He planned to beat the drum for statehood, and that he did! Bill was a Democrat and his party felt Alaska was held hostage to the corporate interests of big business: the canneries and mining companies. But World War II presented an ever greater threat to Alaska and the nation when the enemy Japanese invaded and occupied two of Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Statehood was placed on the back burner for the duration.

The story of the Alaska Statehood effort is another whole story. But briefly, in 1955 a Constitutional Convention was ordered and held in the student union building on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. Bill Egan chaired that convention. The men and women of that body were among the Who's Who of Alaska - if Alaska had had one. They crafted a Constitution for the proposed state, a document carefully and thoughtfully crafted on models from other states of the Union, with wide input from delegates from every corner of the vast territory that was and is Alaska. In 1958 Alaska voted and supported statehood. It was only a matter of time.

In 1958 the U.S. Congress approved statehood for Alaska - by a single vote! (Every vote really does count!) That summer day in July of 1958 saw the biggest celebration Alaska had ever experienced! Southeastern may have not been overjoyed, fearful of the future for the canneries. But then in the wee hours of the morning of Jan. 3, 1959, church bells in Alaska began to toll, fire whistles tootled as folks woke up to the news that President Dwight David Eisenhower had signed the legislation that made Alaska a state! And one of the hardest workers for statehood was Bill Egan.

Bill Egan, who based his first political campaign on the slogan "Born in Alaska, raised in Alaska and schooled in Alaska," was elected the first governor of this great state. Others came after but he was the only one who could or still could boast of his all-Alaska background. That record stands to this day. Governor Egan died in 1984 of lung disease, a result of his smoking. He probably burned many a cigarette as it lay in an ashtray in his office in Juneau. Former Lt. Gov. Red Boucher (1970-74) remembers seeing Governor Egan's Juneau office light still burning late into the night. "He was the hardest working man I ever saw," Boucher said.

Bill Egan, wherever your are, you were a great guy and we'll never forget your name!

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