I knew about four people in Alaska when I was invited to an “orphan’s Thanksgiving” in Anchorage in 1984.
I had overstayed my plans to head south at summer’s end and was living in an apartment behind a strip mall on dreary East Tudor Road. November had been the coldest and darkest of my experiences with cold and dark.
I was nearing the end of my earnings from sliming fish in Bristol Bay and had a job application in at the Anchorage Times, where three of my four friends worked as copy editors. We were invited to the home of the gal who edited the newspaper’s lifestyle section.
The editor’s name was Carol Murkowski and she was the oldest child of Frank Murkowski, the junior U.S. senator from Alaska. But discussion on the drive to her place centered on the first name of Carol’s husband, Roe, spelled just like the word for salmon eggs, and why he wasn’t named Milt, the word for salmon sperm.
For people who work boring jobs, copy editors are surprisingly good for conversation. They tend to know a lot more than just the rules of grammar.
I was introduced around the room of a dozen or so strangers and was seated next to a lively, middle-aged woman who was the mother-in-law of our hostess, or Roe’s mom. I don’t know if I got around to asking her about her son’s name but I remember she was a most fascinating dinner mate, full of interest and interesting things to say and talk about.
I’m sure I bored her to tears with my recent adventures hitchhiking across the American West and jumping on a fish barge to Alaska. I was pretty full of myself at 23. Maybe it registered with me that my dinner mate was serving in the Alaska Senate and had been in politics for years.
Alaska politics didn’t interest me much. But I remembered Arliss Sturgulewski as a kind person with an expansive and questioning mind and a welcoming demeanor, the perfect dinner companion.
Two years after I met her, Arliss won the Republican nomination for Alaska governor, losing the contest to Democrat Steve Cowper. Arliss was sensible. Cowper had a southern accent and some phony swagger. Joe Vogler of the Alaska Independence Party, a wing-nut who wanted to pull Alaska out of the U.S., served as spoiler in that election, taking 6 percent of votes.
Arliss won the Republican nomination again in 1990 but her pro-choice views and tempered approach to development chafed some on Alaska’s far right. Her own running mate jumped ship to join an Independence Party ticket featuring former Alaska Gov. Walter Hickel.
Hickel won with 39 percent of votes and accomplished little during the next four years. Cowper, who decided not to run for re-election, was most recently reported living in Texas with his third wife.
Arliss, the hard-working single mom, remained in Alaska and championed worthy causes. She divorced herself from the Republican Party by 2016, saying it had moved too far to the right.
Arliss died in April, too soon to see another sensible, pro-choice mom from Alaska elected to the state’s only seat in Congress. The final results showing Mary Peltola winning the seat were counted the day before Thanksgiving.
The next day we hosted dinner for 12 at my wife’s house. Amid the cooking, I got to thinking of my first Thanksgiving in Alaska, as an orphan chatting up Arliss, and what fun it would be to get that invitation again, to sit beside her at a big dinner table one more time, to hear what she had to say about Mary Peltola, Alaska and the world.
A true trailblazer, Arliss was ahead of her time. A real Alaskan, she was unapologetic and sure-footed enough to be fun company.