Wally Hickel, 90, two-time Alaska governor and controversial secretary of the Interior under President Richard Nixon, was laid to rest May 18 with his coffin standing up in his grave and facing Washington D.C. The Dustbowl Era Kansas Golden Gloves welterweight boxing champion was buried on his feet so he could, “fight for what I believe in forever,” according to his widow wife of 65 years Ermalee Hickel.
At the Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church, where the Hickel Family attends mass, over 1,000 mourners filled the pews and many had to stand. Some watched the funeral on a projector screen in an overflow seating room.
The May 17 funeral mass was attended by many of Alaska’s lawmakers, including Gov. Sean Parnell, Sen. Mark Begich, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Rep. Don Young and former Senator Ted Stevens.
An aide to former Gov. Sarah Palin enquired if Palin would be welcome at the funeral the day before and was told, “all are welcome.” Palin arrived at the service late and stood in the back largely unnoticed.
Hickel came to Alaska in 1940 with 37 cents in his pocket, leaving his family’s tenant farm near Claflin, Kan.
In his memoir, “Who Owns America?,” Hickel recalls growing up as the oldest boy of 10 children.
“I was milking cows when I was five years old,” Hickel writes. “I was in the field behind four head of horses and a gang plow when I was eight.”
In Alaska he washed dishes, tended bar and founded a construction company in Anchorage in 1947. He built Anchorage’s first modern shopping centers and hundreds of houses.
After a 9.2 magnitude earthquake leveled much of downtown Anchorage in 1964, seemingly before the after shocks had stopped, Hickel announced plans to built the landmark Captain Cook Hotel, inspiring confidence in a city struggling to rebuild.
A pillar of Hickel’s legacy is his belief that natural resources on public land are common resources to be used and conserved in an “owner state,” for the benefit of the people, not large corporations. According to his long-time assistant and friend Malcolm Roberts, it was Hickel’s experience growing up on a tenant farm that lead him to so strongly believe in public ownership of resources. These principles can be seen in Article VIII of the Alaska constitution.
Hickel was a pivotal advocate for Alaska statehood, flying to Washington to lobby the U.S. Senate and President Harry S. Truman, demanding Alaska be given more than 100 million acres of state land to empower the frontier state with resources held in common.
“We would have just been a national preserve without Wally weighing in and convincing the U. S. Senate to give Alaska 103 million acres of state land,” Roberts said. “Defining 87 percent of Alaskan lands as owned by the public made the principal of the commons a reality, like it is in Australia and Canada where 80 percent of the land is owned by the public.”
Eventually, Gov. Jay Hammond used this principle of the commons to give Alaskans their share in the states natural wealth through the permanent fund dividend.
Elected governor of Alaska in 1966 as a Republican, and chosen by Nixon to serve as secretary of the Interior in 1968, Hickel surprised critics with his active defense of the environment. Four days after being sworn is as secretary of the Interior, a Union Oil platform just three miles off the coast of Santa Barbara blew out.
In “Who Owns America?” Hickel recalls jumping into action:
“It took only a few minutes in the air over the Santa Barbara channel to fill me full of the situation – the oil, the terrible mess, the justified outrage of the people of Santa Barbara. I was also outraged by what I sensed to be the bureaucratic resistance on the site to do anything positive about a crime committed against nature. Some people had worked so closely with the oil men for so many years that they simply could not conceive of a Secretary of the Interior doing anything drastic about an oil slick,” Hickel wrote.
When Hickel landed, he stretched his constitutional authority and by sheer force of character managed to shut down all oil drilling in the Santa Barbara channel including rigs operated by six different corporations, and all offshore drilling throughout the U.S. until new regulations had been written and implemented. He permitted one relief well to stop the blowout.
During his 22-month tenure, Hickel continued his fight through many rounds. He tackled a Chevron oil spill off Louisiana’s gulf coast in March 1970 and demanded that oil companies to assume unlimited liability for oil spills.
Yet, Hickel was used to being his own boss and his outspoken views left him increasingly isolated within the Nixon administration. After four students were killed by National Guard troops in the Kent State massacre, Hickel, a father of six sons — several of whom were in college, put his job on the line when he, wrote a letter to Nixon disagreeing with Nixon’s practice of openly demeaning protesters.
“Regardless of how I, or any American, might feel individually,” Hickel wrote, “we have an obligation as leaders to communicate with our youth and listen to their ideas and problems.”
The letter was leaked to the press and Hickel was fired in the first public cabinet sacking in almost 20 years.
“I’m going with an arrow in my heart and not a bullet in my back,” Hickel said in a 60 minutes television interview.
He did not pause to shake Nixon’s hand on his way out of the Oval Office after being fired, he noted in “Who Owns America?”
Hickel remained a mighty presence in Alaskan life for decades and had three failed bids for governor before winning as an independent in 1990 with 39 percent of the vote. His second term was turbulent with the state in turmoil after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Five-time Iditarod champion Martin Buser was a friend of Hickel, both characters sharing a drive to succeed. Together they enjoyed simple pleasures like camping and fishing.
“He was not just a political figure, he was a seer of things and a wise man. He could boil pretty complex situations down to a few words and pass them on and say that’s what you look for, people who look you in the eye with an open face and an open mind.” Buser said, “Lessons like that are longer lasting than ‘you gotta vote for this.’”
In his eulogy for his father, Jack Hickel defended his father’s big dreams, saying of his longtime advocacy for a railroad tunnel from Alaska to Russia, “that is not a false dream, you wait and see.”
Jack, Ermalee and the Hickel family laughed and wiped away tears beside Wally’s grave as he was buried standing up. His legacy lives on through his son Jack who has spent 15 years working as doctor to the destitute in Africa. Jack has been invited by the governments of Sudan other African nations to present his father’s ideas later this year on public ownership of natural resources and the commons. His father called it, “The Alaska Solution.”