Old friends say they can’t believe I’m mayor, but it’s human nature to not believe things can happen until they do.
Donald Trump was elected president twice, for crying out loud. As Jim Hightower famously said, “If God had wanted us to elect leaders, he’d have given us candidates.”
I didn’t expect or want to become the town mayor when I arrived here 37 years ago. But now it seems as natural as waking up in the morning. In 37 years, I’ve dreamt dreams for this town. I’d like some of them to come true.
I imagine the same motivated other Haines mayors.
Bob Henderson was the first one I knew. When I showed up to interview him at the borough office upstairs of the firehall in fall of 1986, he was at his desk in black knee boots and blue jeans covered in mud. Bob was a farmer, among other things.
He was a schoolteacher and a writer and an investor and the man credited with launching the borough’s permanent fund, our town’s $10 million piggy bank. Bob was also willful. He brooked no opposition.
In our first interview, Bob told me exactly what the assembly would do at its next meeting and damned if that wasn’t what they did, at his direction. A benevolent tyrant, Bob brought the public library, swimming pool, Chilkat Center and Sheldon Museum under the borough’s wing.
When assembly members started challenging his direction at meetings a few years later, Bob would turn beet red and sputter. He stepped down after he stopped getting his way so often.
Frank Wallace was mayor of the city around that same time, when the Chilkat Valley had two municipalities and two mayors. Like Henderson, Frank wielded an iron fist without bothering to keep it in a velvet glove. He had a chopped-off finger he’d wag at critics to bring them into line.
Frank’s ex-wife Gail also had been city mayor, years before he was elected. To emulate his hero Ronald Reagan, Wallace kept a jar of black jelly beans on his mayor’s desk. But he wouldn’t vote for The Gipper. As a state plow driver who owed his stake to a large and powerful union, he couldn’t bring himself to mark a ballot for a foe of organized labor.
When the city lawyer advised the city to fence off the Port Chilkoot Dock after a kid fell off it and drowned, Frank said to hell with that. He’d spent summers as a kid jumping off the dock and he wasn’t going to deny anyone else that kind of fun.
By the time I arrived, Jon Halliwell was out of office. Jon is sometimes remembered as the town’s savviest mayor. In the early 1980s, he built Tlingit Park, the Senior Center, and Visitor’s Center during the booming oil years, banned commercial trailers and corralled trailer homes into parks. He lived on Main Street and could tell a joke.
He shrugged off conflicts-of-interest saying, “In a town this small, if you’ve got an interest, you’ve got a conflict.” After serving as mayor, Jon took over the Haines Chamber of Commerce, presiding over the liveliest meetings in town, so rich with gossip and fulmination they qualified as entertainment.
Cigarettes killed Jon before he reached 50.
Fred Shields served as borough mayor a few times and notched as our best-dressed leader, sporting a blazer and tie at meetings. As mayor, Shields was brilliant, funny and impetuous. He computerized the borough office. A budget hawk, he lost a battle against unionization of borough employees in the mid-1990s.
(When the city and borough merged in 2002, city employees demanded that union representation be extended to them, too.)
Fred likes to tell people he left office due to illness. “The voters got sick of me,” he says. That happens in politics, where friends come and go but enemies accumulate.
Montana farmboy and state trooper Don Otis became mayor in a three-way race against Dave Berry and Dave Olerud. As news reporter, I liked Don and advised him to smile for his candidate profile photo in the newspaper. He squeaked into office by three votes.
A lifelong bachelor, Don lived in an empty house full of guns on Bjornstad. To clear downtown sidewalks, he drove his own ATV fitted with a snowplow. In his spare time, he would identify outdated laws and get them off the books. He advocated combining our two governments, but at the end of his term described Haines as “ungovernable.”
It still can be questioned whether we did the right thing in 2002 when we consolidated our two governments and two mayors into one of each. Ketchikan, Fairbanks and Kodiak still have two of each. Certainly an argument can be made that duplication spreads out the workload.
In the late 1990s I was covering a three-day meeting of the Whitehorse Chamber of Commerce at the Chilkat Center. Dave Olerud, who convinced the Canadian leaders to bring their meeting to Haines, was upset that neither the city or borough mayor bothered to show up to welcome the dignitaries.
Dave told me to get on the phone and fix the situation. When I asked him which mayor to call, he shot back, “It doesn’t matter. Just get me a mayor.” As far as mayors go, maybe there’s an argument to having a spare.
I have two cell phones now, which is two more than I want or anyone needs. How does anyone get anything done when they’re expected to continually check their phone?
But because that’s part of the job, I accept it. I’ll also be civil and polite to you and to your concern or request because that’s part of the job, too.
Stop by city hall anytime to chat. I’m there between 3 and 5 p.m.