>>It was Gov. Tony Knowles who coined the phrase “My way is the highway,” meaning that he would force the pipeline to take his preferred route (he was a restaurant owner in Anchorage before entering politics).<<
CC,
It's a really cheap shot to dismiss Tony as a mere "restaurant owner", considering he has family history and personal background in the oil industry...
-Snow
OIL UNDER HIS NAILS
Tony Knowles' father, Carroll Knowles, was a third-generation oilman, an independent "wildcatter."
"He was always counting on the next well to be his big strike," Knowles said in a recent interview.
His mother, Ruth Sheldon Knowles, once told a reporter that the older generations of Knowles men had tended to drill dry holes and "all died broke."
Ruth Sheldon Knowles was an expert on the type. A world-traveling oil business journalist, consultant and author, she wrote a best-seller called "The Greatest Gamblers: The Epic of American Oil Exploration." see: amazon.com
She worked in Mexico, Indonesia and Venezuela, and had just stepped down from a job with the Petroleum Administration for War when Knowles was born in 1943.
When her son was Anchorage mayor, she gave an interview to the Anchorage Times in which she warned that environmentalism -- or "petrophobia," as she called it -- threatened to cripple oil development. She died in 1996.
Tony Knowles worked in the oil fields while he went through school and after finishing college. He tells campaign audiences this helped build up his grubstake to go into the restaurant business in Anchorage.
"People have images of what you are. They might have forgotten that part of him," says campaign manager Leslie Ridle. His familiarity with the industry is significant, she says, because "he knows their language, the way they work. He won't make the rookie blunders in dealing with them."
On this year's campaign trail, voters are more likely to hear from Knowles that he was kicked out of school twice than that the school was Yale University. In fact he followed his mother east after his parents separated, and in ninth grade enrolled in an exclusive prep school, "wearing a shiny suit on Sunday, and everybody else wears worsted wool," as he once described it.
Knowles says he developed a bad attitude toward authority and was asked to leave Yale, where his father and grandfather had gone. Bad grades and a stunt with water balloons were factors.
A college friend, Bill Greenwood, said in a 1984 interview that financial reversals hit the Knowles family just as Tony got to the university.
"I've watched him in debate as a young man just destroy some pretty bright characters," Greenwood said. "In those days, he was kind of a William F. Buckley-type conservative. He comes across like this Oklahoma country boy. And he is an Oklahoma country boy. Except he's an extremely bright Oklahoma country boy."
Knowles says he only got straightened out after enlisting in the 82nd Airborne, which including a year working intelligence in Vietnam.
"After getting kicked out of school, only the Army would put you in intelligence," is a favorite Knowles line.
He returned to school and graduated in 1968 with an economics degree from Yale, where his fraternity president at Delta Kappa Epsilon was George W. Bush.
"I don't know whether your governor has admitted it or not, but he went to Yale," President Bush said in a speech at Elmendorf in 2002, drawing laughter from the crowd and from Knowles. "He probably slurs his words so it sounds like 'jail.' "
Despite his slow academic start, Knowles has through the years been called an engaged, detail-oriented administrator. Ridle, who has run his campaigns since 1994, says he enjoys hashing out the fine points of policy, like his one-time protege, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich.
"He thinks the gas line is the most exciting thing in 30 years, and he says working on it would be fun," she says.
STEPPING INTO POLITICS
After graduation, Knowles had a job on a platform off the California coast when he got an offer of drilling work in Alaska. He quickly asked his college girlfriend, Vassar student Susan Morris, to marry him.
"She said, 'Yes; where are we going?' We headed to Alaska," Knowles said.
In a year, he had quit the oil field and opened his first Grizzly Burger, on Northern Lights Boulevard in Anchorage.
godeke.org |
