Bonny Lynn Babb: The Northern Prize

On May 17, 1976, my four-year-old redheaded Caitlin and I left the Anchorage Public Health Service with exciting news. We found a parking spot next to Holy Family Cathedral, crossed 5th Avenue and, hand-in-hand, climbed the stairs to my husband’s office on the second floor of the Anchorage Daily News building. As we entered the newsroom at noon, it was as quiet as the break of day.

Light poured through the wall of windows onto the calm carpeted newsroom. Silent reporters with phones in hand occupied wooden desks dripping with papers and clippings. Normally, the room would be a sea of motion and sound. Kay Fanning, the gracious, widowed owner of the paper, was standing erect with her phone in hand, too. Then the constrained energy exploded. With a great sigh, the room burst into activity, everyone speaking excitedly at once.

My daughter and I walked to my husband’s desk. She blurted out, “Daddy, Daddy, we’re going to have a baby!” just as he shouted, “We just won the Pulitzer Prize!”

The Anchorage Daily News had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the Public Service category, an amazing feat for such a small paper. They won with their series on the Teamsters in Alaska during the construction of the oil pipeline, beating out the Los Angeles Times, which had also submitted a series on the Teamsters that year. This was the news project on which my husband had spent the previous months working night and day with Bob Porterfield and Howard Weaver, accumulating reams of information, including files on hundreds of people and organizations connected with the union. The series traced the tremendous growth in the Teamsters’ financial holdings, but no irregularities appeared in their financial accounts. As Fanning said later, “There is an aura of brute strength in the Teamster leaders that tends to inspire fear. By making the borders of Teamster power more visible, we made it easier to contain.”

The Teamsters’ series was well balanced, but along the way there was resistance to the work of the reporters. Fanning was notified that Carrs and Safeway grocery stores (two different entities at the time) would no longer advertise in the Anchorage Daily News—a financial blow to the paper. She also received warnings from business people who had dealings with the Teamsters not to continue the investigation.

The following fall, it amused us when the Teamsters International, at the invitation of Jesse Carr, held their full executive board meeting in Anchorage—with the reporters and publishers of the Anchorage Daily News as the guests of honor. The banquet was an elegant affair, and we were treated like royalty.

But that night, an exuberant Daily News staff and their families poured into editor Stan Abbott’s home, bearing pots of every size that contained oysters, salmon, moose stew, Caesar salad, rare cheeses, and delicious home-baked treasures. Corks popped, toasts were made, glasses clinked, stories flowed, and triumphant laughter saturated the house.

It would be another 30 years before Caitlin revealed that she thought the celebration was because we were having a baby.

 

 

 

Bonny Lynn Babb arrived in Fairbanks in 1966 with her husband, Jim Babb, who answered an ad to work for the Fairbanks News Miner. Like many Alaskans, they planned to stay only two years. Babb’s twenty-seven years of teaching include one year in North Pole, two in Fairbanks, and eighteen in Anchorage; the rest were in California and Montgomery County, Maryland. Babb grew up in Carmel, California and attended college at University of California Berkeley, then graduate school at University of Alaska Fairbanks. Alaska has been a great adventure for her. The adventure has included three amazing children; supervising part of the 1980 census in Kodiak, Dillingham, Bristol Bay, and the Aleutian Chain; discovering what a treasure the Fairbanks Arts Festival is; and sampling whale liver at a Whale Festival in Point Hope.