This June 28, 2019, U.S. Representative Don Young, answers a reporter’s question after filing paperwork to run for re-election in Anchorage, Alaska. The young, longest-serving Republican in the US House of Representatives passed away on Friday, March 18, 2022, at the age of 88.
Mark Thiessen / AP file photo
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Mark Thiessen / AP file photo
This June 28, 2019, U.S. Representative Don Young, answers a reporter’s question after filing paperwork to run for re-election in Anchorage, Alaska. The young, longest-serving Republican in the US House of Representatives passed away on Friday, March 18, 2022, at the age of 88.
Mark Thiessen / AP file photo
ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Don Young, an outspoken and longest-serving Republican on the Alaska congressional delegation, has died. He is 88 years old.
His office announced Young’s death in a statement Friday night.
“It is with heavy hearts and deep sadness that we announce that Congressman Don Young (R-AK), Speaker of the House and respected champion of Alaska, passed away today while traveling while traveling. back to Alaska to be with the state and the people he loved.” His beloved wife Anne has been by his side,” said a statement from his spokesman, Zach Brown.
Young, who was first elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1973, was known for his rough style. During his final years in office, comments and one-sided glances sometimes overshadowed his work. During his 2014 reelection run, he described himself as fierce and less than perfect but said he would not stop fighting for Alaska.
Born on June 9, 1933, in Meridian, California, Young grew up on a family farm. He earned a bachelor’s degree in teaching from Chico State College, now known as California State University, Chico, in 1958. He also served in the United States Army, according to his official biography.
Young arrived in Alaska in 1959, the same year Alaska became a state, and credits Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild,” which his father often reads to him, for drawing him north.
“I can’t stand the heat, and I was working on a farm and I used to dream of somewhere cold, with no snakes and no poison oak,” Young told the AP news agency in 2016. After leaving the army and following his father. dead, he told his mother he was going to Alaska. She questioned his decision.
“I said, ‘I’m going to drive dogs, catch fur, and I want to mine for gold.” And I made it,” he said. In Alaska, he met his first wife, Lu, who convinced him to enter politics, which he said was unlucky in a sense – it brought him to Washington, DC, “a place hotter than hell in the summer. And there’s a lot of snakes here, two-legged snakes.”
In Alaska, Young settled in Fort Yukon, a small community mostly accessible by air at the confluence of the Yukon and Porcupine rivers in the state’s rugged, harsh hinterland. He has worked in areas such as construction, trapping and commercial fishing. He was a tug and barge operator who delivered supplies to villages along the Yukon River, and taught fifth grade at a school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, according to his biography. With Lu, he has two daughters, Joni and Dawn.
He was elected mayor of Fort Yukon in 1964 and was elected to the House of Representatives two years later. He served two terms before winning election to the state Senate, where he said, he was miserable. Lu says he needs to leave his job, which he has resisted and says he’s not quitting. He recalled that she encouraged him to run for the US House instead, saying he would never win.
In 1972, Young was the Republican challenger to US Democratic Representative Nick Begich. Three weeks before the election, Begich’s plane disappeared on a flight from Anchorage to Juneau. Anyway, Alaska chose Begich again.
Begich was declared dead in December 1972 and Young won a special election in March 1973. He holds the seat until 2022, and will run for re-election in November.
In 2013, Young became the longest-serving member of the Alaska congressional delegation, surpassing the late US Senator Ted Stevens, who served for 40 years. That year, he also became the longest-serving Republican in the US House of Representatives.
In 2015, nearly six years after Lu Young’s death, and on her 82nd birthday, Young married Anne Garland Walton in a private ceremony in the chapel of the United States Capitol.
“Everybody knows Don Young,” he told the AP in 2016. “They might not like Don Young; they might love Don Young. But they all know Don Young.”
Young said he wants his legacy to be a work for the people. Among the highlights of his career, he said, was the passage of a bill authorizing the construction of the Trans-Alaska pipeline system, which has become the economic lifeline of the state. With that successful pipeline fight, “I’ve found the right place in my life where I enjoy working for the people of Alaska and this nation – mostly the people of Alaska,” Young said in 2016. , then added: “I like the House.”
Throughout his career, he has gratuitously advocated imprints as a way to bring home projects and build infrastructure in a geographically large state where communities The field ranges from large cities to small villages; Critics claim that the earmarks are pork.
Young considers himself a conservative and won support among voters for his stance on gun and hunting rights as well as a strong military. He forged a cause against “radical environmentalists” and a federal bureaucracy that he saw as the key to Alaska’s mineral, timber, and oil resources. He said his words were a “golden bond.”
He says he’s happy every time he can help someone vote. “And I try to do it every day, and I’m good at it,” he told the AP in 2016. At the time, he said he had 190 of his bills shipped in. House of Representatives and 77 of them were signed by a president.
His career has been marred by investigations and criticism over his outdated and often abrasive style.
In 2008, Congress asked the Department of Justice to investigate Young’s role in securing a $10 million fund for highway expansion in Florida; The matter was dismissed in 2010, and Young denied any wrongdoing.
In December 2011, the US House of Representatives Ethics Committee said it was amending its rules to impose new contribution limits on owners who run multiple companies following questions raised by The nonpartisan Office of Congressional Ethics released about contributions to Young.
In 2014, the ethics committee found that Young had violated House rules by using campaign funds for personal trips and accepting inappropriate gifts. Young was required to return the value of the trips and gifts, totaling approximately $59,000, and amend the financial disclosure statements to include gifts he had not reported. The committee also issued a “letter of reprimand”, or reprimand. Young said he regretted the “negligence” and apologized for not taking “careful” in compliance with the House Code of Conduct.
Having just won re-election in 2020, Young announced that he has tested positive for COVID-19, months after he referred to the coronavirus as the “beer virus” in front of an included audience. older Alaskans and say the media has contributed to the COVID-19 hysteria.
He then called COVID-19, where he was hospitalized, taking it seriously and encouraging Alaskans to follow guidelines meant to prevent illness.
Despite the controversy, voters continued to send him back to Washington, something Young says he doesn’t take for granted.
“The Alaskans have generously supported me because they know I got the job done,” he said in 2016. “I will defend my state against my death, and I will always do it and they know. that.”
