A Heap of Lawmaking

While Hawaiians were hula whooping over statehood news, Alaska's overwhelmingly Democratic legislature was finding out that it takes a heap of lawmaking to make a territory a state. Along with weighing a balanced $26.6 million budget and passing a reorganization bill setting up a dozen executive departments to replace 100 assorted agencies, the lawmakers found themselves blizzarded by so many minor bills, chores and diversions that the Fairbanks News-Miner accused the new legislature of "doodling, dawdling and dillydallying." Full of eager novices (only eleven members out of 40 ever served in the old territorial legislature), the house in the past fortnight:

¶ Passed an anti-B-girl measure barring employment of females for "soliciting, enticing, or encouraging the purchase of alcoholic beverages." Lone "nay" voter: the house's oldest member, Fairbanks' Robert E. Sheldon, 76. Orated he: "Fourscore and seven years ago, when Alaska and I were young, Alaska was filled with dance-hall girls who operated on a commission basis, and some of them developed into our leading matrons."

¶ Voted to prohibit newspapers from charging higher (or lower) rates for political ads than for other kinds.

¶ Set up an Eyesight and Wind Committee to do something about dim lighting and chilly drafts in the chamber.

¶ Threw, jointly with the 20-member senate, a turnabout dinner in the Gold Room of Juneau's Baranof Hotel for the swarm of lobbyists who had been wining and dining the lawmakers.

¶Considered such uniquely regional proposals as one to provide a DC-4 landing field in the isolated lower Yukon, another to allow Alaskan Eskimos to fraternize with Eskimo friends in Siberia.

¶ Weighed Representative Robert Blodgett's proposed ten-year ban on new government buildings in Juneau, the state capital. "I wouldn't want them to get carried away with illusions of grandeur," Blodgett explained. But Blodgett himself got carried away in speaking for his bill to set aside 5,000,000 acres of land to provide income for the University of Alaska. "Why, some day," he exclaimed, "we could have the greatest university in the country."

With all this, the legislators found themselves working long, if not exactly hard, days. Wrote Representative Jay Hammond, 37, professional bear-hunt guide and the house's unofficial poet laureate:

O when our stomachs start to grumble,

And our backsides ache with stress,

The hero of the moment

Is the one who moves recess.