Alaska Booster

When John Kelsey arrived at Stanford in the fall of 1938, his matriculation was not assured. The high school in remote Valdez, Alaska, was not accredited; Stanford accepted him on the condition that he come a few days early and take a series of tests. He passed, and proceeded to spend “four wonderful, beautiful years” on the Farm. “Stanford launched me,” Kelsey says. “It gave me a sense of security and confidence.”

Valdez was a frontier town of about 500 people before it became famous as the southern terminus of the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Kelsey was the only member of his 10-person high school class to go to college, and Stanford (the alma mater of a family friend) was the only school he thought to apply to.

The northernmost ice-free port in the Western Hemisphere, Valdez is the gateway to the Alaska interior. Robert Kelsey, John’s father, worked for the Valdez Dock Company as a clerk, recognized a good thing and began to purchase the company. By 1940, the company was wholly owned by the Kelsey family. After John’s parents died in the mid-1950s, he and his brother owned the family business until 1989.

Now 85, John Kelsey spends no time on hobbies. “I sit on about 14 different boards, commissions and committees. I have no free time.” His work on behalf of Alaska earned Kelsey a Lifetime Achievement in Business Award from Alaska Business Monthly earlier this year. “I love doing things for Alaska,” Kelsey says.

In Valdez, Kelsey has served as fire department chief, city councilman and mayor. Governors of Alaska have appointed him to various key positions, including to the board of the Alaska Permanent Fund and, most recently, to the Alaska Natural Gas Pipeline Authority. He took a leading role in rebuilding the Port of Valdez after the Good Friday earthquake on March 27, 1964.

He served with the Alaska Permanent Fund from 1987 to 1995 and was elected its chairman three times. The fund, which invests the state’s oil revenues, was established in 1976 to coincide with construction of the 799-mile pipeline that brings oil from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. The fund, worth about $9 billion in 1987, is worth more than $30 billion now. It pays a dividend of about $1,000 each year to every state resident. (Permanent Fund Dividend sales are a feature of retail life every October; for example, Alaska Airlines annually cooks up PFD fares that have no blackout dates.)

Alaska Business Monthly publisher Vern McCorkle notes that when Kelsey “finally decides to retire and take it a bit easier, he will leave behind a void that will take many men to fill. The work he has done is of legacy proportions.”