George Sullivan

George's father came to Alaska during the goldrush along the Chilkoot Trail. George was born in Portland, Oregon in 1922 because his grandmother was sick in Oregon and there was no doctor in Valdez who could deliver him. He came back to Valdez with his mother on a steamship when he was 6 weeks old. In 1937, when he was 15 years old, he worked at the Kennecott Mine on the tram at the top of the mill building. He caught the buckets of ore (weighing 750 pounds) and dumped them to start the process of grinding the copper. His sister and brother-in-law also worked at the mine, but there was little time for socializing since he worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. After Kennecott, George worked at Gold Stream near Valdez, then on the Alaska Road Commission, and he was in the Aleutian Islands during World War II. He also worked as a Federal Marshall in Nenana in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1952, he moved with his family to Fairbanks and he was elected to the City Council while managing a freight company. He moved to Anchorage with his family in 1959. He was elected to the Alaska House of Representatives in 1964 and became the mayor of Anchorage in 1967. For more information about George, please visit his Wikipedia page or his obituary in the Anchorage Daily News newspaper.