From the living room of her beach-facing condo on Douglas, Smith began her telling of a decades-long political career as a desk clerk at the Golden Nugget Hotel in Fairbanks, which had Thursday night poker games.
“There was a guy running for governor who would pencil out his speeches on the airplane,” Smith recalled. He enlisted Smith to type up his speeches and check for grammar, promising her a job if he got elected.
She laughed at proposition, but Bill Egan got elected and he kept his word.
She would go on to work under numerous governors in a variety of roles, none like the one before it.
“How interesting that I got called to do things I didn’t know that much about, but people trusted my skills enough to learn it,” Smith mused. “I’m proud of being trusted in that way.”
In between some of these appointed roles, Smith served as an elected official, too.
After her experiences in Bush Alaska, she felt she could represent rural Alaskans’ interests better than others had, so she told her mentor, Miller, that she would run for State House.
“He dropped his cup of coffee,” Smith laughed. “He said, ‘You’re young, female, single and you’ve only been in Alaska for seven years.’ We thought it was impossible.”
After the primary election, Miller predicted she would win.
In 1979 she became the first female representative to be elected out of Fairbanks since statehood. She served three terms when representatives were still elected at-large.
During her final term, there was a coup, Smith said. Twenty-one members banded together and voted to make big changes — a coalition government and each district would elect one representative, as it is today.
Smith elected not to run again.
“It got acrimonious,” she said. “It took the fun out of it.”
It’s Smith’s opinion that the state as a whole was better served before it was each district for itself.
Though Smith would take time off here and there, she would always eventually get back into politics in some way or another.
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image credit Michael Penn, Juneau Empire
