Political Quotes

“I rise to introduce legislation to rename a wilderness area in my home state of Alaska in honor of Alaska's fourth Governor, Jay S. Hammond. I am pleased that I am joined in sponsoring this bill by my Alaska colleague, Senator Dan Sullivan. Jay Hammond is truly one of the unique figures in Alaska history. In a state with many unique statesmen, Hammond is truly worthy of honor. A New Yorker who first studied petroleum engineering at Penn State, he became a Marine fighter pilot who fought in World War II in the Pacific/China with the famed Black Sheep Squadron. After the war he found life on the East Coast too confining and flew an old plane to Alaska in 1946, never looking back. Initially a pilot to ``Bush'', remote rural parts of Alaska, he worked as a trapper, wildlife guide and laborer before heading back to college to gain a degree in biological sciences in 1949 from the University of Alaska. He then went to work as a wildlife biologist and hunter for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. By 1950 after conducting some of the first swan studies in northern Alaska, Jay Hammond was transferred to Southwest Alaska where he conducted predator/prey studies on Alaska Peninsula caribou, flew fisheries enforcement flights out of Dillingham Alaska, and fell in love with Lake Clark and its surrounding wilderness, a 45-mile lake on the west side of Aleutian Range that he would call home, besides a setnet salmon site at Naknek, for nearly 55 years. Mr.…”