A driving force in Alaska's growth and success.

• Author: Anjum, Shehla

Her father sailed on a leaky liberty ship to Alaska during World War II. He went to Shemya to help build runways to beat back the Japanese invasion. At eighteen, Margy Johnson took a different route than her father. She graduated from high school in 1966, got married, and headed up the Alaska Highway for Alaska with her Air Force husband. But unlike her father, Johnson never left and became a driving force in Alaska's growth and success.

Johnson has achieved a lot since coming to Alaska: The first woman mayor of Cordova, elected to three terms; the first woman president of the Cordova Chamber of Commerce; served on the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens' Advisory Council; and director of the International Office of Trade during Governor Frank Murkowski's administration.

Now retired, she still keeps busy. She is on the community advisory boards for BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc. and Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. and is a director for First National Bank Alaska, a position she has held since 1993.

In 1966, North Slope oil lay untapped in the ground, Alaska salmon came in tin cans, and Alaska Natives faced disdain. But changes soon started. Passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971 empowered Alaska Natives, oil began to flow with the completion of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System in 1977, and, later, fresh Alaska salmon gained fame as a gourmet food, sought by chefs everywhere.

Growing Up

St. Mary, Montana, Johnson's hometown on the western border of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, is idyllic, but her life was not. She grew up with hard-working parents in a loving family that operated Johnson's of St. Mary, a restaurant now run by her sister Kristin.

During childhood, Johnson loved listening to her dad's stories of Alaska and hearing her mother read his letters from Shemya. "Mother kept all the letters from Dad in a little bundle carefully wrapped with a satin ribbon. The letters carried a sense of mystery and they had little parts cut out by military censors. Listening to them I knew I would someday go to Alaska."

Coming to Alaska was like coming home, and the state gave her opportunities she wouldn't have had anywhere else, Johnson says. "It's a great big, grand, beautiful place, Alaska, and I love being part of it. People either live where they are born, or choose where to live, but in my case Alaska chose me. It embraced me when I came here as a young woman, and it still embraces me."

For the first few years she worked an office job at an engineering firm. In 1972 she gave birth to a son and got divorced later that year. "As a single mom I did whatever was necessary to pay the rent and feed my...