John MacKinnon: a life spent in construction.

• Author: Anjum, Shehla

Small models of bulldozers, excavators, backhoes, cement mixers, dump trucks, and other construction equipment line the windowsills of John MacKinnon's office at Associated General Contractors (AGC) in Anchorage. Mistaking them for "toys" elicits a swift correction from him. "They are die-cast steel models and built to scale." MacKinnon should know; those models are emblematic of a life spent in construction.

MacKinnon, sixty-two, has had a long and interesting career. He was a deputy commissioner of the Alaska Department of Transportation & Public Facilities (DOT&PF) and owner of a contracting business, RMC, Inc. in Juneau for twenty-four years. He served twelve years on the Juneau Assembly and five as deputy mayor and as interim city manager for one. He is one of the seven Denali Commissioners and sits on the boards of the Resource Development Council and Arctic Power. He is also on AGC's Construction Education Foundation and the Alaska Emerging Energy Technology Fund Advisory Council.

In 2008 MacKinnon became executive director of the Alaska chapter of the national Associated General Contractors of America. His working life has been mostly in construction, except for two government jobs. "Construction might have been in my genes. It is mentally rewarding and best of all you are not just sitting around, going to meetings, or shuffling papers. You see immediate results of your work," MacKinnon says.

That love of construction started early. "John always liked building things. He spent a lot of time in our basement workshop and built forts in the trees in our yard," his mother Jane MacKinnon says. A neighborhood girl even left notes for MacKinnon in one of his forts. "Every once in a while we'd see John tearing up those notes. He didn't like it and she probably got tired of climbing up the tree and soon gave up," his mother says.

Deep Alaska Roots

Born and raised in Juneau, MacKinnon has an older brother and sister. He comes from an old family that has lived in Juneau since 1884. His father ran Alaska Laundry Cleaners, a family business incorporated in 1895, which is Alaska's oldest business under the same ownership. His mother took care of the family.

The late 1960s were times of antiwar protests and upheavals for young people in the Lower 48, but life in Juneau followed the same old routines. For MacKinnon it meant going duck hunting before school with his longtime friend Joe Smith. He would often store his shotgun and hunting gear in his school locker, something that would never happen today.

He was a good student, known for his intelligence, wit, creativity, and love of adventure, according to Ken Koelsch, one of MacKinnon's high school teachers. Koelsch credited MacKinnon's resourcefulness and ability to carry out a task. "I was directing a school play and I needed to get the publicity out. So I bet John that if I gave him two hundred posters he couldn't get more than fifty up."

Koelsch was wrong. All two hundred posters went up--plastered in the windows of downtown Juneau businesses. "I later drove downtown and, much to my chagrin, saw the posters in the windows of all the bars," Koelsch says. The publicity paid off; the play was one of the best attended in years.

There were lighter moments in MacKinnon's younger years. Once he talked his friend Joe Smith into helping him make wine from a gallon of Welch's grape juice. They celebrated the Class of 1970 by painting a big "70" on a rock outcropping on the mountain above Ju neau. The painting caper went well, the wine one did not. He bottled the wine before the juice was fully fermented. All the bottles exploded. He was left with only a big mess to clean up.

Finding Construction

After graduating from high school in 1970, MacKinnon attended Western Washington University in Bellingham. Rather than engineering or a construction-related field, he chose a biology major. "I intended to go to medical school," he says.

He graduated with a BS in...