Junior Achievement Alaska Business Monthly Hall of Fame laureates: Dick Cattanach and Jim Sampson: Alaska's dynamic duo tackles state's construction-training challenge.

• Author: West, Gail
• Position: JUNIOR ACHIEVEMENT SPECIAL SECTION

An unusual match and a shared vision paved the way for Junior Achievement's Alaska Business Monthly Hall of Fame laureates Dick Cattanach and Jim Sampson to achieve their goals. Beneficiaries of those joint goals are the construction industry and, by extension, the entire state of Alaska.

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Selected for the Hall of Fame for their contributions to business and community service, Cattanach and Sampson played special roles in developing a conduit through which youth are educated in the construction industry and are able to fill job openings for which employers have, in the past, had to hire from outside the state.

IN THE BEGINNING

Both Sampson and Cattanach came to Alaska from elsewhere, but the similarities in their lives essentially end there.

Sampson came to the Territory of Alaska in 1952 with his Air Force father and family from the Panama Canal Zone, where he was born. With the exception of two short periods, during which his family returned to their origins in Maine, Sampson grew up in Interior Alaska.

"My dad was a Teamster on the Dew Line (the Ballistic Missile Early Warning Site) in Clear," Sampson said, "and I was one of eight kids--the oldest boy. I went to school in Nenana, then came to Fairbanks in 1969 to go to college."

Sampson's college career was interspersed with periods of construction work because money was tight.

"I'd go to school a semester, then work a semester," he said. "I was the first in my family to go to college, and I eventually earned a bachelor's degree in labor relations at Meany Center for Labor Studies (Silver Spring, Md.). They trained me to deal with Dick," Sampson said with a laugh.

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Cattanach was born and raised in Owen, Wis., and graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. Building on his initial degree, Cattanach went on to earn a master's degree in business administration from the University of Denver and a doctorate's from Arizona State.

"After that, I taught college at the University of Mississippi," Cattanach said. "I felt I'd stepped through a time warp. It was 1971-1972, and Mississippi was still segregated. There were still separate restrooms and separate drinking fountains."

From Mississippi, Cattanach moved on--first to teach at the University of Denver, then, in 1974, to move to Alaska as a banker.

"I worked for a few years for the Alaska Bank of Commerce," Cattanach said, "then went to Rochester, N.Y., to work for the National...