Lew Williams Jr.

• Author: Allen, June
• Position: Newspaperman - Special Section: Alaska Business Hall of Fame

Llewellyn (Lew) M. Williams Jr. of Ketchikan began his newspaper career in 1936 as an 11-year-old paperboy with the Juneau Empire. Throughout his youth, while he worked for his publisher father at the Wrangell Sentinel, Williams thought, "I'll do this until I grow up and then decide ..."

But for the next five decades, printer's ink continued to guide Williams' life, along with spunk, determination and good humor --just as it has for the rest of his family. In 1915, Williams's mother, Winnie Dow Williams, now a resident of the Ketchikan Pioneers Home, became the first amateur female radio operator in Tacoma. A few years later, she became a police reporter for the Tacoma News Tribune.

Her future husband, Lew Williams Sr., a Navy radio operator in World War I, worked as a reporter at the Tacoma Ledger. The young couple met at work and married in 1922. By the time Lew Jr. was born in 1924, the family was living in Spokane, Wash., where Lew Sr. worked as a city editor for the Spokesman Review.

When he found a better job in Tacoma, Lew Sr. moved his family back to that city. On Jan. 1, 1935, he traveled alone to Juneau to cover the Territorial Legislature, which was limited to a 60-day session in those days. He stayed on to work for Daily Alaska Empire publisher John Troy, who was also Alaska's Territorial Governor at the time.

The family -- Winnie, Lew Jr. and little sisters Jane and Susan -- followed Lew Sr. to Juneau, where Lew Jr. went to work as a paperboy for the Empire.

In 1939, the weekly Wrangell Sentinel was up for sale. Lew Sr. knew Axel Rasmuson (father of Elmer Rasmuson of the National Bank of Alaska), and through that connection borrowed the newspaper's purchase price of $4,000, a great deal of money in those days.

Fifteen-year-old Lew Jr. went to work for his dad as a printer's devil, or apprentice, on the Wrangell paper. That occupation was interrupted by World War II when the young man went off to war, serving with the U.S. Army paratroopers. At war's end, he returned to Wrangell.

FROM POVERTY TO PUBLIC AFFAIRS

In 1946, when Williams was putting out the weekly Wrangell Sentinel, poverty seemed to lurk just around the corner. "Right after World War II, there was a downturn in the economy, and no year-round economy at all," he recalls.

He didn't have 20 cents to buy a magazine to see what was going on in the world. "In fact," he says, "I was waiting for a $3.50 subscription to come in so we could afford to buy postage stamps to...