Don Young, the Alaska congressman who secured pork-barrel billions for his state over nearly a half-century and became the longest-serving Republican in the House of Representatives and the oldest current member of both the House and Senate, died on Friday. He was 88.
Mr. Young died while traveling home to Alaska, his office said. His wife, Anne, was with him.
In a state whose small population allows for two senators but only one representative, Mr. Young, who cultivated the image of a rugged frontiersman with outsize clout in Washington, was sometimes called Alaska’s “third senator.” To this day, most Alaskans have had no congressman in their lifetimes but Mr. Young, who was first elected in 1973, during the Nixon administration.
Early in his 24th term in 2019, he became the longest-serving Republican in House history, surpassing the tenure of the former speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon of Illinois, who as a teenager had followed the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates and went on to serve 23 House terms in three discontinuous segments between 1873 and 1923.
When asked in 2020 how long he planned to serve, Mr. Young told The Times, “God will decide that, or the voters.”
Mr. Young dated from an era when power in Congress was measured partly by securing of “earmarks,” discretionary spending allocations that lawmakers in both parties used for pet projects in their home districts and states, often by circumventing merit-based or competitive-bidding processes. Known as “pork barrel” legislation, it was often reformed over the years, and banned for more than a decade, before lawmakers agreed to revive the practice with strict guardrails last year.
In the government funding bill that President Biden signed into law on Tuesday, Mr. Young managed to secure more than $23 million for projects in his state. Among the projects were the replacement of a fire station in Kodiak that was first built in the 1940s and the replacement of an old clinic, according to the House Appropriations Committee.
“We have lost a giant who we loved dearly and who held Alaska in his heart — always,” Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said in a statement. “Don was coming home to the place that he loved, and to the people that loved him best.”
Gruff and irascible, Mr. Young, who survived occasional allegations of shady ethics, was a staunch opponent of environmental causes and a tough defender of Alaska’s oil, mineral and logging industries. He used his powerful leadership positions on the House Natural Resources Committee and on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to fund highways, bridges, pipelines and many other projects. (As chairman, he dropped “Natural” from the committee’s name, renaming it the Committee on Resources, but the Democrats changed it back later.)
Mr. Young was perhaps best known for trying to fund what critics called the two Bridges to Nowhere, at costs estimated in 2004 at $2.2 billion. One would have replaced a ferry linking the town of Ketchikan in southeastern Alaska with an island a mile offshore that had 50 residents and a small airport. The other, two miles long, would have connected Anchorage to a small peninsular port that had one commercial tenant. The proposals lingered on the books for years, but the bridges were never built.
Often working with Alaska’s two Republican senators, Ted Stevens on the Appropriations Committee and Frank H. Murkowski on Natural Resources, Mr. Young pushed legislation and policies that built roads and pipelines across national parks, restricted purchases of conservation lands and limited the reach of rules protecting endangered species.
Popular with conservative constituents, Mr. Young opposed abortion except to save a woman’s life; called climate change a “scam”; voted for tax cuts, gun rights and bills to create jobs, but against protections for gay and lesbian people in the workplace; supported the legalization of marijuana; favored repealing the Affordable Care Act; and hailed former President Donald J. Trump’s executive orders rolling back restrictions on Arctic oil drilling.
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2007 that Mr. Young was under federal investigation on suspicion of taking bribes, illegal gratuities and unreported gifts from the Anchorage-based VECO oil services company, whose two top executives had already pleaded guilty to bribing Alaska state legislators. The Journal said Mr. Young had received $157,000 over 10 years from VECO executives and political action committees. But no formal charges were brought against him in the matter.
In 2014, the House Ethics Committee fined Mr. Young $60,000 for using campaign funds to pay personal expenses and for inappropriately accepting 15 junkets. He was also accused of failing to report inherited property assets for 25 years. He apologized for his “oversights.” Again, no criminal charges were brought.
Mr. Young opposed Mr. Trump’s run for the presidency in 2016, but after his election, the congressman became more supportive. He voted against both impeachments of Mr. Trump. But after Joseph R. Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, he was one of the first Republicans to congratulate the new president.
Even under the Biden administration, Mr. Young showed a willingness to work across the aisle on behalf of his state, becoming one of just 13 Republicans to support a substantial $1 trillion infrastructure bill. Mr. Young also notably introduced Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve in the role, at her confirmation hearing last year in the Senate, calling her a friend and emphasizing his own relationships and advocacy for Alaska Natives and tribal governments.
Mr. Young was often crude in public. In a 1994 House debate on the right of native Alaskans to sell sex organs of endangered animals as aphrodisiacs, he waved an 18-inch walrus penile bone at the face of the fish and wildlife commissioner. In a radio interview in 2013, he referred to Latino migrant workers with the ethnic slur “wetbacks.” And in 2017, Representative John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, told Politico that Mr. Young had once pinned him against a wall in the House and held a 10-inch knife to his throat.
His lapses rarely hurt him at the polls. He was elected to 25 consecutive terms. He usually faced moderate to light opposition and won more than 70 percent of the votes five times. In 2020, he defeated a strong challenge from Alyse Galvin, a politically independent community organizer, who campaigned on discontent with the state’s economy during the coronavirus crisis.
After the election, Mr. Young announced that he had tested positive for the coronavirus. He was hospitalized for three days in Anchorage and isolated at home. He said that he regretted having dismissed the seriousness of the pandemic and that he supported the use of masks, but he refused to wear one himself.
As news broke of Mr. Young’s passing Friday evening, lawmakers and aides began to share stories of the longtime lawmaker, who often sat in the back aisle of the House chamber and heckled his colleagues, particularly when a vote had dragged on for too long.
“His absence will leave Congress less colorful and certainly less punctual,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, said in a statement. “But his decades of service have filled every room and touched every member.”
Donald Edwin Young was born in Meridian, Calif., on June 9, 1933, the youngest of three children of James and Nora (Bucy) Young. The father of Donald and his sisters, Beatty and Jane, was a Sutter County rancher. Donald graduated from Sutter Union High School in 1950 and earned an associate degree in education from Yuba Community College in 1952 and a bachelor’s degree in teaching from Chico State College in 1958. From 1955 to 1957, he was in the Army and served in a tank battalion.
At 26, Mr. Young moved to Alaska soon after it attained statehood in 1959. He admitted being drawn by Jack London’s 1903 novel “The Call of the Wild,” about a powerful, 140-pound dog named Buck, a St. Bernard-Scotch collie who is stolen from a ranch in the Santa Clara Valley and sold as a sled dog in the Yukon.
Mr. Young settled in Fort Yukon, a town of 700 just above the Arctic Circle. He tried fishing, trapping and panning for gold, as if resurrecting London’s Klondike wilderness life of 1897. In town, he taught elementary school classes and coached high school basketball and track teams for several years at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school, where wood-burning stoves warmed the students through freezing winter days. With the breakup of the Yukon River ice in spring, he piloted his own tug and barge, carrying supplies to villages along the river.
In 1963, Mr. Young married a Native Alaskan bookkeeper, Lula Fredson, an Indigenous Gwich’in, who became his political adviser and office manager. They had two daughters, Joni and Dawn. Mrs. Young died in 2009. In 2015, Mr. Young married Anne Garland Walton, a Fairbanks flight nurse, who had two children and six grandchildren by a previous marriage.
In 1964, Mr. Young was elected mayor of Fort Yukon, serving three years in his first public office. As he became more widely known, he won a seat in the Alaska House of Representatives in Juneau and served two terms, from 1966 to 1970. He then won a seat in Alaska’s Senate. In 1972, halfway through his four-year term, he ran for Alaska’s at-large seat in Congress.
The incumbent was Nick Begich, a freshman Democrat seeking re-election. Three weeks before the election, Mr. Begich and the House majority leader, Representative Hale Boggs, a Louisiana Democrat on a fund-raising trip to Alaska, boarded a small plane for a flight from Anchorage to Juneau. The plane vanished, and its passengers were never seen again, despite wide searches of the state’s rugged southern coast and the Gulf of Alaska.
The missing Mr. Begich outpolled Mr. Young on Election Day but was declared legally dead a month later. Mr. Young then won a special election to fill the vacancy and took Alaska’s congressional seat in March 1973, starting his long political life in Washington.
On April 28, 2021, Mr. Young announced plans to to run for a 26th term in 2022.
Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.
