Before Sheila Toomey emigrated to Alaska in her late 30s, beginning the life we celebrate, she lived an entire life in New York. Although she didn’t realize it at the time, her jobs during that time prepared her for the journalism career she fell into as a newly minted Alaskan. These jobs included Field Director for a Madison Avenue market research firm, Union Organizer (which resulted in the only criminal charge ever brought against her), and social worker for the NYC Department of Welfare.

All these jobs had one thing in common:  They required talking to strangers about problems in their lives and writing about what she learned to alleviate those problems. Even her first job in Alaska, as assistant manager of a Juneau health food store, involved talking to people about issues that concerned them and trying to treat them.

A stranger in town, Toomey, volunteered at Juneau Public Station KTOO in 1978 to meet people. She worked through City College of New York (CCNY) as a library assistant, so that’s what she did for KTOO radio; she cataloged newly arrived 33 rpm records for their music library.

One day, one of her KTOO friends dared Toomey to try her hand at radio news. Toomey says she was “dubious, to say the least.”  She had never taken a journalism course and had nothing to do with broadcasting. “I could never do the news,” Toomey recalls saying. But she took a flyer, and it worked out.

Ten years later, when the Anchorage Daily News won a Pulitzer Prize for a series that included a story by Toomey, her KTOO friend called and reminded her of the exchange. 

Toomey’s journalism career began when Alaska was in extreme flux. The pipeline construction was complete — the first gallon of oil moved off the North Slope a month after she arrived here. The dismantling of construction sites was underway, with the big oil companies moving into big buildings and importing office staff. The Legislature was figuring out how to deal with Big Money and Big Political Power with new tax schemes and establishing the Permanent Fund.

Toomey says it was an era when smart people with no training could “slide by on the Alaska exception to qualifications.”  Her first paid journalism job was producing a 15-minute statewide radio show covering the 1979 legislative session. After that, she became a reporter for the KTOO-TV nightly news. Later, she moved to Anchorage in 1980 as the producer of Alaska News Nightly; a half-hour public radio show focused on stories from the villages.

In 1981, the expanding Anchorage Daily News recruited Toomey — the first reporter they ever hired with only broadcast experience. Owner Kay Fanning was skeptical but later agreed it worked out. Toomey said the following about that time in her life:

“The Anchorage of 1980 was very different from the Anchorage of today. It was a boomtown — but with the boom rapidly fading toward echo. Downtown never closed. The bars were open all night, the streets full of milling people, sharing drinks and drugs by the light of neon signs while strippers entertained inside and hookers offered their goods outside.  

By now, most of the construction camps had been dismantled, and office jobs were going to people from Texas. West Coast gangsters were considering other options for the prostitutes they cycled through Alaska. Robert Hansen was murdering some of them but no one seemed to notice. 

My job interview was in a bar — one-on-one with Howard Weaver. (He later told me he almost didn’t hire me because I ordered Kahlua and milk). I spent the next 30 years in the best place on earth — a vibrant, edgy collegial newsroom full of intelligent, pushy, smart-mouth, progressive, funny, driven people. It pushed me to be the best me I could be and rewarded me when I succeeded. I loved it.”

Toomey won many awards during her long career. Still, odds are she will be remembered — if she is remembered at all — for The Alaska Ear, a  column she produced weekly for 30 years. The Daily News editors created it to humanize the political and community newsmakers whose names regularly appeared in newsprint. It kept an off-stage eye on the influential and famous who turned to it every Sunday.

When asked to sum up her accomplishments, Toomey said: “Long ago, I adopted Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ as a metaphor for my life. I never planned anything. I wandered down the road doing this job or that, and when the road divided, I chose one, often on little more than a whim. These were small decisions as the world sees such things — no climbing mountains in Tibet or trekking across South America. And because I come from 10,000 years of working-class people, my roads always included a job that at least paid the rent. How boring, how routine, right? Not from where I sit. Amazingly, it all worked out. I’m in my 80s now, the time when one balances the books, sums up life.”

So, how was the trip, Sheila?  “Lucky, fun, wonderful!”

Born:  July 1, 1940, in New Rochelle, N.Y.
Parents:  Peter T. Toomey and Vivian C. (Palmer) Toomey

Education:  

B.A. City College of New York 1965
New Rochelle High School 1958