Dignitaries salute Glenn Olds;

Olds came to APU in the 1970s when the school, then known as Alaska Methodist University, had closed under the weight of millions of dollars in debt.

The reopened university soon took on a new name, Alaska Pacific University, and it regained its financial health and academic standing during the 10-plus years Olds held the presidency.

Olds had become a Methodist minister as a teenager, earned a doctorate in philosophy at Yale, and served as president of Kent State University in the aftermath of the 1970 killing of four students by National Guardsmen at a Vietnam War protest.

Olds left APU in 1987 to run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat against incumbent Frank Murkowski. He would end up serving as commissioner of commerce and then of natural resources under former Alaska Gov. Wally Hickel.

The Rev. Francis T. Hurley, retired Catholic archbishop for Anchorage, was among those who shared warm memories of Olds.

“One day,” Hurley told the crowd, “Glenn had ‘something spiritual’ he wanted to talk about.”
Hurley, of course, welcomed this spiritual conversation and Olds told him about the vision he had for the university.

When they were finished, Hurley said he thought to himself, “I’ve just been made a member of the board!” The crowd laughed.

“Glenn was genuine,” Hurley said. He had enthusiasm, imagination and ideas, from international politics to religion to a railroad from North America to Russia.

Lydia Hays, on the APU Board of Trustees, also spoke highly of Olds.
“During the fragile years, the Board of Trustees was expectant, hopeful, and nervous of Glenn and Eva’s arrival from the Lower 48,” Hays said. “Glenn was a true visionary. He inspired us all, persevered … cultivating donors, volunteers from around the country.


“After four years, APU was again a functional university, and after seven years, accepted by the public, and former donors came back and were re-inspired,” Hays said. “In the early 1980s, 159 small, private universities closed, but only one reopened and that was APU.”

Another speaker, Don Keil, said he had the job of showing Olds and his wife around when they came to Anchorage.

He took them first to the museum to show them the history, then to Hilltop for a view of the city, and finally to the university.

Olds had “zest, zeal and passion,” Keil said. “Mopping floors if he needed to.”

Keil remembered how Olds used humor to make connections, telling the story of how he and Olds once took Frisbees to China.

“And he could yodel!” Keil said.

Keil also mentioned that Olds could be old-fashioned, writing his autobiography by hand.

Rusty Myers said Olds hired him in 1980, and it was tough at first to implement the president’s ideas.

“He made us believe that what we were doing was important. He always inspired us,” Myers said.

Hickel, the former governor, said Olds told him in a phone conversation a few weeks before he died, “I am about to go to the other side, and I am ready.”

“What he accomplished was amazing,” Hickel said. “Never, ever saw him get tired. As a teenager he was taught to box by his lumberjack father.”

Tearful daughter Linda Olds said she was “overwhelmed by the beauty of the service.”

Some information from the Anchorage Daily News and the Associated Press was used in this article.