Elmer Rasmuson, Alaska banker, dies at 91
A few years ago, when experts from Alaska to California were struggling to find a way to save the fishing industry, Elmer Rasmuson made sure he was in on the conversation. As head of Alaska's largest bank, the industry's interests were also his.
Mr. Rasmuson was there, too, to help the University of Alaska build a respected academic reputation. And when museums in Fairbanks and Anchorage needed money to grow, he wrote enormous checks.
Mr. Rasmuson, whose investment of dollars, time and interest nurtured Alaska as it grew from a frontier territory to a modern state, died Friday at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle of complications from gall-bladder surgery. He was 91.
In a state where everybody knows your name, Mr. Rasmuson was also known as Alaska's most generous man. He celebrated his 90th birthday by giving away $90 million--$50 million to the Anchorage Museum Foundation and $40 million to a foundation established in his family's name.
At his death, he left his remaining estate, estimated at as much as $500 million, to the family foundation.
"He was a brilliant man with a very strong background in Christ," his son, Edward, said. "His legacy to Alaska is going to be that he helped formulate all the organizations and institutions he worked with, and he helped build the state."
Mr. Rasmuson's generosity reached beyond Alaska to the rest of the Northwest. Two years ago he gave $5 million to Virginia Mason Research Center in Seattle to build a laboratory and endow an arthritis and rheumatic-disease center named for him and his wife, Mary Louise.
"He put a lot of energy and money into scientific development of the fisheries in the Northwest," said Lee Alverson, who owns Natural Resource Consultants in Seattle and had known Mr. Rasmuson since the late 1960s, when both served on the international North Pacific Fisheries Commission. Mr. Rasmuson later was chairman of the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council.
"We had Korea, Poland and just about everybody fishing in the Pacific, off the coast, and it was depleting the fish stocks," said Alverson. "He was instrumental in developing policy to deal with that."
Mr. Rasmuson's life moved in tandem with Alaska's growth. He was born in Yakutat in 1909 to Swedish missionaries, who insisted he and his older sister, Evangeline, get the best education possible despite growing up on the frontier.
When they were teenagers, their mother sent them to Seattle, and Mr. Rasmuson graduated from Queen Anne High School in 1925. He attended the University of Washington and transferred to Harvard, an experience he later called "the turning point of my life."
In his youth, he worked off and on at the Bank of Alaska, where his father was an attorney at the time. He did stints as teller, janitor and bank manager in branches in Skagway, Ketchikan, Cordova and Anchorage.
In 1931, he was asked to interrupt graduate school to help the bank recover from an embezzlement that threatened its financial future. He inherited the bank when his father died in 1943.
"He was never an old person, not even in later life," said Terence Cole, a University of Alaska professor and co-author of "Banking on Alaska," a companion book to Mr. Rasmuson's own memoirs.
"He was the most formative person in the development and growth of the bank," Cole said. "He built it from a small struggling bank and made it into the largest bank in the state."
Mr. Rasmuson retired in 1974. His son, Edward, succeeded him at the bank. Last year, the family sold its interest to Wells Fargo and Co.
Besides his wife and son, Mr. Rasmuson is survived by two other children, Lile Gibbons, named for Rasmuson's first wife who died in 1960, and Judy Rasmuson, both of Connecticut. Funeral services are Friday in Anchorage.
"I guess what everyone will remember about him is that he had this huge curiosity and a prodigious memory," Cole said. "It made him fun to be with, but it also meant he played a pivotal role in so many things around here it's hard to summarize them all. He was just an incredible person."