Allan Gallant was building one of the most successful businesses in Alaska's history -- until his employees turned on him.
To understand what the man built, you have to travel the frontier. In his seven years as president and chief executive officer of Alaska Commercial Co., Allan Gallant did more than revive the oldest business in the state; he changed the face of the bush itself.
Take the town of Bethel. The two-and-a-half-hour flight west from Anchorage is a reminder of just how enormous, and how empty, Alaska is, a wilderness twice the size of Texas with fewer people than metropolitan Austin. You fly over mile after deserted mile, over the glaciers and peaks of the Alaska Range, over the sinkholes and silt streams of the endless tundra, until Bethel inally appears through the fog, a small airport and a collection of tar-paper shacks huddled along the slate-gray Kuskokwim River.The road from the airport to the harbor and backo is a rutted dirt loop running past the tanning salon and the sled-dog kennels, the piles of scrap wood and the rusting snowmobiles.
In this somewhat raw retail environment, on a site between the federal housing project and the town TV satellite dish, Allan Gallant had the chutzpah to plan a new Alaska Commercial store. Not just a small-time, small-town, beans-and-jeans trading post, either -- Gallant's store would be the biggest in Bethel's history, 47,000 self-contained square feet perched atop the permafrost. There would be space for offices and a videocassette rental store, a Japanese steak-house-and-sushi-bar, a post office, and a parking lot big enough for every pickup in town.
It was the kind of gamble that made Gallant and AC, as the company is known, a force to be reckoned with in the state, and it was pulled off with characteristic Gallant style. First he bullied his conservative board of directors into letting him take the risk. Then he bluffed his bankers into giving him another overdraft to build. "The Bethel Mall," read the bold brown letters on the side of the corrugated metal building, completed in October 1980. "Creative Financing By Allan D. Gallant."
Today, an average of more than 1,000 people flock through the doors each day. They include Yupik Eskimos, prospectors and trappers over from Cripple Creek, Eek, and Napakiak, men, women, and children from the rest of the 56 villages throughout the delta, all come to marvel at this wonder of American suburban culture transplanted to the bush. Before Gallant, the local AC carried such staples as Spam, Kool-Aid, and Pendleton wool shirts, most shipped in by barge. Now the grocery department features Boston and Bibb lettuce, Persian melons, and kiwi fruit, all flown in, plus orange juice squeezed in the store, freshly baked pizza, and cut flowers. You can still sell your gold nuggets, trade your furs, and buy axes or a new pair of mittens. But you can also buy Nike running shoes, a videocassette recorder, or a sweater like the one Krystle wears on "Dynasty." The mall is the region's largest source of credit and native employment; it has become a hangout as well. Grizzled fishermen sit in silence on the wooden benches that line the vestibule. Their grandsons, dressed in camouflage pants and Members Only jackets, drop quarter after quarter into the video-game machines.
There have always been merchants in the bush, of course, white men chasing boom times in fur or platinum, gold or oil. But Allan Gallant's Alaska Commercial was different. The company itself had been bought in 1977 by the Community Enterprise Development Corp. of Alaska (CEDC), a nonprofit agglomeration of community-based organizations, primarily native groups formed during the War on Proverty days, and it was an important symbol of native Alaskans' new wealth the power. As for Gallant, he was a social activist as much as a businessman. Though trained in finance at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, he had worked for 10 years as a community developer, first with the Ford Foundation and then as a private consultant, traveling from the Louisiana Delta to the South Side of Chicago to East Los Angeles. He thought of himself as a business packager, finding an opportunity for a community group, figuring out how to fund it, then matching it with a local entrepreneur.
Gallant doesn't look like a pioneer. Round, relentlessly ebullient, he peers out from behind Coke-bottle-thick glasses that are perpetually askew beneath disheveled gray hair, more a jovial walrus than a builder of empires. Still, pioneer and empire builder he was. When Gallant took over in 1977, Alaska Commercial was stagnant: 11 trading posts with 177 employees and $9 million in sales. By 1985 he had spread the company's trademarked red flag across the state, building a 23-store giant with more than 400 employees and $55 million in sales. He brought merchandising and marketing from the lower 48 to such settlements as Bethel and Cordova, and he delivered a string of profitable R&L's to his owners, all on borrowed dollars.
Even in the beginning of 1985, when Alaskans were predicting lean times as the great oil bonanza trickled out, Gallant saw nothing but new frontiers to conquer. For seven years, perpetually starved for cash, he had had to scramble to survive, battling not only the bush but also the go-slow bias of his board of directors. Now a new employee stock ownership plan had provided him with new capital, newly committed employees, and a transformed board. He planned to make AC a $100-million company, then take it public: it would be Alaska's first "twenty-first-century retailer," offering such in-store amenities as banking and insurance and travel services.
Instead, a few months later, the most innovative and successful merchant in the state was fired.
The statement issued to the newspapers after the May 8 meeting of the AC board of directors was brief and mysterious: three short sentences, including an appreciation of Gallant's "long and dedicated contribution in building the company." His dismissal, without cause, was effective immediately, and there was no other public comment.
Allan Gallant, the pioneer who transformed the frontier, was gone, voted out by the directors of the company he had built.
Alaska Commercial has been central to the state's history since long before Allan Gallant. The oldest business in Alaska, heir to the trading posts that sold staples to Russian trappers, it predates Secretary of State William Henry Seward's purchase of the territory in 1867. It was an AC river pilot, George Williams, who spread the news of the first gold strike in the Yukon in the fall of 1886, and it was company traders who kept the prospectors in grub and gold pans. When Roald Amundsen stumbled out of the bush and into the village of Eagle after his two-and-a-half-year trek to the pole, he stayed in a cabin owned by the local AC storekeeper.
