Reporter Richard Fineberg won a national business journalism award for a meticulous investigation of an early version of the Alaska gas pipeline dream in 1979.
Fineberg’s trip to New York City to collect the $5,000 cash prize left a lasting impression on Howard Weaver, the Alaska newspaperman who at the time was the editor of “The Alaska Advocate,” where Fineberg’s treatise had appeared.
“Richard, a banjo-playing railroad buff, flew as far as Seattle but then hopped freights from there to New York and back. He told me he kept the check in his shoe for safekeeping on the return leg,” Weaver wrote in his autobiography.
That story encapsulates a few of the quirks and qualities that elevated Fineberg above the rest of us. He was a tireless scholar whose idea of a good time was to immerse himself for weeks or months in a complicated investigation of oil industry or government chicanery.
Fineberg died September 27 at the Pioneers Home in Fairbanks after years of poor health. Alaskans are in his debt, not just one of gratitude.
The flags have been lowered to half-staff for countless others who contributed less to Alaska. While his passing will not be marked with such ceremonies, consider this column a reminder of his accomplishments.
If Thoreau was a “self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms,” Fineberg was a self-appointed inspector of the oil industry, a watchdog who put a spotlight on oil finance, as well as regulatory and safety questions that others ignored.
There has never been another reporter like Fineberg in our state. He was not a guy who could cover a car crash or a press conference. He did not know how to simplify matters and there was no such thing as a short Fineberg story.
Fineberg was made for other things. As he told a critic nearly 50 years ago, “As you know, I spend an inordinate amount of time developing background information for the stories I produce, and feedback—positive or negative—is always welcome.”
I think of him as an Alaska version of I.F. Stone, an independent journalist with endless curiosity who could never fit comfortably in someone else’s organization, so he had to create his own.
Fineberg grew up in St. Louis, did his undergraduate work at Beloit College in Wisconsin and earned a master’s degree and doctorate from Claremont in California. His dissertation dealt with the plight of Mexican farm workers and the 1968 grape strike in the San Joaquin Valley.
He was well on his way to an orderly career in academia, serving as an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alaska, when an investigative reporting triumph in 1970 changed the course of his life.
His first great reporting project dealt with 200 nerve gas canisters that the U.S. Army left on the ice of a lake near the Gerstle River at Fort Greely in 1966. The Army forgot to remove the ton of nerve gas before spring, so the canisters sank to the bottom of the lake when the ice went out. Fineberg reported that a single drop of the material could kill a human.
Three years later the Army caught on to the lost nerve gas. It tested the waters, pumped the lake dry, removed the canisters and disposed of the remains.
In June 1970, Fineberg wrote a series for the Anchorage Daily News on chemical-biological weapons testing in Alaska that revealed the incident to the public. The Army did not cooperate or confirm Fineberg’s findings until the following January when the Washington Post got hold of letters from Congress.
Unraveling the nerve gas mystery and coverup by the Army convinced Fineberg that he could not spend the rest of his life in a classroom teaching government.
“That whetted my taste for journalism and I knew I’d found my calling,” Fineberg told reporter Brian O’Donoghue for a 1995 profile in the News-Miner.
His professorial days ended early on, but he never lost the mindset of a scholar. In 1971, he was onboard a ship carrying protesters from Vancouver to the Aleutians on a campaign to try to stop nuclear testing on Amchitka. “The name of the ship gave birth to an organization, indeed to a movement felt around the world: Greenpeace,” O’Donoghue wrote.
Fineberg had been a late addition to the crew and since he was a born skeptic, some of the others thought he was a CIA operative. Fineberg left the boat in Kodiak. “He wasn’t CIA,” journalist Ben Metcalfe told an interviewer in 2007. “He was just a weird academic who didn’t quite fit in.”
It wasn’t the last time that Fineberg “didn’t quite fit in.”
With the approval of the trans-Alaska pipeline, Fineberg found several outlets—none of which paid well—for his painstaking reporting efforts that focused on the oil industry and government regulators. His byline appeared in the All-Alaska Weekly, the Anchorage Daily News, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and various national publications.
During construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline, Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. made a pitch to hire Fineberg for its public relations department, in essence buying him off.
This was after he had written several freelance articles critical of the company’s safety and environmental record—subjects that had received little attention from other Alaska reporters. The company did hire several Alaska reporters during construction.
I think the chances that Fineberg would have ever taken an Alyeska PR job were zero—as he would never have been a company man—but Fineberg said Alyeska flew him to Anchorage to talk its proposal over. He wrote in a 1975 letter that there was never an official job offer. He would have been the world’s worst PR man.
While Alyeska tried to keep tabs on what stories Fineberg was chasing—travel to pipeline facilities had to be cleared and coordinated in advance with the PR staff—he was always asking for more information. As a junior PR staff member put it in a 1975 memo to her boss, “Think how much more time we’ll have with Fineberg out of town.”
He found and read the research reports, studies, memos and other documents that others did not know about or take the time to dig through. He cultivated sources in the field and broke several important stories over the years.
Fineberg was not what you would call a family man, though he had a daughter, Renata, who he learned about when she was a teenager. They grew close over the last 40 years. She lives in California and says she was thankful to have him in her life as she grew into adulthood.
Fineberg did spend several years working in state government, including a position in Gov. Steve Cowper’s administration—the highest paid job Fineberg ever had—but that ended when Fineberg would not compromise on a policy question he felt strongly about. He could be a hard man to deal with.
During most of his years in Fairbanks, Fineberg made his headquarters in a small dry cabin in Ester, heated by a wood stove.
The cabin was decorated with floor-to-ceiling stacks of papers along every wall. He kept his expenses low and scraped out a living through freelance writing, investigative reports and occasional grants.
Fineberg had a large circle of friends and acquaintances through music, politics and the environmental movement. While he was partial to flamboyant neckties when he had to have one around his neck, he was a journalistic monk who shunned the trappings of success.
Chelsea Chapman, who earned a doctorate in anthropology, interviewed Fineberg at length for her 2016 dissertation on various aspects of energy in central Alaska. Her description of a Fineberg encounter will be familiar to all who knew him.
“Our interviews typically lasted three or more hours and I would leave with a notebook full of increasingly illegible writing to puzzle through later, my futile attempt to keep up with his litany of events and data,” she said. “He is a tall, distinguished-looking white man in his 70s with thick-rimmed glasses and a reedy voice, profound wit and precisely chosen words. Other than occasional and usually fruitless forays into his piles of paper for some report he wanted to show me, he sat with one knee over the other and long fingers wrapped around his leg, eyes downcast.”
She said he always offered her coffee, “but it appeared that was probably all he prepared in a kitchen consisting of a miniature stovetop and a shelf of mugs.”
Fineberg was a fast talker who had a pronounced stutter as a young person. He refused to let that stop him—one of his character traits that I admired the most—and his speaking improved as time passed and he became used to getting up in front of others.
I met him in 1976 when he was doing free-lance work for national publications on the pipeline as well as the All-Alaska Weekly, the Anchorage Daily News and the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
I noticed he had come into the News-Miner office in the late afternoon one day and plopped himself down at a desk amid a sea of papers. He proceeded to plug away on an IBM Selectric typewriter, tossing page after page in the trash as he wrote and rewrote, fighting to get his ideas in order as the hours went by.
Nothing unusual about that. But it was startling to find him in the exact same spot early the next morning. Working all night became a habit of Fineberg’s during his freelance career.
I confess that it took me a long time to understand and appreciate Fineberg’s talent and courage. An image stuck in my mind from 45 years ago is encountering Fineberg at the old TVSA log cabin as he sat along the wall strumming his banjo and belting out Tex Ritter’s theme to “High Noon.” Maybe he saw himself as Gary Cooper, standing alone against injustice, I joked to myself at the time. It’s not a joke to me now.
For Fineberg, the challenge was always to sift through a warehouse of material in a way so that others could understand what he was getting at. To do that, he first had to understand it himself, which meant digesting endless statistics and trying to piece the puzzle together. He was not given to cutting corners.
He didn’t care about money and was never motivated by the prospect of financial gain or fame. Not everyone agreed with his conclusions, but he always laid out the facts he relied upon and the reasons for his conclusions, giving others plenty to argue about.
He leaves behind a wealth of material, including many reports on file at the Rasmuson Library at UAF, where his papers are to be preserved. Fineberg also had a website, www.FinebergResearch.com, but it was taken down some years ago.
I would like to see that site reactivated to keep his work alive and available to others. Most of the contents can be found on the Internet Archive and other sites that preserve the record of the internet, so I hope that someone will be able to resurrect his site as a tribute.
As Fineberg wrote two decades ago, “the principal purpose of this website is to gather in one place many of the basic facts regarding the environmental impacts and economic results of oil development in Alaska and elsewhere – information that industry and government prefer to ignore or to spin. Using case studies presented with fidelity to reason and factual accuracy, FinebergResearch.com brings to public attention information about economic and environmental issues related to petroleum development that is not readily available elsewhere.”
“A fundamental premise of this website is that it falls to each of us, as citizens, to inform ourselves and respond appropriately to the issues and events that shape the broad directions of our society and the detailed fabric of our social interactions.”
I remember that whenever Fineberg called, he would introduce himself by saying, “Fineberg here.” He always had something on his mind.
He’s not here any longer, but the best of his work remains within reach.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
