Polio caused Wilma Rudolph to wear a leg brace from the age of 5 to 12, and she became a mother while attending
a segregated high school in Clarksville, Tennessee. In college, she was a track star, winning a bronze medal at the
Olympic games in 1956 and three golds in 1960, the first American woman to accomplish that feat in one year. What
does that have to do with Alaska’s oil and gas industry?
This month’s article “Making History” explains the link that the Alaska Oil & Gas Historical Society discovered. Whereas
industry associations speak of the present-day importance of resource development, the society aims to tell the
stories of the people who built the industry. Those stories lead to surprising places, from the bottom of a Prudhoe Bay
discovery well to a polio ward in Tennessee and the Olympic stadium in Rome.
