Joe Vogler - Early Life

Early Life

Vogler was born April 24, 1913, on a farm outside Barnes, Kansas. He graduated from high school in Waterville, Kansas, in 1929. That year, he began studying at the University of Kansas on a scholarship. He graduated with a law degree in five years and was admitted to the Kansas State Bar.

Vogler moved to Alaska, in March 1942, after having run afoul of many of his contemporaries in the Lower 48 regarding his views on then-U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After spending a year in Kodiak, he moved to Fairbanks and worked as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at Ladd Field (now Fort Wainwright) in Fairbanks, until 1951 when he began mining on Homestake Creek. He filed for 80 acres (320,000 m2) of homestead land off the Steese Highway and acquired 320 acres (1.3 km2) near Fairbanks off Farmers Loop Road. Vogler spent fifty years as a miner and developer in Alaska. He was mostly known around Fairbanks as a rabble-rouser and frequent writer of letters to the editor, until 1973 when he launched a petition drive calling for secession for Alaska, in the early part of that year, and subsequently launched his first campaign for governor a year later (see Political career, below).

Vogler gained his first serious notoriety in Fairbanks during the 1940s and 1950s for a feud with Paul and Flora Greimann, operators of University Bus Lines. The company was a private urban transit company, which primarily transported students between Fairbanks and the University of Alaska. Prior to the replacement of the Cushman Street Bridge in 1959, the old bridge was too narrow to accommodate both a large vehicle such as a truck or bus, and another vehicle. Vogler, with Warren A. Taylor as his attorney, sued University Bus Lines in 1948 in what the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner at the time called the "Battle of the Bridge". Vogler sought a permanent injunction against the buses straddling the center rail of the bridge. The feud continued after the Wendell Street Bridge opened in 1953 and Greimann's buses continued using the Cushman bridge instead of the newer, wider bridge. Police were often involved in quelling these confrontations.