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| Sunday,
September 06, 1987 |
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| A
MAN WITH CLOUT COWPER'S CHIEF OF STAFF HAS HAD
LONG CLIMB FROM STREETS OF MICHIGAN CITY |
| By
JOHN LINDBACK, Daily News reporter |
|
JUNEAU-In
1960, 15 year old Garrey Peska roamed the grimy
streets of Grand Rapids, Mich., with a street
gang looking for trouble. Two of Peska's
friends found it when they beat up a kid and
killed him.
The manslaughter convictions that followed
scared young Peska straight. He wanted more
for himself than that. So, with the coaxing of
a high school business teacher, a blue-collar
kid who looked like a sure dropout turned from
hood to good.
In 1987, things are going good again for
Garrey Peska. In July he was named Gov. Steve
Cowper's new chief of staff. At 42, he holds
one of the most powerful jobs in state
government. |
Instead
of the leather jacket and black boots of his
youth, the now bald and bearded Peska dresses
his 5' 9" frame in suits and ties. At the office
every day, he decides who gets to see Cowper
and who doesn't.
He advises the governor on nearly all major
decisions, including appointments to key
government jobs, intricate negotiations with
legislators and budget decisions.
He supervises Cowper's Cabinet and directs the
governor's personal staff.
The chief of staff wields a lot of power. But,
lately anyway, not for long. Peska's
predecessor, Pete Jeans, lasted eight months.
The man who held the job before that, Ray
Gillespie, made it for 17 months until his
boss, former Gov. Bill Sheffield, lost a
re-election bid to Cowper. The man who held the
job before Gillespie, John Shively, lasted 19
months. He lost his job as a result of his
role in a contracting scandal that prompted
impeachment proceedings against Sheffield.
"Do I wonder sometimes if I can do this
job for a long time? Sure I do. You bet I
do," Peska said during a recent interview
in his Capitol office, just 10 steps from
Cowper's office door. "It's a hell of a
challenge, and it's somewhat
intimidating."
Judging by his background, Peska is no
stranger to intimidating challenges.
The son of a young member of the Army Air
Corps and his wife, Peska was born in Abilene,
Texas. His mother named the boy after her
Dutch father, who's name was Garret. She
changed the "t" to a "y,"
creating an odd spelling for a conventional
name.
When he was just 6 weeks old, Peska's mother
packed up the infant and her belongings and
moved back with her parents to Grand Rapids,
leaving a troubled marriage behind. A divorce
and remarriage followed a couple of years
later. Peska's father disappeared from his
life. His stepfather later adopted him. As
time wore on, Garrey acquired three
stepbrothers.
Life wasn't easy in Grand Rapids, a tough
industrial area of about 300,000 people that
depends on the auto industry for its
livelihood. Peska's stepfather was a teamster
who worked at low-paying warehouse jobs.
"I never thought of us as poor but we
certainly didn't have money to buy
things," Peska said. "My step-dad and
some friends built our house. He couldn't
afford to just buy one. He had to buy it a
board at a time. I guess the only way I could
describe it was we lived in a shack in the
back of the property while he was building it.
My mother and step-dad were married when I was
3. We never moved into the house until I was
9, as I recall."
Because money was tight, Peska said, he and
each of his brothers started working in
elementary school, Garrey as a janitor's
helper.
"It was just the way we did it in our
family. There was never any question about
whether or not you were going to work. It was
a question of when you were going to go to
work, and what you were going to do. To this
day I'm grateful to my step-dad for teaching me
the value of an honest day's work."
By the time he was 15 and enrolled at Lee High
School, Peska had fallen in with a tough
crowd.
"I was a member of one of the street
gangs and thought I was a probably a lot
tougher than I really was," Peska
recalled. "What spun me away from that
whole scene was when two of my friends were
involved in a manslaughter. That blew me away.
I said, "Wait a minute. This is not where
I'm headed.' "
At the same time Peska's high school business
teacher, Jim Skidmore, noticed his skill with
numbers. Skidmore was fresh out of college, so
he was a bit uncertain about how to handle a
problem student who showed potential.
"I think when he first started in high
school everybody thought that he was going to
be a bum," said Skidmore, who now heads
the business teaching staff at Grand Rapids
Junior College. "He was more surly when I
first ran into him. He was kind of a
"you're not going to teach me anything,
you young punk.' "
But Skidmore took Peska aside and told him he
could become an accountant someday. He got
Peska a college-level book and he responded to
the challenge, Skidmore said,
"He tried to be a hood. You know, the
leather jacket, heavy boot kind of thing. It
didn't take long to see that he was bright. I
played on that. I guess I just saw through him
quicker than anybody else."
What followed was a swift and radical
turnaround in Garrey Peska. By the time he
graduated from high school in 1963, Peska had
been president of the student council, captain
of the football team and editor of the
yearbook.
The talent he showed in earlier years for the
trumpet carried through, too.
"I'm a college teacher now,"
Skidmore said. "I taught in high school
for eight years. And he was by far the most
outstanding leader that I ever came across. He
just had a maturity beyond his years.
"He was very serious. I got the
impression that it was absolutely essential
that he make something of himself. It was an
"I'm going to be more than where I've
come from' kind of attitude."
His success in high school failed to make life
much easier for Peska when he got out. He
lacked the money to go to a major university.
At Skidmore's urging, he enrolled in Davenport Business College in Grand Rapids.
Not long after high school, Peska married his
high school girl friend.
He did well in business college and became an
accountant. After earning a two-year degree, he
joined a small accounting company and got
plenty of experience helping small businesses
handle their cash flow. He became a certified
public accountant. But he also became
impatient at the time it was taking to become
a general partner.
At 27, he joined three other partners in a new
computer company. The company was bought out
by a larger company and Peska, unhappily,
found himself working half of each month in
Chicago and the other half in Detroit. He
hated city life and wasn't enjoying the job.
"I came home one day at lunchtime just
thoroughly frustrated. I had just come from a
trip to Chicago, tired of dealing with this
large company I was forced to deal with. I
opened up my Journal of Accountancy and there
was an ad that said the state of Alaska was
looking for auditors to work on the
legislative audit staff. There was another one
that said a company was looking for a
controller for their Ethiopian sales branch. I
wrote letters to both of them and decided that
if either one of them offered me a job, I
would accept the first one that came in."
A short time later, the job offer from Alaska
arrived in the mail. Within two weeks, Peska
was stepping off an airplane in Juneau.
By the fall of 1986, life had taken a few more
turns for Garrey Peska. Both success and
disappointment had cropped up. Though he was
financially comfortable, he wasn't on Easy
Street.
In the years after arriving in Juneau, he had
a daughter, divorced his wife, took a trip
around the world, married again, and took in a
foster son. He served as the first director of
the Division of Legislative Audit, tried
unsuccessfully to keep a computer service
business alive in Juneau and worked as an aide
to both the Senate and House finance
committees.
Between those jobs, he farmed himself out as a
independent consultant or accountant.
As an aide to the finance committees, Peska
was known as an accountant, a "bean
counter," not a politician. He was,
however, a highly regarded bean counter with a
thorough knowledge of the state budget. Unlike
some members of the legislature's staff, he
was not known as an aide with a political
agenda of his own. If he made any enemies
during those years, they are difficult to find
now.
In the fall of 1986, he got his big
opportunity. One of his friends from his days
as the legislative auditor, former Rep. Steve
Cowper of Fairbanks, had just been elected
governor. Peska and his wife, Karen, had
donated about $1,000 to Democrat Cowper's
campaign. He hoped that if Cowper got elected,
the new governor might offer him an important
job.
One day that fall Peska, an avid hunter,
returned from a successful deer hunting trip.
He had bagged an aging but beautiful buck. He
was in a good mood. Cowper called him.
"He said he wanted me to do something in
his administration. I said I would like to do
something. I said I would prefer to be the
commissioner of the Department of
Administration."
He got the job, and with it a harrowing eight
months. Throughout he was forced to deal with
both politics and bean counting.
First came big budget cuts. Saying he felt
state government was paying for some things it
shouldn't, Peska suggested cutting senior
citizens' longevity bonus checks and
eliminating money for public radio and
television stations.
Peska's proposals drew him into the political
whirlwind of the Capitol. Both proposals
angered vocal constituencies. The legislature
backed away and refused to adopt the budget
cuts, leaving Peska and Cowper out on the
lonely point.
Peska also supervised the state's labor
negotiations, another delicate task. Cowper
wanted to cut at least $40 million from the
state's personnel budget. Negotiations were
tough and often bitter. Peska had to confront
the anger of state workers who had supported
Cowper's run for governor. So far, Cowper
hasn't achieved the $40 million in savings.
In July, Cowper asked Peska to replace Pete
Jeans as chief of staff, a job that involves
even more politics. Peska leaped at the
opportunity.
The head of the buck he had bagged the day
Cowper first called him now hangs on Peska's
office wall. "I thought, "What the
hell, I'll bring him with me,' " Peska
said, glancing up at his good-luck charm.
Five weeks after taking the job, Garrey Peska
seems to be in control. His accountant's mind
has brought new organization to Cowper's suite
of offices on the Capitol's third floor.
Under new procedures hatched by Peska and
approved by Cowper, staff members will no
longer walk into Cowper's office, sit down and
shoot ideas past him. Instead, they must
prepare briefing memos for Peska's examination
before he will let them in to see the
governor. Peska also must OK most other
meetings the governor has. Note-takers sit in
on all the governor's meetings to keep track
of any promises Cowper makes.
A disciple of Macintosh computers, Peska
carries in his briefcase a computer-printed
list of things to do that is longer than he is
tall. An admitted workaholic, he goes home to
his Mac and consolidates various lists of
things to accomplish. He often does office
work at home until 11:30 p.m. He gets up, he
says, at 5:30 a.m. to work before breakfast.
Peska says he also intends to whip the
governor's relationship with the legislature
into shape. He suggested that he doesn't want
any more embarrassments, such as the July
special session veto overrides. The governor's
office is going to start counting votes and
communicating better with legislators, Peska
said. He already has sent the governor's
lobbyist, Bob Evans, out on the road to meet
with legislators about what Cowper wants next
session.
"We need to understand the political
level that the legislature operates on. And we
need to understand that if we're going to
operate with them, and work with them, we have
to work within that political
environment," Peska said.
He regards his first big dive into the world
of politics, the cuts he proposed last year in
the Department of Administration, as a
bellyflop. But he says he is determined not to
let both his shyness of politics, and his
relative inexperience with leading a political
charge, prevent him from handling his new
assignment.
In that assignment, he won't be able to avoid
politics. As chief of staff, he will be as
close to setting the political agenda as he
can get without running for office. But, he
says, he is motivated not by the chance to use
power but by the necessity to organize its
use.
"I like to have organization," he
said. "I like to know what the decision
was, who's responsible for implementing it and
when it's supposed to be implemented. And then
I like to have follow-up, so that I can
determine that it is happening."
"I really am feeling very optimistic
about how things are going here. I think
people are realizing that I'm not trying to
take control because I'm trying to gather
power. That's not my objective at all. I'm
trying to take control so that we can get good
decisions made up here." |
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1985-1999 - Anchorage Daily News.
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