Listen my children and you shall hear of the Midnight Ride of Maurice Gravel

Hold your horses. Maurice “Mike" Gravel, the 1959 version of Paul Revere, traveled the U.S. to protest taxes for the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce. (Chicago Sun-Times photo)

In 1959, Maurice R. “Mike” Gravel toured the nation dressed as Paul Revere for the Junior Chamber of Commerce, warning Americans about the threat of growing taxation.

On his 44-state tour, Gravel stopped in Chicago, where a photographer for the Sun-Times said he rode into town in a station wagon from Anchorage. Gravel was 28 at the time and had been in Alaska for three years when he donned the puffy shirt for his tour.

At the time, Ed Merdes of Fairbanks was the vice president of the group, so perhaps the two made a connection that launched Gravel’s publicity drive.

Gravel, who died June 26 at 91, was a master at generating publicity about himself and whatever causes he happened to be championing at the moment, as shown by his role in the Pentagon Papers, nominating himself for vice president in 1972, his role in getting the trans-Alaska pipeline approved, running for president in 2008 and 2019 and his shifting public positions on the war in Vietnam.

In his obituary, the New York Times said that Gravel was an “unabashed attention-getter,”

He arrived in Alaska in 1956 and claimed he spent his last dollar on gas and peanut butter, putting him in a league with Wally Hickel, who claimed to have arrived with 37 cents. Gravel began selling real estate the next day.

Gravel had started calling himself Mike in the Army, and he changed the pronunciation of his name to “Grah-vel,” abandoning the version that sounds like a reference to rocks and stones.

My late brother Terrence, who had a hobby of collecting old news photos, bought the one shown above as proof that the future U.S. senator had practiced the art of self-promotion as a young man. It was not the kind of photo that Gravel used in his campaigns for the U.S. Senate.

The Jaycees claimed that Gravel might be heard by 100 million Americans during his trip, speaking four or five times a day, six days a week, with regular interviews on radio and TV. He collected signatures on petitions calling for lower taxes.

Everywhere he went he sounded the alarm about taxes, wearing his Paul Revere costume.

“He griped about the weather, but his major protest was that ‘we are taxing ourselves out of the free enterprise system right into socialism,’” the photographer wrote in a caption printed in the Chicago Sun-Times on Feb. 19, 1959.

In April that year, he married Rita Martin, his first wife, in the First Methodist Church in Anchorage. Topping the wedding cake were dolls, one dressed in a floor-length gown and one dressed as Paul Revere.

This was nearly a decade before Gravel beat Sen. Ernest Gruening for U.S. Senate, relying heavily on this masterful half-hour ad that appeared repeatedly on Alaska TV stations.

The 1968 ad, “A Man for Alaska,” mentioned his brief stint as the “modern day Paul Revere,” but without featuring the full getup. The ad changed Alaska politics and not for the better, elevating image over substance, a practice that remains effective.

The half-hour ad played up Gravel’s military service, famously suggesting that Gravel had been in World War II, showing Gravel in sunglasses at the Eiffel Tower. Gravel was in the Army from 1951-54, but the ad left viewers guessing about the dates.

Gruening was bitter about the film and said that since Gravel was 15 when the war ended, “he must have been the youngest man enlisted in the Allied cause.”

“He wore the plain clothes and heavy shades of an undercover agent, grew mustaches of various sizes,” the Gravel ad said of the mustachioed subject. “He once walked the streets of Stuttgart with $25,000 cash American for transferring to the underground apparatus.”

“If he looked like an American edition of James Bond, the jokes would come years afterward,” Gravel’s ad said.

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Mike Gravel at the Eiffel Tower in an image featured in his 1968 half-hour campaign ad, shown when the narrator is describing Gravel’s undercover work for the Army. Sen. Ernest Gruening said the thrust of the image was that Gravel was claiming to have been in World War II, which ended when Gravel was 15.

From the Chicago Tribune, Feb. 20, 1959.