Glenn Hackney once told me he adopted his favorite saying from a Portugese man who worked for him in the 1960s during the brief time when Glenn and Esther lived in Hawaii.

Hackney’s employee often said life was “never better,” which became the Hackney phrase.

“I’ve never really seen that whining does a whole bunch of good,” Hackney said. “It seems to me that if you keep a positive attitude, it’s really much more productive.”

A former businessman, legislator, state employee and city employee, Glenn did more for his community and state in the years after he retired than he had done before. Known as a strident conservative during his time in the Legislature, he mellowed in the decades that followed.

While he remained a conservative, he was usually not a strident one and he developed the gift of working with people of all kinds.

He kept on building goodwill in Fairbanks until the car accident that claimed his life this week at 97.

The friendships he built with people made him one of the most recognizable characters in Fairbanks. Thousands of people knew who he was and he was the most effective spokesman the Fairbanks Community Food Bank could ever hope to have.

A “hopeless volunteer” he called himself. He was always one for tortured wordplay and a fan of P.G. Wodehouse. There was nothing hopeless about the man.

It was during an interview with reporter Connie Oehring that Hackney best described his never-ending battle with littering.

“It’s the age-old problem of a few people—let’s not mince words—slobs who just don’t care,” he said in 1986. “They figure if they throw something out of their car, someone will pick it up. And they’re right.”

At that time a spry lad of 61, Hackney said he had a choice. He could drive on and gripe about litter. Or pick it up.

He said he end up with the best of all possible worlds. “I get to gripe and pick it up.”

“Some people think it’s demeaning to pick up garbage, but I consider it paying your dues. Alaska’s been awfully good to us.”

He was near 90, the leader of the Fairbanks Litterati, when I encountered him one spring after he had chipped a frozen mattress out of the ice along South Cushman St. He also had a box spring in the back of his truck that he had found along the Richardson Highway.

Hackney said he could never understand how someone could lose a mattress or a box spring out of the back of a truck and not notice it or stop to pick it up.

He wrote poems about litter—compositions in which he tried to prod people to pick up after themselves: “For a tasteless trail of cardboard ripped into bits, Check one stretch of the Johansen, it’s really the pits.”

He said his approach to life was to always remind himself not to get discouraged.

He became a competitive runner of sorts in his late 50s, starting with an appearance in the Midnight Sun Run as a walker. He later tried to run a mile and liked it.

Countless miles followed, including the Honolulu Marathon and the Equinox Marathon. He led by example.

The highlight of his running career came in 1996 when he carried the Olympic flame near Olympia, Wash., on its way to the games in Atlanta. He won his age group several times in the Midnight Sun Run in his 80s.

It was after a 10K race in 1992 when Hackney stopped to pick up some trash on the road. He couldn’t say he never knew what hit him—a reckless driver racing along the road.

Hackney, who was standing on the curb waiting for traffic to pass, was knocked into the air and landed with two broken legs. A lot of us wondered whether he would survive.

We had little doubt that his days as the Fairbanks Poet Litterate were over. Hackney later credited the work of Dr. George Brown for putting him back together and he returned to the streets.

“Never better,” he said. Words that he lived by.