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idge builder 177walked into Keefe’s office. “Do you know who Billy Frank is?” sheasked.Keefe laughed, “Do I know who Nelson Mandela is? Yeah, I knowwho Billy Frank is. I went to St. Martin’s College just up the hill fromFrank’s Landing. I could practically smell the tear gas from my dormroom!”Crystal was pushing Keefe for a legislative earmark that wouldallow an Indian school at Frank’s Landing to run independently,limiting interference from the Nisqually and Puyallup Indian tribes.“Billy was kind of a hot potato at the time,” Keefe says. “The wholefishing rights battle was a major headache for our congressional delegation.Politically, it wasn’t a very popular thing to get involved in.I worked Magnuson a little bit on it, about the school, and aboutBilly Frank and his dad. As a result, I kind of opened the door forMagnuson to get to know Billy as a human being, rather than as therenegade symbol of this seemingly endless struggle. They becamereally good friends.”When the Senate recessed, Keefe typically flew home to the PacificNorthwest. Typically, Billy waited on the airport drive in a big redChrysler to provide one of “Professor Frank’s Windshield Seminars,”a crash course on the environmental hazards facing the salmon.Once, on the banks of the Hoh River, Billy called the 50 percentallocation to the tribes meaningless without any fish. “What we shouldhave done,” he told Keefe, “was all pile into my canoe and taken aride up the Nisqually River, or the Hoh or the Puyallup, to whereMr. Weyerhaeuser and Mr. Simpson and Mr. Georgia-Pacific wasdestroying the salmon’s nursery, while we were fighting over theharvest downstream. Time is running out for the salmon.”Keefe urged Billy to meet with Magnuson and sell him on theurgent need to improve salmon habitat. After one session, Maggie satpuffing his cigar and turned his bulky frame toward Keefe, “Yourfriend Billy really makes a lot of sense.”Those sessions with Billy altered Keefe’s view of the fish and itsrelationship with the tribes. As the “white guy in blue suits,” Keefe