There was no furniture; the family used overturned buckets and barrels for chairs and tables, and slept on piles of willow branches covered with furs.

"We were sort of living in the end of the Clan of the Cave Bear' era," said Hensley, who is a Washington, D.C.-based executive for Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., the consortium that operates the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

Hensley sees oil as the fuel that transformed his Alaska from the impoverished backwater where he grew up into a modern state that's been critical to the U.S. economy. Oil began flowing from Alaska's North Slope 25 years ago. The first oil rolling down the trans-Alaska pipeline reached Valdez on July 28, 1977. Four days later, the Arco Juneau departed Valdez, making it the first supertanker to carry North Slope crude to markets.

More than 13.5 billion barrels of oil have passed through the pipeline since then. As it marks its 25th anniversary, the state has been transformed from a remote, backward outpost into a wealthy, fully modern part of America.

Still, one of the most vivid images that the lower 48 states have of the oil industry came from the Exxon Valdez oil tanker disaster in 1989, possibly the worst environmental incident in U.S. history. It spread 11 million gallons of oil over 1,000 miles of pristine shoreline, cost $2 billion to clean up and damaged the state's fishing and tourism industries for years.

Despite that blot, Hensley says, the state has been helped far more than it's been hurt by oil over the two-and-a-half decades.

"The changes are, in my mind, monumental from the pre-oil days to now. It's just really another world," he said. Changes range from major social shifts to the smallest details, like the proliferation of discount chain stores in Alaska. And furniture is no problem.

"Nowadays, you can buy a really nice chair for 10 bucks," jokes Hensley, who now wears a suit and tie to work, does business in the halls of Congress and, whether in Washington or in Anchorage, sleeps in a bed.

QUARTER OF A CENTURY

Nothing has changed Alaska as dramatically as the pipeline, one historian says.

"It dwarfs anything that's ever happened in the north," said Steve Haycox, a University of Alaska Anchorage history professor. "Oil did really improve the economic condition in Alaska, by a factor of at least 10."

In the year that North Slope oil production began, Alaska's population was about 410,000. Now Alaska is home to about 635,000. The state's budget has grown from $1 billion to over $7 billion, and it managed that feat despite abolishing its personal income tax in 1980. The $23 billion state-owned Alaska Permanent Fund, established in 1977, pays yearly dividends to nearly every man, woman and child in the state; last year's dividend was $1,850.

Alaska's ability to function as a U.S. state, Hensley believes, would not be possible without the discovery and shipments of North Slope oil. He remembers the not-too-distant past, when many residents struggled with abject poverty and diseases like tuberculosis and when government leaders were dependent on federal handouts to fund minimal public services.

"In my mind, had Prudhoe Bay not been struck, we might have had to revert to territorial status," said Hensley, who served in the state Senate while in his 20s and later became a leader in Native organizations and the state's commerce commissioner.

ROMANTIC NOTIONS

Despite romantic notions about frontier life, pre-oil Alaska offered little attraction for new residents, Haycox said. Few people are likely to move to an place like Alaska unless they have the financial wherewithal to replicate the culture they left, he said.

"They do not go to high-latitude places to enjoy the subsistence lifestyle," he said.