Raymond Plank

Raymond Plank, the youngest of four siblings, was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to farmer and coal miner Raby Plank and Maude Ruth Howe Plank. His parents’ schooling was limited but they instilled in their children the value of education, and Plank dedicated himself to a lifetime of learning. His mother died of a blood clot after a routine appendectomy when Plank was fifteen.

Plank attended the Blake School in Minneapolis and credited his Latin instructor Noah Foss and other Blake teachers with providing the educational basis and academic discipline necessary for a successful life. Plank entered Yale University in September 1940 and after Pearl Harbor enlisted in the Army Air Corps Reserves. He was called to active duty in March 1943 and would not resume his university education until the end of the war. Plank graduated from Yale University in 1946 with a bachelor of arts degree.

Plank was married three times. His first wife was Sally Stevens, with whom he had five children, Katherine, Michael, Pamela, Roger and Dana (Roger followed in his father’s footsteps at Apache, where he was named president and chief corporate officer (CCO) in 2011 before retiring in 2014). Raymond Plank’s subsequent marriages were to Lollie Benz and Heather Burgess, with whom he had a sixth child, Raby.

Plank was the founder and former Chairman of the Board of the Ucross Foundation, which provides visual artists, writers and composers with a setting for individual creative work, reflection and innovation on a 20,000-acre working ranch in northeastern Wyoming. Some of the works supported by Ucross include: The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, The Light in the Piazza with music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, and The Grapes of Wrath composed by Ricky Ian Gordon.

In the 1990s, in recognition of the strong, lasting and positive influence that teachers had on his life, Plank started a program in his hometown of Minneapolis to provide teachers opportunities for summer sabbaticals, self-designed programs of learning and exploration. He endowed the program with $1 million. That pilot program has since grown into a public foundation called Fund for Teachers.

In Egypt, where Apache is a leading oil and gas producer, thousands of young girls are getting their first opportunity for formal education in 201 one-room school buildings constructed by Springboard – Educating the Future, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization established by Plank.

Plank also established the Raymond Plank Professorship of Global Energy Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He served as chairman of the Wyoming Futures Project and co-chairman of Minnesota Wellspring, was a founding member of Freedom Lift and Friends of Mesa Verde, and a member of the Denver Art Museum board of trustees. Plank has been a trustee of Carleton College, where Apache established the Raymond Plank Chair in Incentive Economics, and is past chairman of the University of Minnesota Foundation. He also was a trustee of the Northrop Collegiate School, member of the advisory board of Augsburg College, and founder of the Plank Institute at The Blake School, all in Minneapolis. Plank was a founding member of Stakeholders in America, the American Energy Assurance Council, and Energy Security Policy.