INDY BEACONS: Indy native Ted Stevens made mark on Alaska

By the time his 40-year career as a U.S. senator ended, he was the longest-serving Republican in Senate history.

He helped to secure statehood for his adopted home, served as his state’s most dedicated legislative advocate and was voted its most important citizen of the century, yet he left the Senate a convicted felon. He was also born and grew up in Indianapolis.

This Indy native was Alaskan Ted Stevens. He was born in 1923 in a cottage built by his grandfather on the city’s northeast side. His family moved to Chicago, but his father lost his job in the Great Depression. After his parents divorced, Stevens and his three siblings moved back to the family’s home on Carrollton Avenue, where Stevens helped care for his ailing father and a disabled cousin.

Stevens delivered newspapers and attended IPS School No. 84, which also counts among its alumni Stevens’ Senate colleague Richard Lugar and television host David Letterman. Stevens’ grandfather, with whom he had been living, died when he was 12. Stevens attended Shortridge High School, but financial difficulties forced him to move to California, where he lived with an aunt.

After he graduated from high school, Stevens enrolled at Oregon State University, but World War II drew him into the military. He flew transport aircraft in support of the U.S.-piloted Flying Tigers of the Chinese Air Force, whose mission was to bomb Japan. Stevens received the Distinguished Flying Cross for his service behind enemy lines. He left the military in 1946.

After the war, Stevens majored in political science at UCLA, then, with support from the GI Bill, attended Harvard Law School. When money was short, he worked as a bartender and sold his blood plasma to make ends meet. Taking a private-practice law job after graduation, Stevens was sent to Alaska to serve one of his firm’s clients.

He soon became a federal prosecutor there, but moved back to Washington, D.C., to work at the Department of the Interior, helping to secure statehood for the 49th state. After he returned to Alaska, he opened a law firm and ran unsuccessfully for the Senate on two occasions before he was appointed to fill a vacancy. Thereafter, he easily won reelection.

Stevens was a tireless advocate for his state and expressed no second thoughts about the federal funding he secured for it. A master of the earmark—portions of legislation directing funds to specific projects—he was known for promoting the trans-Alaska pipeline, which generated considerable income for residents of the state.

Watchdog groups criticized Stevens for his many “pork-barrel” projects that consistently ranked Alaska as the greatest per-capita beneficiary of federal largesse. In response, he pointed out that 60% of Alaskan land is owned by the federal government and cited the state’s harsh weather and rugged terrain as justifications for federal investment.

In 2008, Stevens was charged with concealing more than $250,000 in gifts; he was convicted on seven counts. Just days later, he lost his final reelection bid. The very next year, however, at the request of the U.S. attorney general, the conviction was overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct in the withholding of evidence.

Stevens had married in 1952, but in 1978, his wife and four others were killed in a plane crash at Alaska International Airport that Stevens survived. He and his wife had five children. Stevens remarried in 1980, and he and his second wife had one child. Ironically, Stevens himself was one of five people killed in another Alaskan plane crash at age 86 in 2010.

Stevens relished his service to Alaska. What was once frozen tundra, he said, had been transformed into “airports, roads, ports, water and sewage systems, hospitals, clinics, communication networks, research labs, and much, much more.” Today, Anchorage’s international airport bears his name, as will a U.S. Navy destroyer.

The poor boy who once fished in Fall Creek would have been proud.•

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Indy Beacons celebrates the history of Indianapolis in the year leading up to its 2021 bicentennial by telling the stories of famous city residents. It appears the second and fourth issues of every month. Gunderman is chancellor’s professor at Indiana University.