Land of Beauty & Swat

(See Cover)

When you took me young and trusting

From the growling Russian Bear,

Loud you swore before the nation

I should have the Eagle's care.

Never yet has wing of Eagle

Cast a shadow on my peaks

But I've watched the flight of buzzards,

And I've felt their busy beaks.

--Anonymous Alaskan, circa 1900

In the House dining room of the Capitol one day last week, a youthful dark-haired man was having lunch when he heard the roll-call bell. He jammed the last quarter of his tuna sandwich into his mouth, gulped his coffee and hurried up to a gallery overhanging the Democratic side of the aisle. There, Michael Anthony Stepovich, 39, Alaska's first native-born Governor, watched intently as one by one the Congressmen below called out their votes. A few minutes later, the House passed the Alaska statehood bill. Stepovich glanced at his wife, sitting a few seats away, and broke into a broad, gold-tipped smile.

Mike Stepovich, happy as a sourdough with a new-found nugget, turned to leave, stopped to sign autographs for well-wishers, then stepped outside to pose for pictures and some hugs-and-backslap horseplay with Alaska's Democratic Delegate E. L. ("Bob") Bartlett and with two engineers of the House victory: New York's Democrat Leo O'Brien and Pennsylvania's Republican John Saylor. It was Floor Manager O'Brien, counseled at every turn by Speaker Sam Rayburn, who had beaten back strong-willed opposition from Virginia's Democratic Howard Smith, chairman of the Rules Committee, and Minority Leader Joe Martin. "It's great, it's great," sighed the Governor. "I'm very happy for the people of Alaska."

The people of Alaska were happy for themselves, too. In the Moose Hall on Franklin Street in Juneau, American Bar Association President Charles Rhyne (TIME, May 5) had just finished his speech to the Alaska Bar Association when a newsman slipped in, gave the news of the House vote and sparked the audience to cheers. Throughout the territory, the cheers echoed, sometimes with a little reservation ("We've been this far before"); the Fairbanks News-Miner frontpaged a picture of a pair of hands with fingers crossed (for the bill needs Senate approval). In Fairbanks' Elks Club, scores of Alaskans tied on a wingding of a binge. At bars and soda fountains, drinks were on the house. Said a Unalakleet-born Eskimo named Oliver Amouak: "It's a good thing. I like to see it come on fine. I will enjoy my first vote for President."

Cricks & Daffodils. To Alaskan oldtimers, even the weather had augured well for statehood. Not since 1912, when Alaska first became an organized territory and won its first real, if tiny, measure of home rule, had the winter been so mild and the breakup so early. Parkas, mukluks, beaver caps and sealskin coats were thankfully stored away. The ice was gone from the Yukon River, and from the Porcupine, the Koyukuk and the Selawick. Out to Woodchopper, to Steel Creek, Poorman and a hundred other placer gold camps, packed the glint-eyed prospectors in search of a glint in the sand and gravel. In the villages of the Panhandle in the southeast, the red salmonberry blossoms fluttered, and the Indians spun out to gather wild celery and Indian rhubarb, came home for feasts of delicate herring eggs (cooked in seal oil, garnished with soy sauce). Spring yawned in the lower valleys, and out popped the arctic poppy, shooting star, lupine and forget-me-not (Alaska's official flower). And now, after a long winter's self-imposed confinement, out lumbered the great Alaskan bears--and with them the sudden sparkle of high military brass from Washington, who, it just so happens, favor the bear season as the best time for Alaskan inspection trips.

School was out, and that meant that once again Eskimo and Indian children in the Alaska Native Service boarding school in the Panhandle were flown home to their villages in Anaktuvuk Pass in the Brooks Range, and to Chukwuktoligamut near the Bering Sea. In the heartland city of Fairbanks (pop. 11,000), fourteen hundred 4-H Club members relieved their mothers of that wintered-in, cabin-fever feeling by piling outside and scurrying to register for their summer activities. Bud Hilton's Thawing Service advertised steam-cleaning service for building exteriors, while out on the Alcan Highway, dust warnings replaced ice-warning signs. On the Fairbanks outskirts moose calves, abandoned by their mothers, bawled like babies, and into a downtown pool hall waddled a full-grown porcupine. It was 80DEG in the Panhandle's Ketchikan, and 60-lb. salmon flopped through the water in search of fishermen. Farther up the Panhandle, in the capital city of Juneau (pop. 7,200), gardens danced with lilacs and daffodils, and folks admired the new paint job that glistened on the twelve-story Mendenhall apartment building (preparation, some gossiped, for the filming of Edna Ferber's Ice Palace). In a cocktail lounge a jukebox played Squaws Along the Yukon ("Oogah, oogah, oogah, which means I love you, won't you be my honey so I can oogah, oogah, you?").

Nickels & Peanuts. On the coast of Baranof Island, Sitka, last capital of Russian America* was bustling with the clack and crunch of a new $55.5 million pulp mill abuilding. Up to the north, Nome's Sah Yung Ah Tim Mini Chapter (Eskimo talk for "strength gone from the body") of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis was busy pressing its immunization drive, and Bush Pilot Neal Foster, 41, reported that Nome (pop. 2,000) was having a pleasant day at 45DEG and that "a bunch of people are getting their boats in the water here now, mostly for seal hunting."

Perhaps the most surprised man in the whole territory was Alaska's own Attorney General J. (for James) Gerald Williams, who had confidently offered to roll a peanut with his nose from Big Delta 120 miles to Tok Junction, if , Alaska should win statehood.

Polka Dots & Pioneers. Doubter Williams and, more particularly, the rear-guard of antistatehood people have a certain amount of cold logic on their side. Despite its rapid urban development, Alaska is still a wildly savage land. It is bigger (586,400 sq. mi.) than two of Texas plus one Indiana, and 99% of the land-much of it faceless tundra--is owned by the Federal Government. Nearly one-fourth of the 213,000 population is in military uniform manning a polka-dot pattern of defense posts, and the rest of its inhabitants depend chiefly on two sources of income: fishing and timber.

But the statehood forces are encouraged --not awed--by such statistics. They see Alaska as resources waiting for resourcefulness, as a challenge to be met better by home government than by the Interior Department, 3,500 miles away in Washington. For more than anything else, statehood is a matter of heart, a spirit singing. In the cities, in the countless villages that all but defy outside contact, the zest to build and to carve something fresh and distinctive beats with the same kind of pioneer's pulse that drove the trail blazers of the continental West.

Look Sharp. "There's no second-generation money here." says 38-year-old Anchorage Millionaire (real estate) Wally Hickel. who went to Alaska from Claflin, Kans. in 1940 with 37-c- in his pocket. "This is the crib. We're it. We're trying to make a Fifth Avenue out of the tundra, to accomplish in less than 50 years what the U.S. did in 100. Where else could you get that kind of mission, in a land that cozies you with beauty on one hand and swats you hard--if you're not looking sharp--with the other?"

Says Alaska Federation of Labor President Bob McFarland, 47 (home town, Republic, Wash.): "You find so many brilliant people here, people attracted by the sense of challenge that Hawaii, for example, could never supply. Yet life is slower and tastier somehow. I've been back to New York twice--a walk up Times Square and I've just about had it. Now put the reins in our hands and see what we do with it." Says Governor Mike Stepovich: "Only the people of little faith are against statehood now."

Coffee Royals & "Pan Ginney." Mike Stepovich typifies the pioneer's sense of destiny better than any Alaskan Governor before him. A Republican appointed by a Republican Administration, Stepovich handles himself like a man of the people, and the people--65% Democrats, 35% Republicans-- like him that way.

What they like best is his open-faced friendliness, his native talent for conveying to doubters "outside" what Alaska is all about. "I'm Mike Stepovich," he says quietly to strangers, and then, tentatively : "I'm Governor of Alaska." Unschooled in the well-oiled sophistication expected of Governors, he is content to make his points with an earnest warmth that radiates alley or when a he waits his barbershop--or turn a in a territorial bowling committee meeting. And beneath all of this is the tough mettle that was born in him and was strengthened on the cold, hard anvil of Alaskan living.

Mike was born in a Fairbanks log cabin on March 12, 1919. His father was known far and wide as "Wise Mike," an emigrant from Serbia who followed the gold rush call to Alaska in 1898. Wise Mike was rugged and sometimes mean tempered, and there are those who say he won his nickname with wise-guy answers to everything. His breakfast appetizer was four or five coffee royals--a couple of slugs of bourbon sweetened with a dash of coffee--and his hobby was seven-deck "pan ginney" dealt out at the Pastime Cafe. Wise Mike laboriously scratched dust for 30 years before he came up with a modest gold strike, but instead of in vesting it in "pan ginney," he put his faith in Alaska and bought real estate in Fairbanks.

Cats & Dogs. The Stepoviches were divorced when Mike was an infant, and his mother took him to Portland, Ore. when he was six months old. When he was 1 6, young Mike began spending his summers near Fairbanks working in his father's "Cat" and mines. For bought $5 a food day, for he the drove a camp, sometimes packed in 35-40 lbs. on his back across swampy terrain. Alaska's beauty and swat got him; he decided to take a permanent swat at it himself.

Back in the states at Columbia Prep, and later at the University of Portland and Spokane's Gonzaga University, Mike played baseball (first base), gave up a chance to turn pro, went on instead to Notre Dame for his law degree. After that, he put in 3- 1/2-years on Navy desk duty, was discharged a yeoman third class.

In 1947 he returned to Portland to court a hearty, good-looking social worker named Matilda Baricevich. "Mat" knew that marriage to Mike meant frozen bliss in the tundra. "I rather looked forward to it," she says, "even though I had the usual idea of eternal snow and sled dogs cuddling up to you in a cabin for warmth." Mike went on to Fairbanks in the fall of 1947, took his bar exams. Before the year was out, he was appointed city attorney and had settled down with Mat in a four-bedroom frame house.

Step by Step. Mike soon quit his job to set up private practice in a cubicle on Cushman Street. He liked the law but being the friendly sort, found it hard to apply himself seriously. He lost his papers on the way to court to try his first case; he seemed forever to be playing golf or shooting the breeze with friends on Cushman Street while Mat stayed home and cared for an increasing crop of children--now the famous "eight little 'itches" (five months to nine years old), who are part of a Step-by-Step plan that calls for an even dozen children.

Alaska was growing, and so was Mike Stepovich's awareness of it. In 1950 he ran for a seat in the territorial legislature. He was elected to three terms. It was in the legislature, under the tutelage of an old friend and longtime Republican bigwig named John Butrovich Jr. ("Butro and Stepo") that Mike sank himself deep into Alaska's problems.

Yahoos & Tears. For years, the statehood theme had whisked like a williwaw across the territory, sweeping up the visionaries, tossing the stubborn into stormy waves of opposition. In Washington, Alaska's longtime (first elected in 1944) delegate to Congress, onetime Gold Miner Bob Bartlett, spent his days and nights trying to carve out a 49th star on an unrelenting congressional conscience. Another missionary was a former newsman and editor of the Nation, Dr. Ernest Gruening (TIME, June 16, 1947), appointed Governor of Alaska by Franklin Roosevelt in 1939. A diehard conservationist, crusty Ernest Gruening soon realized that Alaska's sleeping giant needed prodding, even at the cost of some of his own conservationist ideals. Says Anchorage Times Publisher Bob Atwood: "Gruening taught Alaskans that they could speak up and yell like yahoos for their rights."

In late 1955 a band of 55 Alaskans, elected by the voters, met at the University of Alaska near Fairbanks. Housewives, lawyers, pilots and merchants, they brought with them packets of state papers, copies of constitutions and history books, set to work writing a provisional constitution. For 75 days, the Alaskans labored, phrasing, rephrasing, arguing. At length, on Feb. 5, 1956, emotionally spent, physically exhausted, brimming with pride, they voted to approve a finely hewn document. "These are good, tough men and women, and I wondered if we might not be getting carried away," recalls Alaska University President Ernest N. Patty, "so I looked for [Real Estate Man] Muktuk Marsdon--this big, tough man with a face like granite. And there he was, digging tears from the corners of his eyes and actually throwing them down on the floor--completely disgusted with himself, apparently, but unable, as the rest of us, to hold it back."

Best Friend. Congress was unimpressed. Eisenhower's Interior Secretary Douglas McKay appeared similarly uninterested. It was only after McKay's resignation in 1956 that Alaska's hopes grew again. President Eisenhower appointed Nebraska's Republican ex-Senator Fred Seaton to McKay's job, and Seaton became the best friend Alaska statehood ever had in official Washington.

Fred Seaton flew into Alaska in 1957, looking for a new Governor. "There were 17 candidates and a dozen others being urged by individuals or groups," says he. "I saw this young lawyer in Fairbanks. Just 37 at the time. He never applied for the job. The more I saw him, the more I knew I was going to recommend him." Steering Mike Stepovich from behind were two powerful Republicans: Territorial Senator Butrovich and Fairbanks Publisher (News-Miner) Bill Snedden.

Time to Shine. "You know," says Mike Stepovich, "a fellow doesn't quite realize, right after his election or appointment to such a job, just how much it means. People say hello, everything's gay and fine. And then comes that time--the time when you know you're going to have to stop just showing your teeth and start producing." Mike started producing right after his inauguration in June 1957. Says Matilda, who calls him "Mali" (Slavic for "little boy"): "When we were living in Fairbanks and Mali was practicing law, the jacket pocket on every one of his suits used to be torn from getting caught on a parking meter where he'd be leaning up while talking with the boys. There haven't been any torn pockets since we came to Juneau. But he's getting a shine on the seat of all his trousers."

No cheechako (newcomer), Mike Stepovich knows his country, puts in a solid day's work in his office in Juneau's grey stone Federal Building, deals with the 47 appointive territorial boards and commissions, oversees emergency work projects, orders examination of fiscal programs that will help prove Alaska's ability to stand alone, confers with Washington and territorial officials, studies his mail, e.g., "We the undersigned students have been recently examined by Dr. Brownlee and 60 having been found with defective teeth, do humbly petition our Governor, Mike Stepovich, to send us a dentist."

Time to Change. Up on Squaw Hill, in the three-story, columned gubernatorial mansion, Mike pursues a rollicking, split-second family life. The eight little 'itches have to be undressed in assembly-line fashion for their showers; the mansion's third floor is blocked off ("We're always losing Dominic," says Matilda); Band-aids, next to food and clothing, are the big expense, what with the children falling downstairs or sliding too fast down the bannisters, or falling off the gubernatorial totem pole that stands outside. After dinner and a session of TV-watching, church-going Roman Catholic Mike sings out: "Prayers, everyone, let's say our prayers." He and the youngsters then kneel in a cluster about a big armchair before they are paraded off to bed.

In the morning Mike swings out of bed at 6:30, goes down the hall to look in on the children, methodically counts heads as he passes from room to room. Then, midst the morning chatter and leggy tumbling of this brood, the Governor of Alaska hoists his three youngest children to the stately hardwood table on which, 91 years earlier, U.S. Secretary of State William Seward proudly signed the historic Alaska purchase with Russia (for $7,200,000) and, one by one, proceeds to diaper them.

Discovery. Mike's use of so hallowed a table symbolizes no bottomless irreverence for Alaskan tradition, but rather the muscular spirit of the ever-changing, booming vastness that was once a faraway, forgotten frontier. As Governor, he has, in a sense, discovered Alaska all over again. "Man," says he, "it wasn't until I got into office that I really began to appreciate, with our resources potential, how much we could have accomplished even by now, if only we had the freedom and the responsibility to operate."

Stepovich's Alaska faces problems that will only become more intense with statehood. Once federal supervision and federal dollars are removed, Alaskans, who now pay a territorial income tax equal to 14% of their federal tax, will have to dig even deeper to pay increased costs of self-government. They are already strapped by what they call F.C.L.--fearful cost of living. Virtually everything Alaska uses is brought in by steamer and airplane, and because the territory produces so little for ships and planes to haul profitably back to the States, the freight charges boost retail prices to alarming levels. A Seattle dollar shrinks about 19-c- in Juneau, 29-c- in Anchorage, 35-c- in Fairbanks. Wages consequently run 15-40% higher than comparable Stateside payrolls, and that is a factor that holds back large-scale investment from Stateside in Alaska's potential.

Rhapsody in Riches. But Alaska's promise sends statehooders into rhapsody. The oil boom, centered in the Kenai Peninsula, has brought the big U.S. oil companies hurrying north to drill the place full of holes--even though drilling a well there costs almost three times as much as it does at home--and already they have filed for leases on 27 million acres. The timber business racked up $34.3 million in 1957, and that economic youngster is still in short plants. Near Ketchikan, hard by the 16 million-acre Tongass National Forest, is a new, $52 1/2 million pulp mill, and timber folk talk about production of 2 billion board feet a year (v. 33 billion Stateside). Scarcely tapped, too, is Alaska's mineral treasure, which boasts 31 of the 33 metals on the U.S.'s critical list (exceptions: industrial diamonds, bauxite). The North American continent's only major tin deposits lie in the Seward Peninsula, and some of the world's biggest known iron-ore deposits wait in the Klukwan section. Coal, as one engineer says, is "all over the damn place."

Alaska's biggest business is fishing (1957 take: $93 million), which is controlled by Seattle packers, supervised by an absentee government--and this outside control is the pet hate of Alaska statehooders. They claim that it weakens the Alaskan labor market by bringing in outsiders for half its 25,000 seasonal work force, and more important, severely depletes stocks by the use of fish traps. As it is, the industry is slipping (8,000,000 cases packed in 1936 v. 2,500,000 in 1957), and the sagging market makes it all the more imperative that the new state get new, diversified industry if it is to pay its own way.

Opulence & Elements. Alaska has already made a running start with the resource of people. Anchorage, near the Kenai Peninsula, vibrates with a population of 35,000, has an opulent subdivision of $35,000 homes built by enterprising Wally Hickel. Two tall apartment houses peak the skyline, a glassed-in, year-round swimming pool ripples within sight of icy mountains, and fashionably dressed men and women frequent the Westward Hotel's spiffy cocktail lounge. Juneau still straggles with dingy, narrow streets from the roaring gold-rush times. Local phone service ends twelve miles from town, electricity 19 miles, the road 26 miles. In Juneau too, as if insulated from the rest of the territory by the mountains, are those who are most vocal against immediate statehood, led by the Juneau Empire's Publisher William Prescott ("Alamo"') Allen, a former Texan.

Fairbanks was once a settlement quilted with sod-chinked log cabins. Today, livelier than ever, it still has many cabins, but the city has good utilities, the University of Alaska (on-campus enrollment: 700), a handsome Professional Building, and an urban redevelopment program that is chewing up the old cabins once inhabited by the bawds of "the line" to make room for more acceptable businesses.

Alaska has a stir and a throb that reaches far beyond the cities, into the tundra, across the forbidding mountains and glaciers, into the valleys. For most Alaskans, each day is a dare, each night a doubtful victory. Territorial Police Superintendent Bob Brandt's meager force of uniformed police and U.S. deputy marshals patrol the vastnesses in planes, helicopters and on dog sleds, alert for signs of old trappers who sometimes die on the trail and are eaten by their dogs; for pillagers who ransack the remote cabins, where a food cache is a guarantee of life for the inhabitant; for the hardy men who are inexplicably swallowed up in the unmapped oblivion.

Dynamic Chemistry. The airplane, operated by scheduled airlines as well as by oldtime bush pilots and private owners, is the tie to the cities for the thousands who live in wilderness villages. Airlines touch Point Barrow in the far north on the Arctic Ocean, Kotzebue on Kotzebue Sound, Attu in the Aleutians. Bush Pilot Don Sheldon, 36, hauls Indians and Eskimos, dog teams, pregnant women, dynamite and lumber, drops his handy craft onto a slippery strip in Umiat or on crags high in the mountain ranges. He brings groceries to Schoolteacher Charlie Richmond (home town: Tuxedo Park, N.Y.), who lives in Sleetmute (pop. 120) on the Kuskokwim River, where English-speaking Eskimos still attend Sleetmute's Russian Orthodox Church. Pilots transport Fairbanks Attorney Ed Merdes, 32, head of the Alaskan Junior Chamber of Commerce, who periodically visits club chapters in such places as Metlakahtla, south of Ketchikan. And they see, day after day, the strengthened heart of a people willing to challenge new frontiers.

"I tell you this," says John Butrovich, with the special kind of awe that seems to flourish in Alaskans, "a dynamic chemistry is working here." That chemistry is a passion for life and growth. To Mike Stepovich and the rest of Alaska's leaders, statehood is a birthright, and they have etched that declaration on the skylines of the cities and on the cold, unyielding glaciers of their land.

* Established by Alexander Baranof, a Siberian dry-goods salesman, manager of the Russian American Co., chartered in 1799 by Russia's Emperor Paul. Ordered to promote discovery, commerce and agriculture and to propagate Christianity, Baranof virtually ruled Alaska for 20-odd years. Through his trading company, which was to Alaska what Hudson's Bay Co. was to Canada, Baranof ably enhanced Russia's claim to the territory by organizing the country, setting up trade relations with England, the U.S. and Spain, and turning Sitka itself into a glittering, sophisticated Russian colony.

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