FAIRBANKS -- State leaders, family and friends have gathered here to pay their last respects to Mike Stepovich, a longtime lawyer and family patriarch who served as territorial governor during a pivotal moment in Alaska history.
A funeral mass is set for 11 a.m. Friday at Sacred Heart Cathedral, followed by a reception at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Appointed governor during the Eisenhower administration in 1957, Stepovich carried the Republican banner when he challenged former Gov. Ernest Gruening, a Democrat, to be one of the first United States senators from Alaska in 1958. Stepovich nearly won.
At 38, he had been the youngest territorial governor and the second Alaskan to land on the cover of Time Magazine. The first was Gruening and the third was Sarah Palin, nearly a half-century later.
One unusual element in Stepovich's life story is the central role he played in a political drama that led to a landmark decision on libel law.
The political passions of the statehood campaign have long since faded, but in 1958 the Senate campaign between Stepovich and Gruening turned in part on a fierce argument about whether Stepovich was a "Johnny-come-lately" to the statehood movement.
A protégé of the late John Butrovich, a Fairbanks legislator and insurance man, Stepovich was a charismatic politician who had served in the Legislature before moving into the governor's mansion with his wife Matilda and the "Step by Step" cadre of "iches," the photogenic family Stepovich, which in time numbered 13.
Gruening, 71, attacked Stepovich as a "glamour boy" and claimed the Fairbanks lawyer had been an opponent of statehood who switched sides out of convenience and was backed by the "one-party press," the pro-GOP newspapers in Alaska.
The Republican establishment, led by C.W. "Bill" Snedden, publisher of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, took every opportunity to promote Stepovich and attack Gruening as old and out-of-touch.
On July 7, 1958, one week after Congress approved statehood, the Daily News-Miner published an op-ed column by Drew Pearson, the most powerful columnist in America, that began: "A lot of Johnny-come-latelies such as Gov. Mike Stepovich are now claiming credit for making Alaska the 49th state in the Union. But the man who unobtrusively, but consistently, badgered Senators, buttonholed Congressmen, maneuvered in the smoke-filled rooms to bring statehood to Alaska is an ex-newspaperman named Ernest Gruening. He more than anyone else is the father of the 49th state."
At the time, Pearson's column appeared in hundreds of daily newspapers, but this column about Stepovich and Gruening was personal. He had been friends with Gruening for more than 20 years, going back to the 1930s, when Gruening ran his column in the newspaper he edited in Maine.
Enraged over Pearson's attack, Snedden responded with an editorial calling Pearson the "garbage man of the Fourth Estate" and said he would no longer run Pearson's column because he didn't want to distribute garbage with his newspaper.
Snedden said that Gruening was a carpetbagger, not a real Alaskan, and "if you ever see someone being unobtrusive, you won't have to ask his name to be sure it is not Ernest Gruening."
Gruening, who had once nominated Pearson for a Nobel Prize and claimed that Pearson had the "most outstanding column in America, the most interesting, the most readable, the most influential," never ran out of plaudits for his friend.
In return, Pearson boosted Gruening and attacked Stepovich by suing Snedden over the "garbage man" crack.
Pearson described Snedden in private correspondence with Gruening as a "dictatorial suppressor of news" and said 500 letters to the editor might force a change of heart. He also said the publicity about a libel suit would help Gruening in the 1958 election for the U.S. Senate.
"What I have in mind is putting Stepovich on the witness stand and taking his deposition under oath well before the election," Pearson wrote to Gruening. "We could take other depositions of other witnesses, if he lied, to show that he was against statehood. This is about the only way that the people of Alaska could get to know the facts regarding your distinguished friend, the present governor."
"I think there's a gold mine of opportunity in this suit," Pearson said.
George Sundborg, who later worked for Gruening but was the News-Miner editor at the time of the "garbage man" column, privately told Snedden that "sad truth is that Mike never did a thing for statehood till a year ago," but Snedden would have none of it.
In the primary election in 1958, Stepovich collected 5,000 more votes than Gruening and the GOP had high hopes for sending one senator to Washington, D.C., but the advantage did not carry over to the general election. Gruening edged Stepovich, while E.L. "Bob" Bartlett won the other seat.
The publicity about the lawsuit may have helped Gruening, but it would be six years before the libel suit went to trial. In the end, Pearson lost, with the court declaring that he couldn't prove that the garbage man attack showed actual malice on Snedden's part. The case would afterward be cited for precedent in defining "actual malice" in libel suits. Pearson lost the suit, but Gruening had won the election.
Gruening claimed that Stepovich was against statehood during his years as a territorial lawmaker.
For his part, Stepovich acknowledged many years later that before the 1958 campaign he was less than a total convert to the statehood cause, saying he was "95 percent" sure it was a good idea.
In the end, what Time magazine said about him symbolized his reputation among many in Alaska: "What they like best is his open-faced friendliness, his native talent for conveying to doubters 'Outside' what Alaska is about."
Contact Dermot Cole at dermot(at)alaskadispatch.com. Follow him on Twitter @dermotmcole.