Everybody, it seems, has a Ted Stevens tale. Larger than life, he was a human dynamo, an Incredible Hulk, an important guy in a world of important guys, but a guy who made time for ordinary people with ordinary problems. He was a guy who remembered names. A guy who penned personal notes to constituents and people he had just met. A guy who defined class.
Some will tell you they ran across him in an airport, or in a restaurant, or how he just walked up and started chatting with them, or how, with no fanfare, he helped them. Others who visited him in Washington were flabbergasted when he took time to buy them traditional bean soup for lunch in the Senate cafeteria.
There is only a handful of men I want to be like when I grow up. My father. Norman Vaughan. Bill Tobin. And Ted Stevens. But maybe taller.
Over the years, I met the senator at social events and sometimes on stories. When I was younger and quite tricky, thank you, I tried to stick it to him during a brief interview. For fun. He laughed and patted me on the arm. I felt like a 6-year-old.
Some years later at the Anchorage Times, Stevens came to argue forcefully against a story we were piecing together about a Southeast Alaska timber mill. He said the story would hurt the community, put people out of work and accomplish very little. The give and take lasted more than an hour, but despite his fabled explosiveness he never seemed agitated. "I didn't lose my temper," he would say. "I know right where it is." He was a teacher patiently dealing with idiots.
Despite his arguments, we plowed ahead. The story earned a prestigious award for the newspaper on the day it shut down. Since, I've wondered about the piece. The things he said would happen, did happen. He could see it; we could not.
Stevens could see many things others could not, and did what needed to be done. "My motto has been here 'to hell with politics, just do what's right for Alaska,' and I have tried every day to live up to those words," he said in his 2008 farewell speech to the Senate.
Because of his tireless energy, we have the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act, the Magnuson-Stevens Act -- to mention a few -- and the Denali Commission, which has funneled about $1 billion in infrastructure to rural Alaska over the past decade, battling Third World conditions. As chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Stevens did the heavy lifting to allow Alaska's infrastructure to begin catching up with the rest of the nation. The list of his contributions and accomplishments stretches to the moon.
In the flotsam and jetsam of the past years, now buried in boxes in the garage, there are handwritten notes from Stevens. One went a long way toward showing me who this guy was.
For the longest time, he was stalked by a former School Board member. No matter how bizarre her behavior, no matter how she harassed him, Stevens remained a gentleman.
When she started causing problems at School Board meetings, the board barred her.
I wrote a column saying no matter her conduct we could not allow officials to ban people from public meetings; to decide who could attend and who could not; that if there were a problem, security should be called and the offender ejected on a case-by-case basis. But a blanket prohibition? Unconscionable.
A few days later, I received a small envelope containing one of his notes. Uh-oh, I said to myself, he is not going to be happy about my defending the woman who tormented him. I was dead wrong. He agreed the board was out of line, and that I should keep after them.
Stevens had good times in Alaska and, over the past few years, some terrible times. Now he is gone, killed along with four others in a plane crash on a wind-blown hillside in Southwest Alaska. I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness, of being adrift.
A war hero, a tough lawyer, a guy with a huge heart who always put Alaska first, the longest-serving Republican ever in the Senate, a father, a grandfather, Stevens was Alaska -- and he was one hell of a guy.
Paul Jenkins is editor of the Anchorage Daily Planet.
Paul Jenkins
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