US senator who put Alaska on the map

For six decades Ted Stevens fought for and funded Alaska. When he began working as an attorney in Fairbanks in 1953, it was a desolate, remote and neglected federal territory. When he left the US Senate in 2009, the 49th State had benefited from billions of dollars of funding, more per capita than any other. Alaskans called him "Uncle Ted" and he could boast: "From frozen tundra we built airports, roads, ports, water and sewer systems, hospitals, clinics, communications networks, research labs and much, much more."

Theodore Fulton Stevens was not in fact Alaskan-born but a native of Indianapolis. The Great Depression, divorce and death led him as a teenager to California where he lived with an aunt. He joined the Army Air Corps flying transport planes over the Himalayas to China and won the DFC and an Air Medal. With the benefit of the GI Bill, supplemented by selling his blood, a loan from an uncle and odd jobs, he graduated from the University of California and, in 1950, Harvard Law School.

In 1952, he married Ann Mary Cherrington, the adopted daughter of a university chancellor, and they moved from Washington to Alaska where he was soon appointed a federal prosecutor. In 1956, he returned to Washington, joining the department of the interior. It was said he wrote 90 per cent of the speeches in the Senate in support of Alaskan statehood. He became known as "Mr Alaska". Returning to Anchorage in 1960, he won a seat in the State House in 1964. Four years later he was appointed by the governor to fill a Senate seat, as a Republican. He would serve six terms, spending 40 years in the Senate.

He came under fire for his support of the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere" - a $223m (Dh820m) project to service an island of 50 people. But his real undoing occurred in July 2008 when he was indicted on seven counts of failing to report gifts from an oil company executive. A week before the 2008 election, he was convicted. Characteristically, he still ran and was only narrowly defeated by the mayor of Anchorage.On April 1, 2009 - too late - his conviction was quashed.

He had flown over his state countless times and had survived two aircraft crashes, one of which, in 1978, claimed the life of his first wife. He did not survive the third, in the fog-bound mountains over Bristol Bay. Born on November 18, 1923, he is survived by his second wife, Catherine, their daughter and five children from his first marriage. He died on August 9. * The National