Mike Stepovich

He graduated from Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., in 1941. (His daughter Nada was a star volleyball player at Gonzaga, where she met John Stockton, a basketball star there and later in the N.B.A. They married, and their son, David, now plays basketball for Gonzaga.) Mr. Stepovich received a law degree from Notre Dame in 1943. After serving in the Navy, he returned to Fairbanks to practice law and served in the territorial House and Senate, where he was minority leader and fought Democratic efforts to raise taxes on mining, fishing and logging. After his political career ended in the 1960s, he continued to practice law in Fairbanks until moving back to Oregon in 1978. Mr. Stepovich lobbied for the cause across Alaska and elsewhere, particularly on Capitol Hill, where he was one of the effort’s most visible faces. His diplomacy, persistent but warm, was widely credited with helping to build consensus. On June 9, 1958, with momentum toward statehood peaking, his portrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine along with an illustration of a totem pole. Mr. Stepovich ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1962, losing a close race to the incumbent, William A. Egan, with whom he had lobbied for statehood a few years earlier. In 1966, he lost in the Republican primary for governor to Walter J. Hickel, who was elected that fall (and who later became secretary of the interior under Nixon). On June 30, Congress approved a bill granting Alaska statehood. Besides his daughters Antonia and Nada, he is survived by four other daughters, Maria Greulich, Laura Tramonte, Andrea McGill and Melissa Cook; seven sons, Michael, Peter, Christopher, Dominic, Theodore, Nicholas and James; 37 grandchildren; 10 great-grandchildren; two half-sisters, Nada Houston and Ellen Burdette; and two half-brothers, Michael and Alexander Stepovich. His wife, the former Matilda Baricevic, died in 2003.