He got $28 million for a rail terminal open only during the summer and $40 million for a commercial space satellite facility.
Almost every institution, region and segment of the population in the state has benefited from Stevens' efforts, from its schools and social programs to its transportation system, its urban areas and the far-flung villages of Alaska's Native peoples.
But during the period Stevens has grown wealthy, some longtime supporters say, the senator has become less willing to hear their views.
"I've been here a long time, and always had a great deal of respect for Sen. Stevens' enormous power and the good he's done for Alaska," Terry Haines, a veteran commercial fisherman from Kodiak Island, said recently. "But lately he's become extremely rigid and doesn't seem to be listening to his constituents much."
Hard Times
Theodore Fulton Stevens was born Nov. 18, 1923, in Indianapolis. At the outset of the Great Depression, when Stevens was 6 years old, his parents divorced, according to his campaign biography.
Stevens went to live with his grandparents after the divorce, helping out by selling newspapers and working evenings and weekends in a drugstore. He later moved in with an aunt and uncle in Manhattan Beach, Calif., where he graduated from high school. Both his father and grandfather died of cancer, Stevens has said.
Stevens joined the Army Air Corps during World War II, flying cargo planes "over the Hump" in the Himalayas -- some of the most dangerous missions of the war. He won two Distinguished Flying Crosses and two Air Medals, his biography says.
The biography describes how he graduated from UCLA and Harvard Law School. After working in the 1952 Eisenhower campaign, he was hired by a Washington lawyer, but soon took a new job as a lawyer in Alaska, which was still a territory.
He played a leading role in the successful campaign for statehood, but Alaska's voters rejected Stevens the first two times he ran for the Senate.
Winning a seat in the state Legislature, he became House majority leader and go-to man for Gov. Walter J. Hickel. In 1968, when Sen. E.L. "Bob" Bartlett died unexpectedly, Hickel picked his ally to fill the vacancy.
In the Senate at last, Stevens worked hard to master legislative details and committee politics.
But increasing political success was accompanied by personal tragedy.
