We're turning 50! Alaskans prepare to celebrate half a century of statehood.

• Author: Bohi, Heidi

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Next year, children will learn about how Alaska carne to be a state as grownups toast the single-most significant event in Alaska's history. Most will likely imagine the passage of statehood nearly 50 years ago as nothing more than a routine presidential-signing ceremony replete with the big wooden desk, fancy pen and smiling onlookers.

While this has been the case behind the passage of statehood for most other states, nothing has ever come quite so easily for Alaska. In fact, by the time the Last Frontier's statehood cause was victorious and President Eisenhower signed the official declaration on Jan. 3, 1959--making Alaska the 49th state --the issue of self-determination had traveled a treacherous, uphill climb.

Alaska's territorial governor Ernest Gruening, Congressional delegate Bob Bartlett and prominent business leaders had engineered many efforts to achieve statehood by 1953--still three decades after Alaska became an American Territory and before the American flag finally billowed with seven rows of seven stars each. But Alaska was still without adequate roads, airfields, hospitals and other statehood benefits the rest of the country enjoyed. Having two voting United States senators and a voting member in the House of Representatives was the only way Alaskans could get what they rightfully had coming to them--and that would only happen if Alaska was admitted into the union.

In 1949, the Alaska Statehood Committee was formed to lobby for statehood, appealing to national and labor organizations, newspaper editors and state governors to get the word out about Alaska's plight. Gruening took it a step further, organizing a committee of 100 public figures and celebrities who supported Alaska statehood, including Eleanor Roosevelt, actor James Cagney, activist Pearl S. Buck, journalist and author John Gunther, and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Statehood became a popular cause nationwide and a bill made it through the House of Representatives before being defeated in the Senate.

The Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1952, again moved statehood to the back burner until the 1955 Constitutional Convention was held in Fairbanks, and the resulting Alaska Constitution was overwhelmingly accepted by Alaskans the following year. Finally, when Congress reconvened in 1958, the political shenanigans surrounding the issue had run their course, the public persuasion efforts had worked, and for the first time, President...