Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia has died at age 92. The New York Times has published a nice summary of his career.
Byrd grow up in poverty in a coal mining camp in West Virginia. My mother also grew up poor, the daughter of a coal miner. She is four years younger than Byrd. As a child, we regularly drove to my grandparents' home on the hillside around the bend from the mine where my grandfather survived an explosion when my mother was a child.
Byrd was his high school valedictorian but never went to college. My mother was high school valedictorian at University High School in Morgantown, WV, in 1939, but because she was a coal miner's daughter, no one at the school suggested that she even consider going to the inexpensive West Virginia University with which the high school was affiliated. (Another clerk at the five and ten cents store where my mother was a sales clerk after high school asked her if she would accompany her to register at WVU. The other clerk's goal was to marry a football player! My mother went to the School of Journalism and became the editor-in-chief of the Daily Athenaeum, the university newspaper, from 1942-43. During World War II, my father was sent by the U.S. Army to West Virginia University, where my parents met.)
After Byrd entered Congress -- I was three years old when he did -- he enrolled in law school and earned a law degree from American University. He wrote four books. He served in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Congress longer than anyone else ever has.
In the last half of the Twentieth Century, Congress steadily tolerated, if not encouraged, the expansion of Presidential power in the American political system. As a former Congressional staffer, I believe that the Congress makes a mistake when it gives up power. This concern was probably the concern of Senator Byrd's that was most important to me.
Should Byrd have retired long ago? No doubt his frailty limited his ability to participate in the high energy activity of the Senate. But on the other hand, he contributed a wisdom of age, and to someone of my years, he has been a great and inspiring model of the many years of productive activity people like me still have.
