Champion of The Elderly

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Neatness is another Pepper trademark. He wears a fresh suit, usually with vest, every day. His sparse white hair (he stopped wearing a toupee in 1980 after it blew off as he greeted President Jimmy Carter at the Miami Airport) is carefully combed. Presiding at a recent House Rules Committee hearing, he leaned back, motioned to an aide and whispered in his ear. The aide rushed to straighten a portrait on a side wall. Pepper nodded his approval.

"In Alabama, we lived in a house that was little more than a place to sleep," recalls Claude's brother Frank, 65. "We did not have a car. I can remember hearing him come home late at night, rehearsing speeches he was going to give when he became a U.S. Senator."

Pepper cannot really explain how he managed to grow up uninfected by the redneck racism prevalent in the Alabama farm country where he was born in 1900. "Why, I was full grown," says Pepper, the eldest of four children, "before I ever traveled on a paved road." Whatever the reason, he felt the stir of ambition early on: at the tender age often, he carved the words CLAUDE PEPPER, UNITED STATES SENATOR on a tree.

Pepper entered the University of Alabama in the fall of 1918. To help pay his way, he worked from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. hauling coal and ashes at a power plant. He starred on the debating team, ran on the track squad, made Phi Beta Kappa, but lost his first election: for student-body president. When his oratorical skills took him to a contest in Chapel Hill, N.C., "it was the farthest north I had ever been."

The North beckoned, however. "Why shouldn't I go to the best law school there is?" he asked himself. He applied to Harvard, was admitted and got tuition, books and $100 a month support money from the Veterans Administration. The reason: during his brief Army service, spent training at the University of Alabama, he suffered an injury that developed into a double hernia. Pepper's appreciation for both education and a benevolent Uncle Sam was never to leave him: "I get so burned up when anybody tries to cut back on the money available to help needy students."

After Harvard, Pepper taught law for a year at the University of Arkansas, then set up practice in Perry, Fla. In the next eleven years, he handled some 30 murder cases, taking one of them successfully all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Active in Democratic politics, Pepper, at 28, became a member of the Florida Democratic executive committee. He won at the polls for the first of 15 times: he was elected to the Florida house of representatives. One of his first bills showed his early concern for the elderly. It would let anyone over 65 fish without a license.

But his sense of racial fairness may have cost him his seat two years later. He was defeated after voting against a resolution that criticized Mrs. Herbert Hoover for inviting the wife of a black Congressman to the White House. Recalls Pepper: "I thought my political career had died aborning."

He resumed his law practice, opening an office in Tallahassee and bringing his parents to live with him in 1931. The Depression had proved ruinous to his father. Pepper learned firsthand the problems of the elderly, caring for his father until he died in 1945 at the age of 72 and his mother until her death in 1961 at 84.