US Congressman. A Republican who represented the state of Florida's 13th congressional district, he served in this position from 1971 until his death. Born into poverty, his father left the family and a flood washed away their home when he was six years old. When he was 16, his family moved to Florida where his uncle had a hunting camp near Saint Petersburg and was forced to drop out of high school to support his sick mother. At the age of 18, he joined the Army National Guard, serving from 1948 until 1957 as a military policeman. After finishing his service, he became an insurance salesman and ultimately ran an insurance agency. In 1960 he ventured into politics and was elected to the Florida Senate, where he served from 1961 to 1970, and was minority leader in that chamber from 1966 to 1970. From 1962 through 1964 he served on the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (chaired by state senator Charley Eugene Johns), commonly known as the Johns Committee, a legislative panel that investigated the activities of homosexuals, communists and others thought to be subversive. In 1964 the committee released a pamphlet entitled "Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida," which drew criticism at the time for its use of explicit photographs of homosexual acts. In 1970 he was elected to Congress from what was then the 8th District and was reelected 20 times. The district, which changed numbers four times during his tenure (it was the 8th District from 1971 to 1973, the 6th District from 1971 to 1983, the 8th District again from 1983 to 1993, the 10th from 1993 to 2013, and has been the 13th since 2013) was once considered a Republican stronghold. In 1986 he helped create a national registry for bone marrow donors called the National Marrow Donor program, and currently lists nearly 10 million volunteer donors and has helped to facilitate transplants for more than 50,000 people. From 1999 until 2005 he served as Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations. As Chairman, he took up the cause for veterans, pulling strings when he needed to and taking a personal interest in the lives of countless service members and would routinely visit the bedsides of wounded soldiers in Saint Petersburg and in the Washington, DC area. He died at the age of 82 after being hospitalized for two weeks with back problems stemming from a small plane crash in 1970. At the time of his death, he was the longest-tenured Republican in Congress and in early October 2013, he had officially announced that he would not seek reelection in 2014.