Thomas Fitzgerald: Frank Lautenberg earned his reputation for toughness

Outside the dark-blue Lincoln Continental rolling between campaign stops along New Jersey's Route 1 on a late summer afternoon in 1994, the storm was gathering. In a few weeks, the American electorate would smite big government in a Republican deluge.

In the backseat of the car, the "swamp dog" was off the chain, ready to fight.

"See this widening project?" Democratic Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg said as the vehicle squeezed past orange cones, flashing yellow lights, and a concrete barrier. He got the money for it. Government did that. And government could make people's lives better - from widening roads to bigger things.

When Lautenberg died Monday at 89, I recalled that ride nearly 19 years ago, when I was covering his second reelection campaign for the Bergen Record. He was by turns reflective, funny, and combative.

Not for nothing was Lautenberg given the swamp-dog tag by retired Army general and golden boy (Heisman, Rhodes) Pete Dawkins, the Republican who had challenged him in 1988 only to be chewed up as a lying, pampered carpetbagger with contempt for ordinary people. Lautenberg would survive in 1994 by ripping his opponent's proposed "flathead tax" and intimating that the man, a GOP speaker of the New Jersey Assembly, was a racist.

On that campaign day, Lautenberg put on a T-shirt and walked for a brisk mile during a charity race. An organizer introduced him from the event stage, saying he must be breathing hard after the workout. A peeved Lautenberg said later: "It's not like I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro or something."

Lautenberg often chafed at being eclipsed by then-Sen. Bill Bradley, a 6-foot-5 pro basketball legend. When a group of sorority sisters asked Lautenberg to pose for a picture after the race, the senator stood on his tiptoes and joked, "If I do this, do I look like Bill Bradley?"

Yet political types in New Jersey used to say that if your Social Security check didn't arrive and you asked Bradley's office for help, you'd get a three-page treatise about his position on entitlement reform. Lautenberg would get you the money.

He was practical like that. Among his signature legislative achievements: banning smoking on commercial airline flights, requiring industrial plants to publicly disclose the toxic chemicals they use, raising the drinking age to 21 nationally, funding for passenger rail service.

Nothing to earn a long passage in the high school history books, but, as he saw it, all life-improving things.

Lautenberg came by his belief in government viscerally. The poor son of Polish and Russian immigrants from the mill town of Paterson, he served in World War II, then earned a business degree at Columbia University on the GI Bill and went on to make million as a founder of a payroll services company. Lautenberg believed the government, by paying for his education, made that success possible.

Lautenberg's father, Samuel, with a sixth-grade education, worked in the silk mills of Paterson and died of cancer in his early 40s. The senator always said his father's struggle cemented his drive for environmental regulation.

"He was an unusual fellow, very intellectual," Lautenberg recalled of his father in 1994. "He used to read Gandhi ... would preach that if you kept your body in good shape, your mind would be in good shape." On Sundays, Samuel Lautenberg would put that into practice, packing a lunch and taking his son on the bus to hike in the woods on the New York border.

After his father left the mills, the Lautenberg family ran a series of candy stores and luncheonettes in North Jersey towns, struggling to pay off the loan sharks that fronted them the money.

"We never had dinner at the table as a family," Lautenberg recalled. "We'd sit in the back of the luncheonette in a booth until a customer would come in, and then we'd get up and wait on them."