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The Simple Life. In Washington, Senator George lives with his wife in a three-room apartment in the Mayflower Hotel. (Their two sons, Lieut. Heard F. George of the Army Air Forces and Lieut. J. Marcus George of the Naval Air Corps, are married.) The Georges have no maid. Mrs. George, an ample, imperious-looking yet jolly woman—known to all her friends as Miz Lucy—cooks all the meals. The Senator is usually up by 7 a.m., takes a quick shower, breakfasts on orange juice, eggs and fried Georgia ham (his favorite dish), and is in his air-conditioned office in the Senate Office Building by 8:30. His office is a model of neat efficiency.
By 10:30, the Senator is usually at a committee meeting, by noon on the Senate floor. During the afternoon he will stride out of the Senate Chamber back to his office to read bills, reports, memoranda — mostly on taxes.
An ideal evening for the Georges has the Senator turning the radio on loud, sitting spang in front of it and reading tax reports, while Miz Lucy does needlepoint at a slightly safer distance. The Senator pores over data, laughs at Fibber McGee & Molly (his favorites), dives back to his reports. The Georges dine out infrequently, almost never dress for dinner. Senator George does not own a silk hat. He used to get his greatest relaxation fishing, with cotton caterpillars, in the Flint River near his five-room home at Vienna (pronounced, in Georgia: Vy-enna).
Up from Tenancy. Friends of Senator George, who admire his stern, Baptist-bred rectitude, like to say that he was born poor and will die poor. But he will not die as poor as he was born. His father, Robert T. George, was a tenant farmer, grubbing a scant existence out of the red clay Georgia plain. (Father George, now 90, subsequently made a modest fortune in Florida real estate, lives nearby.) At 16, young George had put himself through high school, won fame as a boy orator. With a law degree from Mercer University (1901) he went to Vienna, a county seat of 2,000, as the place to hang out his shingle. Vienna legend has it that after a few years all the other lawyers worked on Walter George to go into politics, because he had all the business.
In twelve years, he rose from city solicitor to judge of the State Supreme Court, where he stayed five years. He left the bench in 1922 in disgust over crooked Georgia politics when his term still had five years to run.
"God Bless You, Walter." Succeeding to the Senate seat of tub-thumping Tom Watson nine months later, he was re-elected in 1926 and 1932. But his great test came in 1938. His career as something more than run-of-the-mine Senator began on a hot August day in Barnesville, Ga. Franklin Roosevelt had marked him as a Southern conservative to be purged from the Senate. George had opposed the Court-packing bill, and he was too stubbornly independent to be counted on as a 100% New Dealer.
On that day the President came to Barnesville to start the purge himself. With Walter George on the platform, the President pronounced his excommunication. Senator George, cool in a white suit, stepped to the microphone, said: "I accept the challenge."
Said the President, with a smile: "God bless you, Walter. Let's always be friends."