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Byrd graduated at the top of his high school class of 30, but the Depression made college only a dream. It took him one year to find a job as a gas station attendant; then he switched to cutting meat in a shop closer to home for $12.50 a week. Byrd studied a butcher's manual, honing skills he had already picked up tending his family's hogs. He recalls the details: "I shot them, stabbed them, cut their throats, hung them up, cut them open, rolled out the insides, cleaned them out."
By the time he was 20, Byrd had saved enough to marry his high school sweetheart, Erma Ora James. Occupying two rooms of a house owned by his employers, the Byrds could not even afford an ice box; they hung half an orange crate outside a window. Four years later the couple moved to Crab Orchard, W. Va., where Byrd got a better paying job, as head butcher in a supermarket.
In 1942 Byrd made what he calls "the worst mistake of my life." He joined the Ku Klux Klan. He says that back home in Crab Orchard, "everybody was in the Klan—my adoptive father, the minister, the doctors, the judges. I got attracted to the idea of the Klan because it seemed pro-American and anti-Communist."
Last week Byrd revealed to TIME Correspondent Neil Mac-Neil that it was a top Klan official who first encouraged him to run for Congress. Said Byrd: "I know it will hurt me, but I want to tell the story in full." Byrd wrote to the Imperial Wizard of the Klan in 1942, asking to join.
He received a reply from Grand Dragon J.L. Baskin, a retired Methodist minister whose Klan realm included West Virginia; Baskin encouraged Byrd to organize his own klavern of 150 members. He did just that and was then unanimously elected Exalted Cyclops, the group's leader. Impressed, the Grand Dragon told Byrd: "These people believe in you. You ought to set your cap for Congress."
Instead, Byrd went off to work as a welder in shipyards in Baltimore and Tampa during World War II. By the time he returned to Crab Orchard after the war, he had lost interest in the Klan but not in Baskin. Byrd, who played a mighty fine, foot-stomping hillbilly fiddle, asked Baskin what he should do next. Said the Grand Dragon: "Take that fiddle and use it." In 1946 he ran for the state legislature and fiddled his way into office. Playing such tunes as Turkey in the Straw and Old Joe Clark, he drew campaign crowds and attention in town after town, beat out twelve other Democratic primary candidates, and went on to win the election.
Byrd then bought his own grocery store in Sophia, W. Va., and started earning credits for a bachelor's degree at three different West Virginia colleges. In 1952 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. "There was no time for leisure, no time for anything but work, work," says Byrd.
After three undistinguished terms in the House, he was swept into the Senate in the Democratic landslide of 1958. "Once into politics, I dreamed of going into the Senate," Byrd recalls. "It was like falling in love with my childhood sweetheart. I couldn't live without her."