For those who like to keep track of all things related to North Carolina, here's some trivia: How many North Carolinians are there in the U.S. Senate right now?
Depending on how you define the term, there are four: U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole, reared in Salisbury (and defeated by state Sen. Kay Hagan of Greensboro, a Shelby native, in last week's election), and Sen. Richard Burr, from Winston-Salem. Both Dole and Burr are Republicans; Hagan is a Democrat.
And there are at least two senators who are N.C. natives (native, as in (born in' as opposed to 'reared in') but who represent other states.
One of them is West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, an aging parliamentarian who was born in Wilkes County, and whom the Democratic leadership recently persuaded to step down from leadership of the appropriations committee because of his advanced age. He'll be 91 next week. Byrd was born on Nov. 20, 1917. Wikipedia's entry says this: "Byrd was born Cornelius Calvin Sale, Jr., in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, in 1917. When he was one year old, his mother, Ada Mae Kirby, died in the 1918 Flu Pandemic. In accordance with his mother's wishes, his father, Cornelius Calvin Sale, dispersed the family children among relatives. Sale Jr. was given to the custody of an aunt and an uncle, Vlurma and Titus Byrd, who renamed him Robert Carlyle Byrd and raised him in the coal-mining region of southern West Virginia." Curiously, Byrd, a Democrat, is a former Ku Klux Klan member, way back in his youth, who endorsed Barack Obama for president.
The other Tar Heel native in the Senate is Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss. As my former colleague Dave Ingram notes in an e-mail from Washington, where he now works for Legal Times, Chambliss was born in Warrenton in Warren County in 1943. Chambliss later graduated from high school in Louisiana and went to the University of Georgia. Chambliss, a Republican, is locked in a Dec. 2 runoff with Democrat Jim Martin, an Atlanta native.
Ok, one more piece of trivia. Of the four current U.S. senators and the one senator-elect mentioned in this blog, which one is not a North Carolina native? It's Richard Burr, a native of Charlottesville, Va.
(And just to take note: That's the same state -- excuse me, commonwealth -- from whence Lt. Gov. Bev Perdue came to this state to eventually become the first woman elected lieutenant governor and governor of this state. She's a native of Grundy, Va.)
(Which other recent N.C. governor was born elsewhere? Gov. Jim Martin, governor from 1985-1993, born in Savannah, Ga. And no, that’s not the same Jim Martin running against Saxby Chambliss.)
