Howard Baker, Sr.

Howard Henry Baker Sr. (January 12, 1902 – January 7, 1964) was an American lawyer and politician who was elected to seven consecutive terms as a United States Representative from Tennessee from 1951 to 1964. He was the father of future U.S. Senate majority leader and White House chief of staff Howard Baker, Jr. Biography Baker was born in Somerset, Kentucky, in 1902 to James F. Baker, an attorney and newspaper publisher in Huntsville, Tennessee, and Kentucky native Helen Keen Baker. The family moved to Huntsville, Tennessee, in 1909, and Baker spent most of his childhood in Scott County. The family moved to Knoxville in 1918, the same year that Baker entered the university there. He graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1922 and its law school in 1924; he was admitted to the Tennessee bar in 1923. Baker is an alumnus of the Epsilon Eta chapter of Sigma Nu Fraternity. After law school, Baker married Dora Ladd and returned to Huntsville to become a partner in his father's practice. Their son, Howard Baker Jr., was born in Huntsville in 1925. Dora died when Howard Jr. was a child. On September 15, 1935, he married Edith Irene Bailey. Career For a period, Baker served as publisher of a weekly newspaper in Huntsville, Tennessee, the county seat of Scott County. In 1928, he was elected to a term in the Tennessee House of Representatives, and served on the Scott County Board of Education from 1931 to 1932. In 1934, he became district attorney general of the former 19th Judicial Circuit, serving until 1938 in that capacity.