GROSS, Harold Royce, a Representative from Iowa; born in Arispe, Union County, Iowa, June 30, 1899; educated in the rural schools; served with the First Iowa Field Artillery in the Mexican border campaign in 1916; during the First World War served in the United States Army, with overseas service, 1917-19; attended Iowa State College and the University of Missouri School of Journalism at Columbia; newspaper reporter and editor for various newspapers 1921-35; radio news commentator 1935-1948; delegate, Republican National Convention, 1968; elected as a Republican to the 81st and to the 12 succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1949-January 3, 1975); was not a candidate for reelection in 1974 to the 94th Congress; was a resident of Arlington, Virginia, until his death in Washington, D.C., on September 22, 1987; interment in Arlington National Cemetery.

-- http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=G000495

In 1948, Gross ran against an incumbent House member of his own party, Republican John W. Gwynne. He wrested the nomination away from Gwynne in the Republican primary without the help of the party organization. In a 1948 general election in which Democratic President Harry S. Truman surprisingly carried Iowa and Iowa Democrat Guy Gillette ousted Republican George A. Wilson from the U.S. Senate, Gross won his first of many landslide victories. In his most narrow victory, he was the only Republican member of Iowa's U.S. House delegation to survive the 1964 Democratic landslide. He was re-elected 12 times before choosing to retire rather than run in the 1974 election.

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._R._Gross (the version downloaded on June 18, 2010)

____________________________________________________________________________

From pp. 100-101 of The Great Plains States of America

by Neal Peirce (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973, 402 pages)

Iowa’s most conspicuous Congressman for the past two decades has been H. R. Gross, a cantankerous man of diminutive stature and booming voice who wages an unrelenting, personal war against bloated federal budgets, junketing of his colleagues, and hanky-panky in high places. (FOOTNOTE, p. 100: "Gross’s definition of the improper is not universally shared. One of his targets was President Johnson’s aide, the Rev. Bill Moyers, who incurred the Grossian wrath for dancing the frug in the White House.")

He can be seen any day Congress is in session wandering at random about the House floor, hands in pockets, an ashen look of anger on his heavy-lidded face, ready to press time-consuming quorum calls and force his colleagues to consider if not heed his puritanical counsels. (“When they start shoving me around,” Gross says, “then I ram one right down their throats with a quorum call.”)

The bright side of Gross is that his caustic remarks often enliven dull House debates, and that he performs a positive service in forcing legislators pushing their favorite bills to be well-prepared for debate; through his questioning, he pins down the meaning of ambiguous legislation. (He must be the only member of Congress who reads the entire contents of every piece of legislation that comes to the floor.) A widely held view is that of Massachusetts’ Silvio O. Conte, a liberal Republican: "I think Gross performs a hell of a great service for the Congress."

Many Iowans remember Gross as the voice of doom on Des Moines radio station WHO in his newscasting days (before he went to Congress in 1948). The man who introduced Gross and did his commercials was -- yes, Ronald Reagan. Oddly enough, Gross, the Iowa Gothic champion of olden values, may have been one of the first “media candidates” of American history; Iowa political experts believe that it was only his fame as a broadcaster that enabled him to upset a well-entrenched incumbent to win his first congressional race in the 1948 Republican primary.

Back in his 16-county district in north central Iowa, Gross restrains the wild tactics displayed on the House floor. His wife -- "Mom" -- will come along to campaign with Gross. At a church coffee, with everyone gathered around to hear him, he’ll be like just one of the folks, giving the impression that he’s with them against big government, trying to save them the injustice of seeing their tax money spent on frills and silly programs...

Some other Iowans who have distinguished themselves in national life include these: physicist James A. Van Allen of radiation belt fame; journalist-columnist Marquis Childs; the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jay (“Ding”) Darling; novelist MacKinlay Kantor; Presidential adviser (under F.D.R.) Harry L. Hopkins; painter Grant Wood of “American Gothic” fame; musical director and composer Meredith Wilson; circus king Charles Ringling; evangelist Billy Sunday; and “Buffalo Bill” Cody. George Washington Carver, born in slavery in neighboring Missouri, was the first Negro student at Iowa State University. Two Iowans of a very nonconformist bent who have made an impact in national life in recent years are Sam Brown, youthful organizer of the 1968 Presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy, and Nicholas Johnson, the first member of the Federal Communications Commission to challenge the profit-first practices of the commercial networks and radio-television stations that lease the nation’s airwaves.

____________________________________________________________________________

From the New York Times obituary -- September 24, 1987

www.nytimes.com/1987/09/24/obituaries/hr-gross-is-dead-iowa-congressman.html

<< In the early 1960s he took an early stand against ''double-dipping,'' the practice of retired service personnel getting a military pension and another Federal paycheck. He opposed restoring former President Dwight D. Eisenhower to his generalship unless Congress stipulated that he would only receive his Presidential pension and not a general's salary also. His foreign-policy stances often reflected his anti-Communist zeal and isolationism. He opposed President Kennedy's creation of the Peace Corps, calling it a ''haven for draft dodgers'' because its members would have been exempt for the selective service process. >>

And one more tidbit, going back to Wiki land:

<< When Gross was in Congress, a special exception was made to the practice that bills offered in the House were numbered consecutively. The number H.R. 144 was reserved each session for one of Representative Gross's bills (because 144 equals one gross, making its title the arithmetical equivalent to his name). >>