New Senator from Kentucky

When Virgil Chapman moved up to the U.S. Senate in 1948, the man who stepped into his old seat as Congressman from Kentucky's Bluegrass sixth district was Thomas R. Underwood, 53, a husky, bushy-haired newspaper editor (the Lexington Herald) and amiable, self-effacing member of Kentucky's ruling Democratic Big Five. Last week Tom Underwood stepped up to replace Chapman once again. Nine days after Virgil Chapman's death as a result of a Washington automobile accident (TiME, March 19), Congressman Underwood was named to fill the Senate vacancy./-

The son of a politically minded editor and a mother who also played politics (she headed Kentucky's Democratic Women's Clubs), Underwood made his first try for public office when he entered the 1948 race for Congress. But he has been a figure in Kentucky politics for years: with Chapman, Governor Laurence Wetherby and Kentucky's Senior Senator Earle C. Clements, and Vice President Alben Barkley.

In the House he has been a moderate Administration Democrat, voting with the party leaders on repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, against them on civil rights. But except for a few remarks about the tobacco industry, he has strictly obeyed the seen-but-not-heard injunction directed at all freshman Congressmen. In his debut as a Senator, he plans to follow the same course. "I haven't tried to be anything more as yet than a good listener," explained Tom Underwood, "and I can't think of any place where that quality will seem more distinguished than in the 'Senate."

/- An appointment which came as something of a disappointment to another Kentucky politico. The day of Chapman's death, Baseball Commissioner A. B. ("Happy") Chandler, scheduled to lose his job next year, put in a hurry-up call to the governor's office. The-governor said he was sorry but he had already picked his pinch-hitter.

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