Tennessee's William Brock

THERE is no way of avoiding it, and Bill Brock does not want one to: he is a super-regular guy, the median of Middle Americans, giant of the jaycees. To Brock, citizenship is service. He could see the need more than a decade ago from his office in the family candy firm, when he was appalled by a survey that showed widespread functional illiteracy below the levels of the Chattanooga society in which he lived. He and his friends organized their own training program, and Brock started coming down from his plush home atop Lookout Mountain to teach reading and writing to impoverished blacks.

Brock soon took up other civic causes, including aid for the mentally retarded and physically handicapped children, and his city now has two of the nation's best treatment centers in those fields. He worked effectively to ease the integration of public facilities in his city. Later, as a member of the House of Representatives, he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. "We exceeded our constitutional authority," he says.

Brock is a true and practicing conservative, and there is total consistency between his own action toward integration and his rejection of legislative compulsion toward the same end. "I got very big on the civic-service thing," he says. "It's basic to my philosophy. I really believe in individual service to the community. My gripe with the liberal today is that he has an empathy for the disadvantaged that will not translate itself into action. He won't get his hands dirty. He wants to impose a solution." Politically, too, Brock has not shrunk from hard work. He was the first Republican in 42 years to win in his district.

Nothing in Brock's personal life and tastes dims the image of regularity that he carries in public. A spare man two weeks short of his 40th birthday, his clothes and hair reflect no effort at compromise with today's youthful fashions. He likes semiclassical music and Winston Churchill, and privately and publicly projects total sincerity. He relaxes by roaming around the woods near his home with his wife Muffet and their four young children. Occasionally he travels to Florida to sail (he was in the Navy from 1953 to 1956) and waterski.

Brock majored in commerce at Washington and Lee University, but is no longer active in the family business headed by his father, William Brock Jr. And his rooting attachment is now for the University of Tennessee, where he is a season-ticket holder for football games.

Brock's concern with social problems is real and personal. He likes to describe his meetings with activist blacks in Chicago and is proud of a friendship he has with a young radical who edited a student newspaper in Ohio. Though he may not see the answers to social problems flowing from Washington and the Federal Government, he is actively seeking them in his own way. "When people despair," he says, "they turn either to apathy or violence."

As he ends eight years in the House and moves over to the Senate, Brock will be rattling what he may regard as a family skeleton in the Senate cloakroom. Another William Brock, his grandfather, was a Senator from 1929 to 1932. Grandfather Brock was, of all things, a Democrat.

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