Clinton, South Carolina, Saturday, April 6, 2019, 12:34 p.m.

When I was in the sixth grade at Clinton Elementary School, U.S. Sen. Ernest Frederick “Fritz” Hollings visited my classroom.

From the view of an 11-year-old in a desk chair he couldn’t get his leg in now, Hollings looked as tall and thin as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was probably then Lew Alcindor.

Twice in my boyhood, I got this vision of Abe Lincoln walking by. The other was when I ran past Paul “Bear” Bryant on the field after his Crimson Tide had polished off Clemson. Tall men who seemed solitary, even in a crowd.

Many years later (there have been many more since), I spent a month in Washington, D.C., working as an intern in Strom Thurmond’s office. Thurmond, as the senior senator, had more of a budget for interns than Hollings, who would become the nation’s oldest junior senator because Thurmond became the oldest senator at all.

I was the only card-carrying Democrat in Thurmond’s ample stable of allegedly best and brightest. Early on, I got lots of attention, but when it became clear I showed no signs of conversion, things settled down. Apart from Q&As with other prominent politicians, visits to embassies, the CIA, the FBI, and the occasional reception, I mainly did what I wanted, and lots of it involved an independent study for college. Hollings’ office became something of a refuge.

By 1978, Hollings didn’t look like Kareem anymore. He was just a tall, stately man with the most artful of Charleston dialects. It was “aboot” instead of “about,” and the country had been at war in “VEET-nam.” Hollings didn’t laugh. He roared.

I came to see him as a delightful hybrid of the old and new in politics. Of course, when I was around him, he was comparatively a pup. When he died this morning, he was 97.

In his day, Hollings was about as much a Democrat as South Carolina would let him be.

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