Backstory: The iron man of state politics

Wisconsin Sen. Fred Risser has been a state legislator for 50 years, longer than any current lawmaker in the nation.

from the March 1, 2007 edition

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MADISON, WIS. - Fred Risser is showing off his canes at his new apartment in downtown Madison, Wis. He's got canes from all over the world, in all lengths and sizes. There is a camel-bone cane from Morocco. A cane with a knife in it. A cane carved in the shape of his favorite flower, the Lady Slipper. Mr. Risser has collected them, hundreds of them. But he doesn't use them. At 79, he doesn't need anything to support his 6 ft., 2 inch frame.

In fact, the man who is the longest serving state legislator in the United States is something of a dynamo. He walks a lot. He dances. He bikes 25 miles on his lunch break on trails around Madison. He takes no elevators. Instead, he lopes up the marble stairs to his capitol office, where he's sat in one legislative house or the other since 1957 – the year Dwight Eisenhower was president and Elvis Presley debuted "Jailhouse Rock."

But even though the stairs are the same, the place is different than when he made his first ascent half a century ago.

"Things have changed tremendously," says the soft-spoken president of the Wisconsin state Senate. "Legislators didn't have any offices or secretaries or stationery. Our office was our desk. There was only one woman in the legislature, out of 133. They didn't even have a women's washroom on the same floor as the chambers."

Things have changed, indeed. Back then, the cold war was just beginning to intensify as the Soviets launched Sputnik. Joseph McCarthy represented the state in the US Senate. The Brooklyn Dodgers were just moving to Los Angeles. The word "Beatnik" entered the vernacular in 1957, though Madison itself was still a decade away from its antiwar and counterculture upheaval.

All this has given Risser an institutional memory and sense of history that differentiates him from many who work under the capitol dome here. "[Risser] is able to take the long view in a way that a lot of people aren't," says Bill Lueders, news editor at Madison's Isthmus paper. He sees power in the legislature "in geologic terms."

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