Clair Engle's Silent Vote: Pointing to His Eye to End the 1964 Filibuster

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Clair Engle was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1911, named for the aunt who helped deliver him, and grew up in rural Shasta and Tehama counties, becoming student body president at Red Bluff High School. After Chico State Teachers College and a law degree from UC Hastings in 1933, he eloped with his first wife, Hazel, opened a practice in Corning and was elected Tehama County district attorney in 1934 at age 23. During a few months in the California State Senate in 1943 he passed a law turning empty county fairgrounds into housing for migrant farm workers. He won a House seat in an August 1943 special election, representing an 18 county district he covered by flying his own plane, which earned him the nicknames the flying congressman and Congressman Fireball.

He chaired the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, expanded the Central Valley Project and backed the Taft-Hartley Act, and under California's cross filing system he was at times nominated by both parties. In 1958 he defeated Governor Goodwin Knight for the Senate, the first Democrat elected to that seat in the 20th century, and worked with Republican Thomas Kuchel on the San Luis project and Point Reyes National Seashore. A brain tumor diagnosed in August 1963 left him partially paralyzed, and in April 1964 he stood unable to speak while a colleague read his resolution against a Bodega Bay nuclear plant. On June 10, 1964 he pointed to his eye to vote aye as the Senate broke the civil rights filibuster 71 to 29, and he died on July 30, 1964, at 52.

• His district was second in area only to Nevada's at-large district.
• He once flew solo from Alexandria, Virginia, back to California.
• As he fought his illness, the state party demanded his medical records, and Alan Cranston and Pierre Salinger launched campaigns for his seat.
• About 3,000 mourners, including Chief Justice Earl Warren, attended his funeral in Red Bluff.
• A Trinity County reservoir was temporarily renamed Clair Engle Lake before reverting to Trinity Lake.