Frank Moss: Utah Senator in Disguise, Cigarette Ad Ban, Childproof Caps

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Frank Moss was born in 1911 in Holladay, Utah, the youngest of seven children of educator James Edward Moss. A two time state debate champion at Granite High School, he graduated magna cum laude from the University of Utah in 1933, married Phyllis Hart in 1934, and earned his law degree at George Washington University in 1937 while working at New Deal agencies. He served in the Army Air Forces' Judge Advocate General's department in Europe, then as a Salt Lake City judge and Salt Lake County attorney. In 1958 he won a Senate seat with less than 40 percent after former governor J. Bracken Lee ran as an independent against incumbent Arthur Watkins, who had chaired the committee that censured Joseph McCarthy.

Moss became an expert on Western water, wrote The Water Crisis in 1967 and secured new national parks for Utah. As chairman of the Commerce Committee's consumer subcommittee he sponsored the Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, the Poison Prevention Packaging Act behind childproof caps and the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975, and he was an original sponsor of Medicaid. In 1976, at 64, he posed as a poor patient at an East Harlem clinic that ran him through needless tests. That year Orrin Hatch beat him by nine points, asking what you call a senator who has served 18 years and answering that you call him home. Hatch then held the seat for 42 years. Moss, the last Democrat to represent Utah in the Senate, died in 2003 at 91.

• His father is considered the father of high school athletics in Utah.
• His tobacco law required health warnings and ended cigarette advertising on radio and television.
• In 1974 he and Frank Church sponsored the first bill for federal hospice funding, groundwork for the 1982 Medicare hospice benefit.
• He chaired the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences from 1973 to 1977.
• In 1976 he backed a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade.