Richard Harding Poff, R.I.P.

Former congressman — and later former state Supreme Court justice — Richard Poff has passed away.

Poff was a Republican from Radford, first elected in the 1952 Eisenhower landslide. He represented the 6th District (now held by Bob Goodlatte) until his retirement in the early 1970s.

He went on to serve on the Virginia Supreme Court. The federal building in downtown Roanoke is named after him.

Here’s more on Poff and his career:

Poff’s political career kept him in the U.S. House of Representatives for 20 years. It began in 1952 when the Radford lawyer astonished Virginian politicians by winning the 6th District seat in Congress when he was in his late 20s.

The seat had been held by Democrats since Reconstruction but Poff’s victory began nearly 60 years of Republican dominance in the district interrupted only by Democrat Jim Olin’s decade in Congress from 1983 to 1993. He was one of three Republican congressmen that previously all-Democratic Virginia elected that year; their election inaugurated the Republicans’ slow but steady rise to power in the state.

Poff would later freely admit that he had some help from Dwight Eisenhower, who swpt through Virginia in his first run for the presidency in 1952.

“I rode in on Ike’s coattails,” he once said. “Without Dwight D. Eisenhower, there would have been no Dick Poff.”

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