____Air bags. Clean air. The Freedom of Information Act.
__He has never had much of a personal life, but Ralph Nader
___________has deeply affected American public life.

BY KAREN CROFT | I remember Ralph Nader sorting mail. He'd come into the Center for Study of Responsive Law, hunch his 6-foot-4 frame over the boxes of mail (some addressed only to Ralph Nader, Washington, D.C.) and use the time to catch up on what his troops were doing. He'd be alert to every detail in the casually chaotic front office, where I worked in the late 1970s and early '80s, one of an army of laughably underpaid but passionately loyal minions who have served Nader over the years. Two phones, each with five or six lines, would be ringing and the office managers would be juggling everyone from Marlon Brando (in town with a Native American group) to a lady in Detroit who'd sent her car's broken drive shaft to Nader because no one else had helped her and she knew he would.

Without looking up, he'd ask us to find newspaper articles for him ("It's on the left side of the front page of the second section of the New York Times within the last three weeks"), get someone on the phone (his way of orchestrating his escape to his paper-strewn warren when he was ready) and inject occasional questions about the outside world, like "What movies are people seeing?"

Ralph Nader didn't have time to do things like see movies. He has been busy since 1968 being the most vigilant citizen in America. He works harder than any president or member of Congress. He has affected your life as a consumer more than any man, but you didn't elect him and you can't make him go away. All of us Naderites (there have been thousands over the years) call him Ralph, even though we all have the deepest respect for him. We call him Ralph because that's what fits. Like Uncle Ralph. Or Father Ralph.

Nader really is like a priest. He is little affected by the world he affects. He has never been married, never had children. No one knows for sure if he has a love life. He has never owned a car and has lived in the same inexpensive Washington boardinghouse for many years. "Fashion" is not a word he could define: He has the look of a man who cuts his hair with kitchen scissors and his idea of great bedtime reading is the Congressional Record. His hero is baseball legend Lou Gehrig because Gehrig was a modest man who just kept going, playing in 2,130 consecutive games. Ralph has served in the nation's capital for 30 years now, dueling with its entrenched political and corporate interests and trying to rouse the citizenry. These are, arguably, comparable feats.

Nader's accomplishments have become part of the fabric of American public life. You know that clause on plane tickets that says that if you're bumped, the airline has to reimburse you and put you up for the night? Nader got bumped from an overbooked flight and got angry, and that's why you get treated fairly now. Remember the days before seat belts and air bags? Nader wrote an article for the Nation in 1959 titled "The Safe Car You Can't Buy" and ranted as early as 1975 to Congress that all auto manufacturers should have to install air bags in their cars. People said Nader was a nut. Now car companies advertise that their air bags are the best.

And remember the march on Washington after the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island? Nader organized that and was a key player in changing this country's attitudes toward nuclear power.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Launching his first crusades in the '50s

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