Ike Skelton

Isaac Newton " Ike" Skelton IV ( born December 20, 1931 in Lexington, Missouri, † October 28, 2013 in Arlington, Virginia ) was an American politician of the Democratic Party. From 1977 to 2011 he represented in the U.S. House of Representatives the fourth congressional district of Missouri. This includes the western part of the state and the majority of whose capital is Jefferson City.

Career

After attending the Military Academy in his hometown of Lexington Skelton studied at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. In 1953 he graduated from the University of Missouri in Columbia with a Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Laws in 1956. He then worked as an independent lawyer before he became a prosecutor in the 1957 Lafayette County. From 1961 to 1963 he served as Special Assistant to the Attorney General of Missouri. Between 1971 and 1977 he was a member of the State Senate before he was first elected to Congress.

From 2007 to 2011 Skelton served as chairman of the influential Committee on Armed Services. Previously, he was on that committee since 1998, the highest-ranking Democrat. He also competed in the elections of 2010 to the re-election, but lost the Republican Vicky Hartzler with 45:50 percent of the vote and had to retire so on January 3, 2011 from the Congress.

Private life

His wife Susan Anding Skelton died on 23 August 2005; the two had been married for 44 years. On 26 November of that year, Skelton and two colleagues, Congressmen Tim Murphy and James C. Marshall were injured during an official visit in Iraq in a car accident. Your vehicle overturned near the airport of Baghdad. Skelton and Murphy were then treated in the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl.