WASHINGTON -- He was the scrap boy.

Long before Robert C. Byrd became Senate Majority Leader and West Virginia's pre-eminent political figure, he gathered scraps to feed the family hogs that his adopted father, a coal miner, raised in a pen by the railroad tracks to make ends meet.

Mixing a remarkable intellect trained in the classics with the common touch of a former scrap boy, Mr. Byrd, 92, is the longest-serving member of Congress and a titan in Senate history.

As the Senate honored Mr. Byrd in November for a 57-year career that has spanned 12 presidents and began before Hawaii became the 50th state, Mr. Byrd spoke of his poor childhood in Stotesbury, W.Va.

"I recall those days, long ago, when I walked three miles down a hollow in the snow in order to catch a bus to attend a two-room school in Mercer County," said Mr. Byrd -- frail, trembling, but resolutely still here -- in a speech on the Senate floor.

Mr. Byrd has been largely confined to his northern Virginia home in recent years with a variety of ailments, but has displayed resilience and dedication in showing up at odd hours to vote on the Senate's health care overhaul and in taking on his home state's influential coal industry in an address last month. He remains president pro tempore of the Senate, third in the presidential line of succession.

Though engaged in debates of the present, Mr. Byrd is unmistakably a figure of a fast-disappearing past, a fierce guardian and practitioner of Senate tradition and a leader from a time when the upper chamber was more courteous and less partisan. Not all of that past is pretty: Mr. Byrd has repeatedly expressed remorse for joining the Ku Klux Klan before entering politics and his vicious opposition to civil rights legislation in his early years in the Senate.

Most of his rags-to-power tale is memorialized in hundreds of photographs, plaques and mementos that line his office suite in the Hart Senate Office Building, with not an inch of wall space to spare. Prominently featured in the foyer is a young Bob Byrd brandishing a fiddle.

Mr. Byrd was a meat cutter with a high school education teaching Sunday school at his Baptist church when he started pondering a run for the state House in 1946. He went to a Raleigh County commissioner and well-connected pol, who had some advice: Take his fiddle on the campaign trail.

Mr. Byrd, an accomplished player who later cut a record while in the Senate, heeded the tip, and a slogan spread throughout the hills: "Byrd by name, Byrd by nature. Let's send Byrd to the legislature."

"My fiddle case was my briefcase," Mr. Byrd recently told an old friend, the Rev. Tom Acker. "And I never lost an election."

Mr. Byrd was born Cornelius Calvin Sale Jr. in North Wilkesboro, N.C., in 1917. His mother died in the flu epidemic when he was a year old, and Mr. Byrd and his siblings were dispersed among family members. An aunt and uncle, Titus and Vlurma Byrd, renamed the boy and raised him in southern West Virginia.

In the early 1940s, he organized a local Ku Klux Klan chapter, and was elected as its leader, or Exalted Cyclops. Mr. Byrd remained associated with the group until he ran for the legislature, according to recently published letters he'd written that brimmed with racist and pro-Klan sentiment.

The KKK membership helped jump-start Mr. Byrd's political career, but its legacy has been a stain on his career, and he has repeatedly apologized when political foes or others bring it up.

"My only explanation for the entire episode is that I was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision -- a jejune and immature outlook -- seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions," Mr. Byrd wrote in his 2005 memoir, "Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields."

His ambitions pushed him beyond southern West Virginia to serve in the state house from 1947-53, then three terms in the House of Representatives before beginning the first of a record nine terms in the Senate in 1959. Aligned with a group of Southern Democrats, Mr. Byrd was a steadfast opponent of civil rights legislation, including a legendary 14-hour filibuster of the 1964 bill, which eventually passed.

Mr. Byrd steadily rose in the Senate's leadership, beating Sen. Edward M. Kennedy -- who would later become one of his greatest friends in the chamber -- for the position of majority whip in 1971. From 1977 to 1988 he was the Democratic leader in the Senate -- with a five-year run as minority leader sandwiched by two stints as majority leader.

Former Senate historian Richard Baker remembered "the tenacity, his ability to be a supremely effective vote counter and to be a vote gatherer. He literally walked the halls of the Senate -- this is in the 1980s -- going into individual members' offices, getting to know the secretary at the front and working back to the senator's office, doing some basic retail politicking."

Mr. Byrd also mastered the Senate's often-arcane rules, using them to advance his agenda and, at times, outfox the opposition party.

In 1988, Republicans boycotted a late-night session so the Democrats would not have the necessary quorum for a vote on campaign finance legislation. Mr. Byrd, peeved at the tactic, invoked his power to have the sergeant at arms arrest absent senators. Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., who was hiding in his office, gave up peacefully, but in a bit of fun, demanded that officers physically carry him into the Senate chamber.

Mr. Packwood -- now a lobbyist in Washington -- said he harbors no hard feelings about the incident.

"It was not mean," he said. "It was partisan. Politics have always been partisan; they've only recently gotten mean."

One of Mr. Byrd's fiercest critics at the time was Pennsylvania's then-Republican Sen. Arlen Specter. But Mr. Specter said he always respected Mr. Byrd's thorough knowledge of the Constitution and advocacy to protect the Senate's powers.

Mr. Byrd is fond of saying he served alongside presidents, not under them. He pressed that point during Bill Clinton's presidency when he fought the line-item veto, which would have given the president power to choose portions of Congressional bills to strike down. The Supreme Court ruled the power unconstitutional in 1998.

Mr. Byrd's reverence for the Senate as an institution extends into his encyclopedic knowledge of the body, displayed in a series of floor speeches in the 1980s that Mr. Byrd later compiled into a four-volume history of the Senate. He collaborated with the historian's office, although Mr. Baker said much of the research and writing was Mr. Byrd's own.

Mr. Byrd -- who earned a law degree by attending night classes while in Congress -- also has amassed expansive knowledge of poetry and world history, especially the Roman Senate. Mr. Baker said Mr. Byrd would read the dictionary cover to cover, then incorporate a new word he'd learned into a speech.

After leaving his post as majority leader, Mr. Byrd became chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, enhancing his ability to bring home federal money to West Virginia.

From highway projects to a massive telescope in Green Bank to the Federal Bureau of Investigation fingerprint laboratory in Clarksburg, Mr. Byrd's economic influence is felt throughout the state -- and his name is emblazoned on much of it. Mr. Byrd declared himself the state's first billion-dollar industry, winning acclaim back home.

But former three-term Gov. Arch Moore, a Republican, said Mr. Byrd would often take credit for -- and stick his name on -- work done by state or local officials to earn a federal contract.

"At best, 25 percent of what Congress has done that benefited West Virginia, he has done," Mr. Moore said. "The other individuals, the local county officers, the mayors, individuals in the field of education, always initiated the idea. And very rarely did the idea come initially from his service."

Nonetheless, Mr. Byrd was popular throughout the state, friends and political allies said, because he cared in an almost paternal way about his constituents. He often called friends and acquaintances to keep tabs on the concerns of a particular corner of West Virginia.

Ken Hechler, 95, who served in the U.S. House during Mr. Byrd's early years in the Senate, said Mr. Byrd wouldn't eat fancy meals when he traveled the state and usually stayed with friends rather than in a hotel. Mr. Hechler said that when Mr. Byrd gave a speech, he often picked out someone he knew in the audience to punctuate a thought, saying something like: "Isn't that right, Farmer Jones?"

Mr. Byrd's Senate races were never close, and in 1994 and 2000 he won every county in the state.

In recent years, Mr. Byrd has been a cherished adviser to Senate leaders who followed him.

"He is indispensable with his extraordinary institutional knowledge, indispensable with his guidance and mentorship that he offered us and extraordinarily helpful in coming up with innovative ways to address the challenges of the day," said former Majority Leader Tom Daschle, then a Democratic senator from South Dakota, now a Washington lobbyist.

"So he's one of a kind. He's an icon, historically as well as contemporaneously, that no one will ever match."

Though he frequently misses votes, Mr. Byrd continues to advocate for issues close to his heart and especially for bringing federal funds to West Virginia. Last month, Mr. Byrd, who remains chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, announced a $328 million expansion of the FBI facility in Clarksburg.

Also last month, Mr. Byrd released an op-ed essay challenging his home state's coal industry on the topic of mountaintop removal mining, a form of strip mining in which ridge tops are blasted to expose buried coal seams.

Mr. Byrd, who recently met with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson to discuss the issue, said backing for mountaintop removal is dwindling in Washington and he is concerned about the environmental effects of the practice. Mr. Byrd said fighting EPA attempts to regulate the practice is the wrong tactic for the coal industry.

"We have our work cut out for us in finding a prudent and profitable middle ground. But we will not reach it by using fear mongering, grandstanding and outrage as a strategy," Mr. Byrd said.

It was a bold step and it didn't sit well with the state's powerful coal interests. It was also a signal of Mr. Byrd's continued evolution as an active policymaker.

Aides say he makes it in to vote a couple times a week when he's needed, and even when he's not. He has a fondness for voting to confirm judges, even when the vote is 100-0. And for the tightest of votes in the health care reform debate last month, Mr. Byrd arrived in dramatic fashion for late-night and early-morning roll calls.

"Huge," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., of the moments when his delegation partner entered the chamber in his wheelchair, guided by an aide. "He's over 90 and he's still fighting."

Along the main corridor of Mr. Byrd's Hart Building office is a wall dedicated to pictures of Erma Byrd, the high school sweetheart he'd famously doted on since their marriage in 1937. Old friend Carroll Simpkins, an accountant in Beckley, W.Va., said, "He always made all husbands look bad."

Friends said Mrs. Byrd's death in 2006 left a void in his life, and for a time he visited her grave each day. He speaks of her often in private and in floor speeches.

On the November day when he was honored for breaking Congress' longevity record, Mr. Byrd said, "My only regret is that my dear wife Erma is not here today to enjoy this moment with me, but I know that she is smiling down from heaven, and reminding me not to get a big head."

Mr. Byrd now lives for his life's other enduring love -- the Senate.

"His wife and the Senate were the two great things," Father Acker said.

"Now his wife is not there; the Senate, he can't do as much for as he did. He sits there and he reminisces and he thinks, and he's waiting for God's movement: 'What's the next movement God wants for me?' "

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