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U.S. Congressman Howard Coble

A decade before the "Contract with America," Congressman Howard Coble of North Carolina may have felt like a lone voice, crying out in the wilderness. In some ways, he still is. In 1984, Coble, a Greensboro attorney who had been recently initiated as an alumnus into U.N.C.-Greensboro (Epsilon Iota); was reluctantly contemplating a run for Congress. For a small town "farm boy," the impetus was certainly not the call of big city Washington, but rather friends, relatives and the Republicans in the state's sixth district who wanted him to cut "outrageous" government spending.