This is a photograph showing United States Senator James Blackwood Pearson from Kansas. He was born May 7, 1920, in Nashville, Tennessee, and moved to Kansas after service in World War II. Pearson started a law practice in Mission and quickly became involved in local politics. He served as assistant county attorney and probate judge for Johnson County, and in 1956 he was elected to the state senate. In 1962, Pearson was appointed to fill the Senate vacancy left by Andrew Schoeppel's death, and was reelected twice to that position, retiring in 1979. A progressive Republican who spoke out against the Vietnam War as early as 1970, Pearson spent the last years of his life in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he died on January 13, 2009.