Hugh Rodham, First Lady’s Father, Dies

Hugh Rodham, 82, father of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, died Wednesday night in Little Rock, Ark., three weeks after suffering a debilitating stroke.

President Clinton and his wife were to fly to Little Rock this morning, White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers said. Funeral arrangements were pending.

“The Rodham family wishes to extend its heartfelt appreciation to the many prayers offered, the many expressions of concern in Arkansas and throughout the world,” Myers said.

Rodham was a former salesman who built his own small textile business. For 30 years, he mostly made draperies--he bought the fabric, printed designs on it, sewed it and hung the curtains.

He was reared in Scranton, Pa. His father had come from Northumberland, Britain, and worked at the Scranton Lace Co.

During the Depression, Rodham also worked at the company when he was out of college and before he went into the Navy.

Rodham was a curtain salesman at the firm in 1937 when he met Dorothy Howell, his future wife. She had come to apply for a job as a secretary.

They were married in 1942. A Methodist, he and his wife raised their two sons, Hugh and Tony, and their oldest child, Hillary, in conservative Park Ridge, Ill. He was a lifelong Republican who often argued with his daughter after she became a Democrat while a college student during the 1960s.

Both of Hillary Clinton’s parents were said to have an unflagging belief in education.

“I’ve often kidded my father, who has never been a fan of taxes or government, about moving to a place that had such high property taxes to pay for school,” the First Lady said of her parents’ decision to raise their family in Park Ridge.

Rodham was a graduate of Pennsylvania State University, where he studied physical education. During World War II, he trained sailors in the Gene Tunney Program--a kind of boot camp--before they went off to battle.

A biographer of Hillary Clinton described Rodham as “a man whose business occupied most of his waking hours” but was “in his own reserved way as great a supporter of his daughter’s prodigious skills as his wife.”

“It really was the classic parenting situation, where the mother is the encourager and the helper and the father brings news from the outside world,” Hillary Clinton said in an interview with Glamour magazine.

In the same biography, author Judith Warner wrote of Rodham that his “style lay in fostering a pragmatic competitiveness. Without putting his daughter down, he let her know that there was always much more to be achieved.”

Hillary Clinton said: “My father would always come home and say: ‘You did well, but could you do better? It’s hard out there.’ Encouragement was tempered with realism.”

Rodham’s approach “was based on real concern,” Warner wrote. “He had attended Penn State on a football scholarship and knew how close he had come to not receiving a higher education. He didn’t want his daughter ever to run that risk.”

The Rodhams moved to Little Rock in 1987 to be closer to their daughter. The family was so close that her parents and two brothers all accompanied the Clintons to Acapulco on their honeymoon. They even all stayed in the same hotel.

Rodham’s son, Hugh, 41, is a public defender in Dade County, Fla. His youngest son, Tony, 38, is a private investigator in Miami.

During inauguration week, Hillary Clinton invited several dozen friends from home to the White House for a party in the Blue Room, where her parents were special guests. Rodham watched the festivities from a wheelchair.

He had reportedly been in frail health over the last few years. When he attended a baseball game with President Clinton last July, he walked slowly, with a cane.