He served in the Great Lakes Mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, got married, then graduated from BYU in 1958, two months after the birth of their first child, Brent. Orrin and Elaine Hatch moved back to Pittsburgh, where Hatch went to law school at the University of Pittsburgh on a scholarship.

The Hatch family returned to Utah in 1969, where he took a job as senior vice president and general counsel for an oil and drilling company but eventually left, and by 1975 he had a successful law practice.

He turned his interests to public office after being fed up with what he heard was going on in Washington. Without ever holding elected office, he had little money and no name recognition. But he still beat incumbent Sen. Frank Moss, a Utah Democrat, in the 1976 election and has been re-elected five times since.

"Utah's never had a better senator," said Lee Roderick, a former Washington journalist who has written two books on Hatch.

Even if the Democrats would take over the majority of the Senate, which is a possibility this election, Hatch would still be an asset to the state because he can work with Democrats, Roderick said.

Hatch has a close working relationship with Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass, Roderick said, and is "one of the few around here that knows how to bring both sides together."

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