Frank Lautenberg

Frank Raleigh Lautenberg (January 23, 1924 – June 3, 2013) was an American businessman and politician who represented New Jersey as a Democrat in the United States Senate for five non-consecutive terms from 1982 to 2001 and from 2003 until his death. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who had entered the United States via Ellis Island, Lautenberg served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II. Prior to his political career, he co-founded Automatic Data Processing (ADP), a pioneering payroll processing firm, and served as its chairman and CEO from 1975 to 1982, growing it into a major corporation.

Lautenberg's Senate tenure emphasized transportation funding, environmental remediation, and public health initiatives, including accelerating Superfund cleanups and securing billions for New Jersey's highways and transit systems. He authored the 1987 legislation banning smoking on domestic airline flights and co-sponsored the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, which conditioned federal highway funds on states raising their drinking age to 21. Other notable efforts included the Lautenberg Amendment of 1989, facilitating refugee admissions for persecuted religious minorities from the Soviet Union, particularly Jews.

Frank Lautenberg was born on January 23, 1924, in Paterson, New Jersey, to Sam and Mollie Lautenberg, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe—his father from Łódź in Poland and his mother from Minsk in Russia—who had arrived in the United States via Ellis Island.

Born to Polish Jewish immigrants, Lautenberg's family heritage informed his commitment to communal ties, evident in policies like the 1989 Lautenberg Amendment, which eased refugee status for Soviet Jews and enabled over 350,000 emigrations by facilitating U.S. resettlement. His children pursued private professional paths outside politics, reflecting the family's emphasis on discretion over public involvement.

Frank Lautenberg amassed his fortune primarily through co-founding Automatic Data Processing (ADP) in 1949, a payroll and business services company that grew substantially under his leadership as CEO from 1975 onward, expanding revenues from $150 million to billions by the time of his Senate service. His wealth derived largely from ADP stock holdings, with financial disclosures estimating his net worth at approximately $87.5 million as of 2011, including assets in the tens of millions from company equity. Lautenberg, born to impoverished Polish Jewish immigrants in Paterson, New Jersey, exemplified a self-made trajectory from wartime service and early sales work to entrepreneurial success, building ADP into a Fortune 500 firm without inherited advantages.