Ralph Straus Regula was born on December 3, 1924 in Beach City, Stark County, Ohio. Educated in the local public schools, Regula entered the Navy during the Second World War and served from 1944 to 1946. In 1948, he received a Bachelor of Arts under the G.I. Bill from Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio. After graduation, Regula became a school teacher and principal while taking night courses at the William McKinley School of Law in Canton, Ohio. In 1952, he earned his law degree, was admitted to the Ohio bar, and opened a law practice in Navarre, Ohio.

Ralph Regula’s career in public service began in 1960 when he became a member of the Ohio State Board of Education. After four years on the state board, Regula, a member of the Republican Party, was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives, where he served from 1965 to 1966. Beginning in 1967, he served for six years in the Ohio Senate. During his years in the Ohio General Assembly, Regula played a leading role in the creation of both the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine and the Stark State College of Technology.

In 1972, Regula ran for the seat in the U.S. House of Representatives being vacated by Frank T. Bow, who was retiring from Congress after serving for twenty-two years as a Republican for the 16th Congressional District of Ohio. Regula won the general election in 1972 by a 57% margin, and went on to win seventeen consecutive re-election campaigns by an average of more than 65% of the vote. Regula retired from Congress in January 2009 after thirty-six years of service, which made him the longest continuously serving congressman in Ohio history at the time.

Upon entering Congress in January 1973, Regula became friends with Gerald Ford, who at the time was the house minority leader. Regula backed Ford as the replacement to Spiro Agnew when Agnew was forced to resign as vice president in October 1973. After Ford became president following the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974, he helped Regula obtain a seat on the House Appropriations Committee. Regula went on to serve thirty-four years on the committee. During his tenure on the Appropriations Committee he was a member of the Interior Subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over funding for all federally owned land including national parks, forests, and wilderness areas. Regula became chair of the subcommittee in 1995, making him one of the thirteen House appropriations “cardinals.” As chair, he set the legislative agenda for the subcommittee, scheduled hearings, and dealt with issues such as maintenance backlogs and charging recreation fees at national parks.

Term limits on chairmanships imposed by the Republican Party Caucus forced him to resign as chair of the Interior Subcommittee at the end of 2000. However, as the second-ranking Republican on the Appropriations Committee, Regula had his pick among six other subcommittees, so starting in 2001 he chaired the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Subcommittee. Regula kept this chairmanship until 2007, when he became the ranking minority member of the newly formed Financial Services Subcommittee.

In 1974, while a member of the National Parks and Recreation Subcommittee of the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, Regula helped shepherd through Congress legislation to create the 33,000-acre Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area south of Cleveland, Ohio. Regula convinced President Ford to sign the bill over the objections of then Interior Secretary, Rogers C. B. Morton, and over the years used his position on the Interior Subcommittee to appropriate more than $200 million for land acquisition and park development. In 1996, Regula successfully introduced a bill to form the Ohio and Erie Canal National Heritage Corridor, which runs from Cleveland south through the 16th Congressional District to New Philadelphia, Ohio. At the time it was formed, the corridor was one of only nine such national heritage corridors in the nation. As Interior Subcommittee chairman, Regula also was instrumental in the conversion of the Presidio military base in San Francisco into a national park. In addition, in 1998 Regula used his position to help establish the National First Ladies’ Library in a home in Canton, Ohio once owned by President William McKinley.

As overseers of funding for federally owned land, the Interior Subcommittee also has a major role in national energy policy, specifically on oil and gas drilling and coal mining on federal lands. Regula, as a member and chair of the subcommittee, was an advocate of opening the nation’s outer continental shelf to oil and gas exploration. He also appropriated millions of federal dollars for the development of clean coal technology, and late in his career helped fund research efforts in Ohio for the development of fuel cell technology.

A conservative on spending and progressive in programs, Regula at times strayed from the strict Republican party-line vote, such as in his support for minimum wage increases and funding for family planning programs. As a lawyer practicing in the early 1960s, Regula brought together industry and local conservation groups to create the Wilderness Center, a five-hundred-acre nature preserve in southwest Stark County, Ohio. While in the Ohio Senate, he worked with Governor John J. Gilligan, a Democrat, to pass legislation forming the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. During his years in Congress Regula’s record on environmental issues often ran counter to the more conservative viewpoints of the Republican Party (GOP.) Regula’s moderate position was most evident in 1995 when he voted with fifty other Republicans to halt his party’s attempt, as put forth by the GOP’s “Contract with America,” to eliminate most of the Federal Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory powers.

Representing a district home to numerous steel related industries, in the late 1970s Regula was the co-founder, along with Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, of the House Steel Caucus. He chaired the caucus in 1999 and 2000, and used it and his membership on the former Commerce, State, and Justice Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee as a forum to help the domestic steel industry compete against foreign steel imports. He successfully advocated for the tariffs imposed in 2001 against the low-priced foreign steel being dumped into the U.S. market. Regula also supported domestic research programs that led to the development of lightweight steel for use by the automobile industry. In the early 1990s, Regula attended many meetings of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and helped write legislation that alleviated concerns in Congress about how trade disputes would be mediated by the World Trade Organization.

From 1981 through 1992, Regula was a member of the House Select Committee on Aging, where for many years he was the ranking member of Health & Long-term Care Subcommittee. When Regula became chairman of the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Subcommittee, he used this experience to increase funding for training programs in geriatrics, for state and local volunteer programs that assisted older people, and for federal programs such as Meals on Wheels.

Prior to his retirement Regula was dean of the Ohio Congressional Delegation, a position he used to help craft bipartisan measures that furthered Ohio’s interest. Regula also was a staunch supporter of the legacy of William McKinley, who, prior to his election as the 25th President of the United States, held the same 16th District seat in Congress as Regula. For many years Regula passed out scarlet carnations (Ohio’s official flower adopted in 1904 in remembrance of McKinley) to fellow members of Congress on January 29th, McKinley’s birthday. At the beginning of each congressional session Regula sponsored legislation to prevent the name of Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America, from being changed to its Native American name of Denali.

Throughout his thirty-six-year career, Ralph Regula maintained a low-key approach in Congress. He never appeared on any televised political talk show, even though he held powerful positions in subcommittees of the House Appropriations Committee. As a moderate, Regula worked to forge common ground on the policy issues in which he held an interest. In funding his re-election campaigns he refused to accept money from political action committees representing businesses, trade unions, or other special interests. This disinterest in political fundraising, and his subsequent lack of contributions to national Republican coffers, probably was a major factor in Regula’s defeat by Bill Young of California in a 2004 campaign for the chairmanship of the House Appropriations Committee. Regula spent his time in Congress advocating for the needs of his constituents in the 16th District and for the economic development of both his home state and the country as a whole. Through his committee work, Regula directed more than $450 million to parks, universities, highways, hospitals, and various research and development programs. Regula passed away on July 19, 2017 at the age of 92.