Jack Fields
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jack Milton Fields, Jr. is a former Republican politician from the state of Texas.
Fields was born in Humble, Harris County, Texas on February 3, 1952. He graduated from Humble High School in his hometown in 1970. Fields earned a B.A. from Baylor University, Waco, Texas in 1974 and a J.D. from Baylor in 1977. After being admitted to the Texas bar in 1977, Fields worked as a lawyer in private practice and as a vice president of a family-owned business through 1980.
In 1980, at 28 years old, Fields was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives on the coattails of President Ronald Reagan's overwhelming electoral victory in a congressional district that had elected only Democrats for the preceding 84 years. He defeated incumbent Representative Bob Eckhardt, a Democrat who had held the seat for 14 years. Fields was sworn in as a United States representative on January 5, 1981 and represented the 8th Congressional district of Texas from 1981 to 1997.
When the Republican Party assumed majority control of the House of Representatives in the 1994 elections, Fields was elected Chairman of the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the House Committee on Commerce. In that role, he was one of the principal authors of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, the National Securities Markets Improvement Act of 1996 and the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
In 1993, Fields joined a field of 24 candidates in a special election for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Lloyd Bentsen when he became Secretary of the Treasury. However, Fields failed to win enough votes to advance to a runoff election, where Kay Bailey Hutchison won the seat. Fields did not run for reelection to the 106th Congress in 1996 and retired from his congressional career in January 1997.
After leaving Congress, Fields started two companies, the 21st Century Group, Inc., a government relations firm based in Washington, D.C., and Texana Global, Inc., an international trade corporation headquartered in Texas, and has served on various corporate and charitable boards. In 2004, the U.S. Post Office in Kingwood, Texas was renamed the "Congressman Jack Fields Post Office" in Fields' honor. Fields is married to Lynn Fields and has two daughters, Jordan and Lexi, and a stepson, Josh Hughes.
