Tony Lazio helped launch the first black Kiwanis Club in Suffolk County, for which he took considerable grief, but mostly he organized barbecues and drove visiting dignitaries like Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Ronald Reagan to the airport. Tony Lazio's connections with the Republican and Conservative parties would eventually pay off for Rick, but childhood friends wondered how he stomached the endless fund-raisers where he was dressed neatly in polo shirts and expected to be polite to all his elders. Lazio recalls disagreeing with his formidable father only once. "He was a very proud vet from World War II -- my mom was also a veteran; she was a Wave -- but he did not want me to go to Vietnam," Lazio recalls. "And I said, 'You know, I'm gonna go. I want to go.' " The draft ended, however, when Lazio was 15.

Classmates and faculty at West Islip High School describe a polite and hard-working kid who collected stamps and worked on the senior-prom committee and played the Rolling Stones on electric guitar. "There were interesting characters in the school," says Lazio's class of '76 classmate Bob Morris, now a frequent contributor to the Times, "but Rick just wasn't interesting. He was very average and agreeable -- dungarees and corduroys and crewneck sweaters. Ultimately, he is the embodiment of the place, which is sort of banal."

Ron Riccio, the high school's former social-studies-department chairman, tries to put Lazio's home turf into a larger context. "If you blindfold someone and bring them back to West Islip, they'd think they were in the fifties, whether it was really the seventies, eighties, or nineties," Riccio says. "For a long time, people referred to the town as 'White Islip.' "

In an early show of Lazio's open-mindedness, among his best friends was Terry Maresca, a Native American girl whose family was on welfare. "The commonality was service," says Maresca, who also went to college with Lazio and is now a Seattle doctor treating indigent families. "Regardless of sex or background, if you were committed, that was the common denominator to be friends with Rick -- if you wanted to serve the greater good, even if you disagreed on how that manifested itself."

Yet in many ways, physically and philosophically, Lazio has never strayed far from home. The one idiosyncratic choice Lazio ever made was to attend Vassar College. He says he picked it for its proximity to Long Island and its small size; with his modest high-school grades, the chance to get an Ivy League-caliber education was attractive, too.

"I'd love to be able to tell you I saw Rick puking his guts out or tripping, but I can't," says Matt Brelis, who like Lazio majored in political science at Vassar and is now a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper reporter. "I don't recall seeing him at Matthew's Mug, which was the campus bar, at all. He was just sort of white-bread, a good Do Bee."

Lazio wrote for the student newspaper, but both he and the editor at the time, Laurie Wimmer, can't remember a single subject Lazio covered. "There was a lot of tumult going on on campus -- divestiture from South Africa was a very, very volatile issue at Vassar -- and he always kept an arm's length from it," Wimmer says.

To Lazio, the most significant event during his college years was entirely personal. His father suffered a stroke in 1978. Tony Lazio's right arm and leg were paralyzed, and his ability to speak was severely limited.

"Rick's house was a nice, middle-class split-level in Babylon, and they had built this contraption to get his father, who was in a wheelchair, up and down the stairs," says Lloyd Braun, then a Vassar friend and now one of ABC's top executives. "Mr. Lazio was going up the stairs and Rick was right next to him, and they got to the top of the stairs and I remember Rick kissing him on his forehead. The look on Rick's father's face was joy. Rick was 19, and you would have thought he was 40, just in terms of compassion."

Tony Lazio died in 1985. "Rick was groomed by his dad," says Michael Moriarty, who met Lazio in law school and is now his brother-in-law. "I remember Rick telling stories about being a kid and going to Election Night parties, putting up bunting and stuff. His dad was making sure if the right opportunity presented itself, Rick could take advantage of it. I've never talked to Rick about the ambition that drives him, but I think it goes back to his dad. Rick feels that he's living the life that his father set him up to lead -- meeting his own debt to his father for giving him opportunities he never had."

For law school, Lazio chose American University in Washington, in large measure for the school's proximity to political action. The Republican district attorney in Suffolk County hired Lazio as a prosecutor; in 1989, after a couple of years in private practice, he easily won a seat in the Suffolk legislature. "I sat next to him for three years because our districts were adjacent," says Sondra Bachety, a Democrat from Babylon. "He doesn't do much, but he's very pleasant."

Lazio's 1992 race against Downey has become the stuff of myth: Underfunded underdog knocks off nine-term, nationally known, seemingly untouchable congressional power. Much of the myth is true, but one crucial element is misleading. Lazio started off with little cash, but when Downey was severely weakened by his involvement in the House Bank check-cashing mess, the national Republican Party heaped money on the race -- "stuffing it into every one of Downey's orifices," in the vivid words of Rich Bond, who was chairman of the Republican National Committee at the time. "And Rick worked his ass off," Bond says.

The cratering Long Island economy certainly helped feed the dissatisfaction with the incumbent and anticipated by two years the Republican revolution that took over the House. When Newt Gingrich became Speaker, he needed moderate allies and waived a House rule to allow Lazio to sit on two powerful committees, Banking and Commerce. Lazio also rose to become chairman of the House Housing subcommittee and later grew tight with Dick Armey, the House majority leader.

"It's fair to say that philosophically there's more distance between Rick and Armey than Rick and Newt, yet he's maintained very positive relationships with the various regimes, and with the various power players in Congress," says Bob Ehrlich, a Republican congressman from Maryland and a close friend of Lazio's. "Rick's personality has allowed him to do that, his likability, his charisma."

Lazio says his closeness to the conservative-Republican leadership has changed it rather than him, enabling Lazio to work behind the scenes to help beat back attempts to shutter the NEA and the Housing and Urban Development agency. His climb also stepped on some Republican toes. In 1998, with Gingrich becoming an albatross to the GOP, Bill Paxon maneuvered to oust the House speaker. Lazio sided with Gingrich and Armey against Paxon. Lazio's allegiance wasn't decisive, but Gingrich crushed Paxon's revolt, and the Buffalo Republican soon quit Congress.