GREENWOOD — William Jennings Bryan Dorn was remembered Thursday as a public servant who “cared about the common folks,” a man who enjoyed political success and endured setbacks with legendary equanimity.

“He believed that everyone, everyone had the chance to get ahead in life,” former Gov. Dick Riley said in his eulogy for the former Third District congressman.

“He used his energy and influence to get things done.”

More than 500 people came to the First Baptist Church in Greenwood to pay their respects to the Democratic politician, who died Saturday at his home in Greenwood. He was 89.

Riley remembered Dorn as a larger-than-life figure who was first elected to the state Legislature at the age of 23 and who remained “a man of the people” through a career that spanned more than two decades in the U.S. Congress. Dorn remained a representative until his retirement in 1974, although he made unsuccessful bids for the U.S. Senate and the governorship.

Riley recalled how Dorn rallied to his side in the 1978 gubernatorial race, even after Dorn had suffered defeat in the Democratic primary.

“I needed his help immediately,” Riley said, mainly because Riley’s opponents suggested Riley did not have the stamina to be governor.

“I said, ‘Bryan, let’s walk together.’ In 95 degrees, we walked five miles to Anderson.”

A huge crowd greeted the pair, and the colorful Dorn rose to speak.

“Boy, what a speech,” Riley said. “He made one of those wonderful, wonderful speeches to his people.”

Dorn, one of 10 children, came to Congress in 1947, just two years after the end of World War II, in a freshman class that included John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

He participated in national debates over civil rights, Vietnam, communism and the anti-war movement. He touted himself as the “No. 1 enemy” of communism

An Army veteran, he understood that America was changing in the post-war world and that South Carolina, still mired in old agrarian ways, would have to change with it.

He pushed for the GI Bill, which opened up educational opportunities to thousands of his fellow GIs, advocated for vast dam projects to bring electrical power to rural areas and worked to preserve the once robust textile industry.

Like many white South Carolinians, he did not relish the growing clamor for greater civil rights, believing, as he wrote NAACP secretary James Hinton in 1948 “the least said about race consciousness and race prejudice, the better off our Nation will be.”

He opposed both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as federal intrusion on what he saw as a matter to be decided at the local level with Christian brotherhood.

Eventually, Dorn worked for peaceful integration and tried his utmost to open the Democratic Party to minorities. His youngest son, the Rev. Johnson Dorn, recalled Thursday the fallout from his father’s eventual embrace of civil rights. He remembered a night when his father packed several of his children into the back seat of his car and rode to the outskirts of a Ku Klux Klan rally.

With the headlights doused, they listened to the fiery speeches. “That was the first night I heard someone cuss my father,” Johnson Dorn said.

He was scared, he admitted, but his father “laughed all the way home.”

Johnson Dorn, Steve Griffith Jr., the congressman’s first cousin, and retired Judge Jack Tracy, a former Dorn staffer, evoked laughter and tears with stories of old campaigns and family lore, including stories of “Miss Millie,” the newspaper woman who would become Dorn’s wife and greatest confidante in 1948. Millie Dorn died in 1991.

The Rev. Tony Hopkins, Dorn’s pastor, spoke of Dorn’s deep faith and his keen sense of the separation of church and state.

“He did not use his office to practice Christian imperialism,” said Hopkins, “nor did he use the church to practice politics.”

Among those paying their respects to Dorn were state Treasurer Grady Patterson, state Superintendent of Education Inez Tenenbaum, state Sen. John Drummond, D-Greenwood, and former Reps. Butler Derrick and Elizabeth Patterson.

Dorn was buried with full military honors at Bethel United Methodist Church Cemetery near Callison.