MOUNT PLEASANT - From the weathered wood dock reaching into Charleston Harbor behind state Sen. Arthur Ravenel's house, one can see the massive diamond-shaped towers of the new bridge bearing his name.

The $632 million Ravenel Bridge, the most expensive span ever built in South Carolina, opens next year and will be a fixture on the Charleston skyline for a century to come.

In a way that's fitting because, for a half-century, Ravenel has been a fixture on the S.C. political landscape.

In a political career dating to the 1950s, the 77-year-old Ravenel has served in the state Senate, state House, U.S. House, and he ran for governor.

With his quick wit and friendly smile, he also helped build the modern Republican Party in a state that, during the past decade, has moved swiftly toward the right.

Now Ravenel, a businessman and lifelong politician, is retiring from public life.

He plans to spend time on his farm in Hell Hole Swamp near Charleston; travel to Africa to observe wildlife; and attend the baseball, soccer, basketball and what-have-you games of his 19 grandchildren.

Ravenel, known as Cousin Arthur to friend and political foe alike, was defeated when he first ran for the state House in 1950. Two years later, he was elected.

"In the legislature then, everyone was a Democrat. Absolutely no one was Republican. You just heard about Republicans," Ravenel says as he sits in his den overlooking the harbor amid photos of family and grandchildren. "Sherman was one."

Ten years later, Ravenel got involved with South Carolina's fledgling Republican Party and was a national convention delegate in 1964 when Barry Goldwater was nominated in San Francisco.

That was the same year U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond announced he was switching to the GOP. With that, the party started running more candidates for offices in the state.

In 1974, James Edwards became the first Republican governor in South Carolina since Reconstruction.

Then, in 1980, Ravenel and state Sen. Glenn McConnell, now Senate president pro tem, were first elected to the Senate. It was the same year Ronald Reagan became president.

"We say we were elected and carried Ronald Reagan on our coattails," says Ravenel with a laugh.

He said he isn't surprised the party has grown.

"We saw it coming," he says. "The Democratic Party was getting more and more liberal. As it got more liberal, we were able to recruit more and more people to run."

In 1986, Ravenel won the open 1st Congressional District seat and went on to serve eight years in the U.S. House.

But he never enjoyed it all that much. "The whole time I was up in Washington, I was in the minority. It's just not too pleasant when you are in the minority," Ravenel says.

Leaving the seat, he ran for governor in 1994, losing in a GOP runoff to David Beasley, who went on to become governor.

He returned to the state Senate in 1996 with an idea of creating an infrastructure bank to pay for big-ticket highway projects around the state.

It started as a way to finally get a new Cooper River bridge - something discussed for years but for which the money never seemed available.

Now, Ravenel can daily watch the progress of the bridge bearing his name.

And now another generation of Ravenels is involved in political life. Ravenel's son, Thomas Ravenel, came in a close third in the six-way GOP race for U.S. Senate this year.

He will miss his colleagues in the S.C. Senate, which he calls "the Cadillac of elective office."

He remembers sharing a Senate suite for a time with state Sen. Kay Patterson, D-Columbia.

Ravenel says he asked Patterson if he could place a picture of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the anteroom.

It was all right with Patterson, who already had a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. on the wall.

"He said, 'We'll just let them keep an eye on each other,'" Ravenel says.

Ravenel, who has a number of ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, flies a Confederate battle flag on the end of his dock and can see Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began, from his den.

Amid the heated rhetoric over removing the Confederate flag from the Statehouse dome four years ago, he once referred to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as the "National Association for Retarded People," bringing calls for his resignation.

"When you look at it dispassionately now, it was the wrong flag," says Ravenel. "It was up there for the wrong reason and naturally it got pretty contentious."

The flag atop the capitol was the Confederate Navy Jack, not the battle flag.

"Now it's the right flag placed at the soldiers' monument, where most people seem to agree it belongs," he says.