The Kid from Shirkieville Who Rewrote the Constitution

Birch Bayh authored two constitutional amendments, survived a plane crash, and pulled Ted Kennedy from the wreck.

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED MARCH 19, 2026

Consider the résumé for a moment.

He authored the 25th Amendment, which tells the country what to do when a president can no longer serve. He authored the 26th Amendment, which gave 18-year-olds the right to vote. He wrote Title IX. He helped shepherd the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act through the Senate. He blocked two Nixon Supreme Court nominees. He once pulled a Kennedy out of a burning plane wreck with his bare hands.

He was also the Indiana 4-H Tomato Champion of 1944.

Would you believe he was just a farm kid from Indiana?

Birch Bayh was born in Terre Haute in 1928, right on the wrong edge of the Great Depression. His father coached basketball and served as athletic director at Indiana State University. His mother died when Birch was twelve.

After his father entered military service, Birch moved to his grandparents' farm in Shirkieville, which is a real place. He threw himself into 4-H work, baseball, and public speaking. He graduated high school, went to Purdue on an agriculture degree, served two years in occupied Germany, came back, and farmed. That's what you did in Shirkieville.

But Bayh had bigger ambitions, and so he decided to run for the Indiana House of Representatives. He sold 120 acres of the family farm to pay for law school and completed his degree while he served in the legislature. In 1959, he became the youngest Speaker in Indiana history. Three years after that, he set his eyes on the U.S. Senate, and unseated a three-time incumbent with a catchy jingle that was mostly designed to teach Hoosiers how to say his name:

Hey, look him over
He's my kind of guy
His first name is Birch
His last name is Bayh

He was 34. He probably expected Washington life to be exciting. He had no idea.

On the evening of June 19, 1964, the U.S. Senate passed the Civil Rights Act. It had been held up for months by filibuster. Bayh voted for it, then rushed to catch a small charter plane to Massachusetts, where he was scheduled to deliver a keynote address. Senators Ted Kennedy and his aide Edward Moss were on board. So was Marvella, Birch's wife.

Near Springfield, the plane descended through heavy fog and crashed into an apple orchard. Bayh suffered muscular trauma. Marvella fractured two vertebrae. Kennedy was thrown to the front of the plane, his back broken, unable to move from the waist down.

Moss and the pilot didn't make it.

Bayh smelled gas and thought the plane might catch fire. He got Marvella out, then went back in. He called out: "Is there anybody alive up there?" No answer. He called again. Kennedy answered. Bayh pulled him out through a window.

The Civil Rights Act was passed that same night. Bayh had voted for it before the plane went down.

It was the kind of night that might have shaken a man into a quieter life. Instead, Bayh went back to Washington and got to work.

He became the first Senator since James Madison to author two constitutional amendments. The first was the 25th, ratified in 1967, which codified what happens when a president can no longer serve.

The second was the 26th. His argument was simple and hard to argue with: if an 18-year-old was old enough to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, they were old enough to vote for the people sending them. The amendment was ratified in 1971. Eleven million new voters cast ballots the following year.

Along the way he also wrote Title IX, which he credited largely to Marvella, who spent their marriage reminding him what it was like to be a woman in a man's world.

Birch Bayh was swept out of office in 1980. By the time he died in 2019, he'd watched his son take back the Senate seat that used to be his own. Between the two of them, they served five terms and thirty years. Today Evan's son Beau is running for Indiana Secretary of State, another link in a long chain that runs back through Shirkieville, Indiana.

Beau's campaign will break a streak of ten years since a Bayh appeared on the Indiana ballot, but since 1967, the name's been in the Constitution. Twice.