record, Senator Sam at Home, which featured tracks of Ervin speaking his mind and telling anecdotes, separated by tracks of him singing popular songs. One of those songs, "Bridge Over Troubled Water" was released as a single, and subsequently appeared on the 1991 compilation album Golden Throats 2. Ervin was initiated into the Freemasons, where he was elevated to the 33rd and highest degree of Master Mason. Sam Ervin died in 1985 at a hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, from complications of emphysema. He was 88 years old. His funeral was attended by numerous dignitaries, including former president Richard Nixon and members of his administration. Legacy Ervin's son, Samuel J. Ervin, III, was appointed in 1980 to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit by President Jimmy Carter. His grandson, Sam J. Ervin, IV, was elected in 2008 to the North Carolina Court of Appeals and in 2014 to the North Carolina Supreme Court. Another grandson, Robert C. Ervin, was elected in 2002 as a North Carolina Superior Court Judge for District 25A. Ervin's office and personal library has been preserved as the "Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. Library and Museum", which is housed in the Phifer Learning Resource Center at Western Piedmont Community College in his hometown of Morganton Privacy activism In a 1964 essay called "The Naked Society", Vance Packard criticized advertisers' unfettered use of private information to create marketing schemes. He compared a recent Great Society initiative by then-president Lyndon B. Johnson, the National Data Bank, to the use of information by advertisers and argued for increased data privacy measures to ensure that information did not find its way into the wrong hands. The essay inspired Ervin to fight what he saw as Johnson's flagrant disregard for consumer privacy. He criticized Johnson's domestic agenda as invasive and saw the unfiltered database of consumers' information as a sign of presidential abuse of power. Ervin warned that "The computer never forgets". Accolades 1972: Paul White Award, Radio Television Digital News Association 1981: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement Quotations In an interview on William F. Buckley's Firing Line program, Ervin suggested that people in public life need to have more "backbone", and Buckley playfully suggested Gordon Liddy as a model to which Ervin responded, "Well, Gordon Liddy has a little too much backbone. I'll have to admit that I have a sort of