Alton Lennon from North Carolina, Garrett Withers from Kentucky, and Magnus Johnson from Minnesota) to be elected to the House after their Senate careers. (Matthew M. Neely from West Virginia and Charles A. Towne from New York via Minnesota were also elected to the House after their Senate careers, but they had been elected to the House before their Senate careers as well.) Pepper remained a member of the House until his death in 1989, rising to chair of the powerful Rules Committee in 1983. Despite a reputation as a leftist in his youth, Pepper turned staunchly anti-communist in the last third of his life, opposing Cuban leader Fidel Castro and supporting aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. Pepper voted in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Pepper would be the only Representative from Florida who would vote in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the early 1970s, Pepper chaired the Joint House–Senate Committee on Crime; then, in 1977, he became chair of the new House Select Committee on Aging, which became his base as he emerged as the nation's foremost spokesman for the elderly, especially regarding Social Security programs. He succeeded in strengthening Medicare. In 1980 the committee under Pepper's leadership initiated what became a four-year investigation into health care scams that preyed on older people; the report, published in 1984 and commonly called "The Pepper Report", was entitled "Quackery, a $10 Billion Scandal". In the 1980s, he worked with Alan Greenspan in a major reform of the Social Security system that maintained its solvency by slowly raising the retirement age, thus cutting benefits for workers retiring in their mid-60s, and in 1986 he obtained the passage of a federal law that abolished most mandatory retirement ages. In his later years, Pepper, who customarily began each day by eating a bowl of tomato soup with crackers, sported a replaced hip and hearing aids in both ears, but continued to remain an important and often lionized figure in the House. In 1988, Pepper sponsored a legislation to create the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Enacted during his final term, the NCBI has revolutionized the exchange, sharing and analysis of genetic information and aided researchers worldwide to achieve advances in medical, computational and biological sciences. Pepper became known as the "grand old man of Florida politics". He