Richard O. Simpson, First U.S. Product Safety Czar, Dies at 93

Richard O. Simpson, a self-made Republican businessman who as the primary chairman of the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission aggressively protected the American public from shopping for hundreds of thousands of dangerous items, died on July 21 in DeLand, Fla., north of Orlando. He was 93.

His loss of life, in a hospital close to his house, was confirmed by his daughter Karen Simpson Tweedie.

Mr. Simpson was appointed to the fee by President Richard M. Nixon in 1973, shortly after it was created by a Democratic Congress. He instantly made the company’s work broadly clear to the general public.

He was so assertive that when the surgeon normal declared that smoking was a well being hazard, Mr. Simpson proposed banning the sale of cigarettes altogether, a prerogative that he later acknowledged was past the fee’s jurisdiction.

Still, throughout his three-year tenure, the fee declared some 25 million objects unsafe and demanded that they be recalled, repaired or changed. They included flammable mattresses, TV antennas that might result in electrocution and tablet bottles with out child-resistant caps.

“He was the first and best of the numerous heads of the commission, and he was still monitoring and pushing the commission from his retirement,” the patron advocate Ralph Nader mentioned by telephone.

“He believed in law enforcement,” Mr. Nader added. “He didn’t have his antenna out for the corporate lobbyists, like most new regulatory agencies.”

Mr. Simpson’s problem was to steadiness “unreasonable risk” with the influence that retooling a product would have on the monetary value each to shoppers and producers and to the economic system extra broadly. A regulatory resolution regarding a product may end in halted manufacturing and job layoffs and carry “the potential for industry dislocation, the loss of choice by consumers and the likely impact on prices,” as Mr. Simpson put it.

Acknowledging at a Congressional price range listening to that his company had a “frightening amount of authority,” he declared that its energy needed to be exercised prudently.

“If you tried to build every house so it couldn’t burn,” he informed The Christian Science Monitor, “you might well triple the cost — and you might not want to live in it.”

On one birthday, his spouse gave him a gift that exemplified the potential for overreach: a toothpick with each ends safely swaddled in cotton. The accompanying card learn: “Your birthday gift has been approved by the U.S. Safety Commission.”

Richard Olin Simpson was born on March 7, 1930, in Independence, Mo., the sixth of 9 kids of Clyde and Lily (Holler) Simpson. His father was a carpenter, however the household was impoverished. Mr. Simpson recalled having to attend in line to gather welfare funds.

He was the primary member of his household to complete highschool. After enlisting within the Navy and serving in the course of the Korean War, he graduated with a bachelor’s diploma in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. He briefly studied regulation there earlier than enrolling in graduate engineering programs at Stanford University.

Mr. Simpson began an engineering agency that specialised in naval electronics and weapon programs; grew to become vice chairman of the Rucker Company, an electronics agency, which launched a protecting gadget that guarded in opposition to electrocution; and ran an engineering providers agency. In 1969, he joined the U.S. Commerce Department, the place he helped form security requirements for youngsters’s sleepwear.

He was appearing assistant secretary for science and know-how when he was appointed chairman of the patron fee.

With its first vote, the fee surprised producers by refusing to delay the efficient date of a regular for mattress flammability.

It banned the rear step on tricycles — bikes rating on the prime of its shopper product hazard index — to maintain different kids from hitching rides and falling off; regulated butane cigarette lighters that produced flames the size of three cigars; and urged the recall of highly effective adhesives that glued the person’s fingers collectively.

His dedication to child-resistant caps on medication containers was private. Years earlier, two of his kids needed to have their stomachs pumped after digesting too many candy-flavored aspirin tablets whereas taking part in physician.

“We have taken an agency born in controversy, during a period of very low government credibility, and, by abolishing the restraints that secrecy imposes, have created an agency that people can believe in,” he informed The New York Times in 1975.

Mr. Simpson left the fee in early 1976 after Gerald R. Ford had succeeded Nixon as president, annoyed with political interference by the White House over employees appointments and delays over whether or not he could be reappointed. (The present chairman is Alexander Hoehn-Saric, who was nominated by President Biden.)

Mr. Simpson later returned to the personal sector — recommending that the product business police itself — and wrote a guide, “The Quest for Safer Products” (2016).

He married Patricia Ann Kramer in 1949; she died in 2003. In addition to his daughter Karen, he’s survived by his kids Dianne Tuohy, Norma Simpson Bufford and Richard and David Simpson; 13 grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.

As a reminder of the balancing act between shoppers and the broader public curiosity that each fee resolution entailed, Mr. Simpson’s clutter-free desk on the company was dominated by a single decoration. Like the toothpick, it was a present from his spouse: A lead sculpture of a boy, crouching, making ready to spring right into a handstand.