Jack Gross blends into a crowd after a Capitol Hill hearing.

The short, unassuming 61-year-old Iowan reminds me of people I knew growing up in Indiana. He’s plain-spoken and friendly. He could have stepped out of the Norman Rockwell painting that he says his childhood in Mt. Ayer, Iowa, resembled.

Over the course of two days in Washington during the week of October 5, Gross starred in a news conference and congressional hearing, beginning a political journey that could make him this year’s Lilly Ledbetter.

Like Ledbetter, Gross is that the heart of a controversial Supreme Court ruling. Her case centered on pay discrimination; his revolves around age discrimination. Congress passed a bill to overturn her case and vows to do the same for Gross’ case.

Goodyear paid Ledbetter less for her factory supervisor position than it paid her male colleagues, Ledbetter alleged. But the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that she had not filed suit before the statute of limitations expired.

Ledbetter asserted that she didn’t know that Goodyear was shortchanging her until decades after it made the first unfair pay decision. Earlier this year, Congress approved a bill that renewed the statute of limitations each time a worker receives a paycheck diminished by discrimination.

The bill was the first that President Barack Obama enacted. He knew Ledbetter well before she showed up for the bill-signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House, because she had campaigned with him.

From the time of the court’s decision in the spring of 2007 until Congress passed a bill bearing her name last January, Ledbetter grew into a political symbol for Democrats.

As the party battled the threat of a Republican filibuster in the Senate and a veto by then-President George W. Bush, Ledbetter became a political touchstone for women’s groups and for Obama, who was working to appeal to supporters of then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Gross also represents a powerful constituency: older Americans. One of Washington’s behemoth lobbying organizations—AARP—is putting its weight behind the Gross bill.

What is most compelling about Gross is his story. He suffered chronic ulcerated colitis in his youth and worked his way through college. Upon graduation, he took a job with the insurer Farm Bureau in Iowa, where he has been employed for about 30 years. He worked for several years in the late 1970s until 1987 for a seed company, then returned to Farm Bureau.

Gross was eventually promoted to the position of claims administration vice president. He consistently received strong evaluations and developed an insurance policy package that is an exclusive Farm Bureau product.

But when the company’s Iowa and Kansas operations merged earlier this decade, Gross asserts that all claims department employees in Iowa with a rank of supervisor or higher were forced to take demotions. Many of his tasks were reassigned to younger workers.

Gross filed suit in 2003. He has been battling the company ever since but continues to work there, which means that he has had to “endure retaliation for exercising a legal right,” he said in prepared testimony.

The written statement he submitted for the record at an October 7 hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee was even more poignant than his brief remarks.

“Many of my friends are also farm or small-town kids who now feel like they are the forgotten minority,” Gross wrote. “Some have been aggressively looking for work for months, only to find doors close when they reveal the year they graduated. This fight has become more about them than it is for me.”

He is upset that his name is now associated with a case that has made it harder for plaintiffs to prevail in age discrimination suits.

 “That’s a heavy burden to place on one guy who simply tried to right one single act of age discrimination,” he said in an interview.

As is the situation with so many employment lawsuits, if Farm Bureau had used Midwestern common sense and treated a high performer fairly, regardless of his age, the Gross lawsuit and the resulting bill could have been avoided.