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> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/us/politics/wendell-h-ford-kentucky-governor-and-senator-dies-at-90.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/us/politics/wendell-h-ford-kentucky-governor-and-senator-dies-at-90.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news>
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> Wendell H. Ford, Kentucky Governor and Senator, Dies at 90
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> Photo
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> Wendell H. Ford, a former governor and United States senator from Kentucky. Credit Reuters
> Wendell H. Ford, a political moderate from Kentucky who served one term as governor and four as a senator, rising to become the Democratic whip <http://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/14/us/man-wendell-hampton-ford-no-2-man-for-democrats-senate.html>, or assistant leader, in the early 1990s, died on Thursday in Owensboro, Ky. He was 90.
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> A spokeswoman for E.M. Ford & Company, an insurance agency run by the Ford family, announced the death. Mr. Ford learned he had lung cancer in July, she said.
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> In Washington, Mr. Ford was best known for his defense of the tobacco industry and for his advocacy of legislation making it easier to register to vote. The measure, passed in 1993, became known as the Motor Voter law <http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/18/us/senators-approve-a-bill-that-eases-vote-registration.html>, after one of its requirements calling for state governments to allow voter-registration opportunities to any eligible person applying a driver’s license or renewing one.
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> But Mr. Ford made it plain that he had enjoyed his three years as governor more than his 24 in the Senate.
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> “When you’re governor you can get things done,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2012. “You could get it done, walk outside and put your hand on it.”
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> In the Senate, he said, hearings, reports, parliamentary delays and simple obstruction, meant that frequently nothing happened.
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> As governor from 1971 to 1974 — he resigned with a year left in his term to take his Senate seat — he presided over a reorganization of the state government. Some 60 to 70 agencies, each with its own pipeline to the legislature, were combined into nine departments reporting to the governor.
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> Another major victory came when the legislature voted to impose a tax on coal production, an idea that had been around for 50 years. The tax, at 4 cents a ton, covered the cost of ending the state’s sales tax on food, prescription drugs and farm machinery.
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> In the Senate, Mr. Ford was also known for his concerted efforts to use federal money to build and improve airports. “Every little town in Kentucky has an airport,” he said in the interview. “If you’ve got an airport, you’ve got an opportunity for economic development.”
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> Mr. Ford was politically to the right of center in his party; in his 24 years in the Senate, he voted along liberal lines 56 percent of the time, the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action calculated. And while he could be sharply partisan in his public speaking, he could also work the back rooms making deals with Republicans, a tradition that had become harder to sustain, he said, as the Senate embraced transparency with open meetings and televised coverage.
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> In the old days, he said, “you could close the doors and work everything out.”
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> “Everybody was happy, even the constituents,” he said.
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> After retiring from the Senate in 1999, Mr. Ford was a consultant with a Washington lobbying firm, Dickstein Shapiro. His major post-Senate enterprise, however, was the Wendell H. Ford Government Education Center <http://www.owensboromuseum.org/exhibits/wendell-h-ford-government-education-center> at the Owensboro Museum of Science and History in Owensboro, the Ohio River city where he was born and continued to live. Each year as many as 10,000 Kentucky high school students spend a day among exhibits and interactive displays about the state’s political and economic history. Well into his 80s he campaigned for Democratic candidates.
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> Continue reading the main story
> When Mr. Ford announced in 1997 that he would not run for a fifth term the next year, he cited the difficulty of fund-raising as an important reason. “I detest the idea of having to raise $5 million for a job that pays $133,000 a year,” he said.
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> One handicap, he said, taking a swipe at President Bill Clinton’s practice of letting campaign contributors sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House, was that “Mrs. Ford won’t let me bring anyone home to sleep in our spare bedroom.”
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> Wendell Hampton Ford was born on Sept. 8, 1924, and grew up on a farm near Owensboro, in Yellow Creek. He attended the University of Kentucky in 1943 and served in the Army from 1944 to 1946.
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> After the war, he went into the insurance business and became active in the Junior Chamber of Commerce, known as the Jaycees, serving as president of the Owensboro chapter, the Kentucky state unit and, in 1956-57, the national organization.
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> The Jaycees posts raised his profile in Kentucky and led to his first job in state government, as chief assistant to Governor Bert T. Combs, from 1959 to 1961. And his network of Jaycees colleagues throughout the state helped him in his first political race, for the State Senate, in 1965. He was elected after winning by 305 votes in the Democratic primary. Two years later he was elected lieutenant governor, after winning by 631 in that primary. He served under a Republican governor, Louie B. Nunn.
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> Mr. Ford ran for governor in 1971, facing Mr. Combs, who had resigned a federal judgeship to seek to win back the governorship, in the Democratic primary. Mr. Ford beat him by a substantial margin and took the general election easily. In 1974, in his race for the Senate, he defeated an incumbent Republican, Marlow Cook, by a large margin and was never threatened in three re-elections.
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> He is survived by his wife, the former Jean Neel, whom he married in 1943; a son, Steven; a daughter, Shirley Dexter; a sister, Betty John Sharpe; a brother, Reyburn; five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
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> Mr. Ford used to joke that as a Kentucky senator he had to represent interests — like tobacco, coal and bourbon — that Washington found increasingly politically incorrect. He also liked to regale his colleagues, often in the cloakrooms, with Kentucky yarns. One that he told in public stressed the importance of a less controversial Kentucky constituency, horse racing.
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> As he told the story, one Kentucky Derby day, a man walking in the Churchill Downs grandstand spied a box with a prominent empty seat. Next to it sat an older woman. “This is the first empty seat I’ve seen today,” he told her.
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> She explained, “Well, it belonged to my husband, but he died.”
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> The stranger asked, “Why didn’t you give it to one of your relatives?”
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> The woman replied, “I would have, but they’re all at the funeral.”
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