SPRINGFIELD, Ill. -- Paul Simon, the bow-tie-wearing missionary's son who rose from crusading newspaper owner to U.S. senator and presidential aspirant, died Tuesday, a day after undergoing heart surgery. He was 75.\nSimon was surrounded by family members at St. John's Hospital in Springfield when he died, according to a statement from Southern Illinois University, where Simon started a public policy institute after his retirement.\n"All of us at the institute were honored and privileged to work with this extraordinary human being and leader," said Mike Lawrence, associate director of the SIU Public Policy Institute, in the statement.\nSimon had a single bypass and heart valve surgery at the hospital's Prairie Heart Institute Monday. In January 1999, Simon underwent coronary artery bypass surgery to correct blockages in six arteries that supply blood to his heart.\nFormer Gov. Jim Edgar said that although he was a Republican and Simon a Democrat, "I think we were probably as good a friends as you can be in those circumstances. He's just somebody I've had the utmost respect for."\n"He was just always out doing things, continuing to be extremely effective as a person who was making a difference," Edgar said. "He had more energy than all of us put together."\nThe Southern Illinois Democrat's political career began with his election to the state Legislature in 1954 and culminated with his election to the U.S. Senate in 1984. He retired from Congress in 1997.\nSimon was in his first Senate term when he sought the Democratic nomination for president. He halted his campaign in April 1988 after winning only his home state's primary.\n"I leave the field of active campaigning with no regrets for having made the race," he said, "because it has been an exhilarating experience to get to know our nation better." He later wrote a book about the campaign, "Winners and Losers."\nSimon was a bespectacled, slightly rumpled man with a strong reputation for honesty, a politician who began disclosing his personal finances in the 1950s. He had the sober, straight-laced bearing of a Sunday school teacher and wrote 22 books, including "Advice & Consent," published in 1992.\nSimon blended fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. Raised during the Depression, the son of a Lutheran minister, he saw the great needs facing the country and how government responded through New Deal programs.\nHis family struggled, though not as much as others. "I learned that you have to be careful with money," he said.\nThat explained his reputation as a "pay-as-you-go" Democrat who would rather raise taxes than rely on deficit financing -- and why he so long championed a balanced budget amendment.\n"To be a liberal doesn't mean you're a wastrel," said Simon, citing the words of a political mentor, former Sen. Paul Douglas of Illinois.\nIn 1948, at age 19, Simon dropped out of college, borrowed $3,600 and bought a failing weekly newspaper in Troy, a town of about 1,500 across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. He became the nation's youngest editor-publisher at the time.\nHis blasts at crime and corruption did not make waves until then-Gov. Adlai Stevenson took notice and ordered a series of state police raids. Simon's role put his name in the pages of Life and Newsweek, and he was asked to testify before a televised U.S. Senate hearing on organized crime.\nEven as a lawmaker, he remained loyal to his roots in journalism, banging out a weekly newspaper column on an old-fashioned manual typewriter. Simon eventually owned 14 newspapers and sold the chain in 1966.\nSimon was born Nov. 29, 1928, in Eugene, Ore., shortly after his parents returned from China, where his father was a missionary. He enrolled in the University of Oregon in 1945 at age 16 to study journalism and transferred to Dana College in Blair, Neb., in 1946 when his parents moved to southern Illinois.\nIn 1953, Simon decided to run for the Illinois legislature. Though he declared himself a Republican and endorsed Thomas E. Dewey over Harry Truman in a 1948 editorial, Simon made a fundamental concession to the local political climate: He ran as a Democrat.\nThe reform-minded Simon soon was nicknamed "Reverend" in Springfield and scored some legislative triumphs, including Illinois' first open-meetings law. He later served in the state Senate.\nIt was during his tenure as a state lawmaker that he met his future wife, Jeanne, a state representative, at the state capitol. She left the state House in 1960 after two terms to marry him. They honeymooned at the Democratic National Convention.\nIn February 2000, Mrs. Simon died at age 77 of brain cancer, marking the end of one of Illinois' longest-running and most successful political partnerships. The next year, Simon, at 72, married again, this time to Patricia Derge of Carbondale.
Derge was the widow of David Derge, a former president of Southern Illinois University who died in 1996. She served on the staff of the Illinois Constitutional Convention in 1970 and has taught high school government.
In 1968, Simon won election as lieutenant governor. He appeared headed for the top office when then-Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley tapped Simon for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1972 against a Republican incumbent who had enacted Illinois' first state income tax.\nBut an anti-Daley backlash blunted the Democratic machine's strength in Chicago, and corporate lawyer Dan Walker defeated Simon in the party primary.\nSimon spent the next two years lecturing at universities. His political return came in 1974 when he went to the U.S. House representing part of southern Illinois.\nIn 1984, he took on three-term GOP Sen. Charles Percy, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and won by a 50-48 margin. He accused Percy of lying, contended Percy profited from the Reagan tax cuts, and portrayed the millionaire senator as the candidate "of country clubs and board rooms."\nSix years later, Simon faced a re-election challenge from then-U.S. Rep. Lynn Martin, a Republican. Simon won with 65 percent of the vote.\nSimon decided not to seek a third term in the Senate and retired from Congress in 1997. In retirement, he taught at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, near his hometown of Makanda, and ran the Public Policy Institute, a bipartisan think tank he founded.\nWhile he was in the Senate, Simon helped overhaul the federal student loan program to enable students and their families to borrow directly from the government. As a crusader against television violence, he successfully pushed the industry to monitor the amount of violence on the screen.\nIn addition to his wife, survivors include a daughter, Sheila of Carbondale, a son, Martin Simon of Crofton, Md., and stepdaughter, Jennie Derge.
