Jay Rockefeller, who left one of America's richest families to work as an antipoverty volunteer in a West Virginia coal community and went on to serve the state as governor and as a U.S. senator for 30 years, has died at 89. He died at his home surrounded by family, WV MetroNews reported Friday, citing a source close to the family. The report did not give a cause.
Rockefeller, a Democrat, was governor from 1977 to 1985 and represented West Virginia in the Senate from 1985 to 2015. His successor in that seat, Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, said he "dedicated his life to serving West Virginia and our nation" and called him "a true gentleman who treated me with respect, kindness, and encouragement."
From antipoverty worker to governor
John Davison Rockefeller IV was born in New York City on June 18, 1937. His great-grandfather, the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, was at one time thought to be the world's richest man. Jay studied Asian languages and history at Harvard and spent three years at International Christian University in Tokyo.
He moved to West Virginia in 1964 for antipoverty work and became a social worker in Emmons, in Kanawha County, according to his biography in e-WV, the West Virginia Encyclopedia. Two years later he switched his registration from Republican to Democrat, breaking with his family's party, and won a seat in the House of Delegates. He was elected secretary of state in 1968.
His first run for governor, in 1972, ended in a loss to Republican Arch Moore by 73,355 votes. During that campaign he had called for strip mining to be banned, a position he later changed. After four years as president of West Virginia Wesleyan College, he won the governorship in 1976 over former Gov. Cecil Underwood, 495,659 votes to 253,423, the biggest winning margin the state had seen. He beat Moore in a 1980 rematch.
His wealth was an issue in his campaigns. He reported spending more than $1.5 million in 1972, then a record for a single candidate, and close to $12 million in 1980.
Three decades in the Senate
Rockefeller won his Senate seat in 1984 and was reelected four times. He talked Toyota into opening a Putnam County plant and helped pass a 1992 law that kept United Mine Workers health insurance paid for with a levy on mined coal. He chaired the Senate Commerce Committee and the Finance subcommittee on health care, and served on the Intelligence Committee.
In 1997 he worked to get the Children's Health Insurance Program through Congress. West Virginia University Libraries, which hold his congressional papers, marked the program's 20th anniversary with an exhibit on the compromises he worked through to pass it.
When he announced in January 2013 that he would not run again, he said, "West Virginia has become my life and my cause."
He married Sharon Percy, daughter of Illinois Sen. Charles Percy, in 1967. They raised their four children in West Virginia.
