Hubert Humphrey's Widow Dies

(AP)  Muriel Humphrey Brown, widow of Vice President Hubert Humphrey and his brief successor in the U.S. Senate, has died. She was 86.

Mrs. Brown died Sunday of natural causes at Abbott Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Minneapolis after being admitted to the hospital earlier in the day.

Former Vice President Walter Mondale, who was her late husband's protege and knew her for 50 years, described the couple as a splendid and influential team.

"Together they helped change this country to a better, fairer, more decent society," Mondale said. "Half of what we credit Hubert for we should credit Muriel, because they were a team from beginning to end."

Mrs. Brown was a reluctant campaigner who once said she was afraid to address her own women's club. She grew into the role and eventually campaigned seven days a week for her husband when he unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 1972.

Mrs. Brown rarely appeared in public in recent years but was by the side of her son Hubert Humphrey III last week when he won the Democratic-Farmer-Labor gubernatorial primary.

"Wouldn't Hubert have been proud," Mrs. Brown said to a cheering crowd shortly after her son's victory.

Hubert Humphrey lost the 1968 presidential election to Richard Nixon and was re-elected to the Senate in 1970. After his death, Mrs. Brown became the only woman to serve as senator from Minnesota when then-Gov. Rudy Perpich appointed her to the vacant seat in January 1978.

She did not seek election in the fall of 1978. Republican Sen. Dave Durenberger succeeded her.

She was the 12th woman to serve in the Senate and the fifth to take a seat vacated by her husband. She was the only woman in the Senate at the time.

"It's the most challenging thing I've ever done in my whole life," she said.

Like her husband, she championed social programs and labor issues. She went beyond him in her push for abortion rights, saying that the federal government ought to pay for abortions for poor women.

Mrs. Brown was born Muriel Fay Buck on Feb. 20, 1912, in Huron, S.D. She met Humphrey in 1934 when he was working at his father's drugstore and she was a bookkeeper for a utility. They married two years later.

A year after Humphrey died at age 66 after a long battle with cancer, she married Max Brown, a lifelong Republican whom she met when the two were sixth-graders in Huron.

In addition to her husband and Hubert Humphrey III, Mrs. Brown is survived by a daughter, Nancy Solomonson, and two other sons, Bob and Douglas Humphrey.

Written by Rochelle Olson