Former Sen. Jim Inhofe died Tuesday morning, as first reported by the Tulsa World. He was 89.
Inhofe had roughly 60 years in public service and 29 years as a United States senator.
Born Nov. 17, 1934, in Des Moines, Iowa, the longtime Republican lawmaker moved to Tulsa as a child. Inhofe was a track star in high school and graduated in 1953 from Central High School. Inhofe was drafted into the army three years later and served between 1957 and 1958.
Inhofe’s political career spanned over six decades. In 1966, Inhofe won his first election, a Republican special election primary for a vacant state house seat. Two years later, he was elected to the state Senate. Inhofe served in the state Senate for another four years, won three terms as mayor of Tulsa, and lost a 1976 race for U.S. representative.
In 1994, Inhofe entered the race to replace David Boren, the last Democratic Senator from Oklahoma, in the U.S. Senate.
A vocal climate change denier, he famously brought a snowball onto the Senate floor and threw it as evidence that climate change did not exist.
During Inhofe’s first year, Republicans captured every Oklahoma congressional seat.
Inhofe was not always favored by the Republican Party. In 2020, the senator received heavy criticism from his party when he defended the results of the 2020 presidential election at the state GOP convention.
Inhofe left politics in 2023 after suffering from the long-term impacts of COVID-19.
