HispanicBusiness

While still in high school, he began dating Sheila Ison, a Southern Baptist with Kentucky roots. They went to different colleges at first, could not bear the separation and were married in 1963, when both were 19. Their first child, Paul David, was born in 1965. Sheila worked in the university library as Wellstone went on to graduate school in political science.

He plunged into his studies and wrestling, winning a regional championship and earning his undergrad degree in three years.

Wellstone was hired to teach political science at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., in 1969, and his new responsibilities did not end his confrontative protest politics. He was arrested at a Vietnam War protest at the federal building in Minneapolis in 1970. He organized Rice County welfare recipients. He was arrested again at a Paynesville bank at a protest related to farm bankruptcies.

Wellstone was so controversial that Carleton officials tried to fire him in 1974. But with the vocal and organized support of students he had taught, he fought back and eventually won tenure.

Steve Schier, a Carleton professor, said Wellstone was "less of an academic, more of a grass-roots political activist. He viewed it as part of his mission to get students active in politics."

As Wellstone himself got involved in politics, his high-volume speeches, delivered in cadences that he copied from black gospel preachers, made him a favorite speaker at DFL functions. In 1982, as something of a sacrificial lamb against a popular moderate, Republican Arne Carlson, Wellstone ran for state auditor.

During the campaign Wellstone admitted that he had a learning disability that gave him trouble with numbers and statistics, an odd handicap for a state auditor.

He was soundly defeated, but Carlson said Friday that he had become good friends with Wellstone in the last couple of years, partly because Wellstone sought his advice about what people would think of the senator's revelation that he had multiple sclerosis.

"He grew in the job, and to me that's always the test of an individual's worth," Carlson said Friday. "He always used his public service as an opportunity to express his principles, his fight for the underdog."

Senate campaign

Wellstone's next campaign was for the U.S. Senate. He declared his candidacy in April of 1989 at a community center in a low-income Minneapolis neighborhood. The DFL establishment gave him little chance of defeating a popular and entrenched incumbent Republican, Rudy Boschwitz.

But Wellstone worked tirelessly to persuade DFL activists, concentrating on the urban core, distressed agricultural regions, and above all the blue-collar enclaves of the Iron Range.

His debate coach that year, whom Wellstone later nominated as a U.S. attorney, David Lillehaug, recalled that "he was about the only person who really believed he'd win. . . . The DFL establishment thought I was crazy to want to help him but I loved his heart. He always said he wouldn't be the senator for big oil, for the drug companies. It was straight populism, 180 proof."

Victory

Wellstone caught the beginning of a populist reaction against 1980s Republicanism under President Ronald Reagan. He presented himself as the enemy of corporate privilege and wealth. He called for a single-payer national health-care system and sweeping campaign finance reforms, and managed to put together what has been called a "blue-green" coalition, composed of union members in hard hats and liberal and environmental activists in pony tails.