Thomas Luken, Veteran Ohio Democrat, Is Dead at 92

Thomas Luken, a political force in Ohio for more than 30 years as a federal prosecutor, a member of Congress and the mayor of Cincinnati, died Wednesday in Cincinnati. He was 92.

His son Charlie said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.

Charlie Luken was the third member of his family elected mayor of Cincinnati, following his father and his uncle Jim.

Thomas Luken was known as much for his temperamental, confrontational style as he was for leading, as mayor, the city’s purchase of a private bus company in the early 1970s to avoid higher fares.

“He was after the New Deal, but that was his brand of politics,” Charlie Luken said in an interview. “And he liked to fight and he liked to argue.”

One of the many Cincinnati Democrats he mentored was Jerry Springer, who would find fame as the host of a raucous nationally syndicated talk show. Springer was first a member of the City Council and later the mayor, from 1977 to 1978.

“He was tough, he was rough,” Springer said of Luken to WCPO-TV in Cincinnati. “He wasn’t necessarily the most genial guy.”

But as the current mayor, John Cranley, said at a news conference Wednesday after the death, Luken was an influential, popular ally.

“He marched in Selma, put together the coalition to create the first Democratic majority in the City Council and passed an investment in public transportation that nobody has done since,” Cranley said.

He added: “I went to church festivals with Tom Luken when I was running the first time. Of course, nobody knew who I was, but they knew who he was.”

At another church festival, Luken followed Steve Chabot, his Republican opponent in a congressional election, as he handed out plastic cups with his name on them. Howard Wilkinson, a political reporter for WVXU Radio in Cincinnati, recalled on the station Thursday that Luken then promised potential voters: “If you come up to me with a Chabot for Congress cup, I’ll fill it with beer.”

“That won him a lot of votes,” Wilkinson added.

Thomas Andrew Luken was born in Cincinnati on July 9, 1925. His father, Walter, was a factory worker, and his mother, the former Minnie Kisbert, was a homemaker. After graduating from Xavier University and the Salmon P. Chase Law School in Cincinnati, he served in the Marines.

He was elected city solicitor of Deer Park, a suburb of Cincinnati, before being named first assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, an appointment that was helped by his brother Jim, a labor leader whose friendship with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was based in part on their dislike of the Teamsters union president, Jimmy Hoffa. Jim Luken pulled his milk deliverers union out of the Teamsters in 1961.

After serving on the City Council, which included a year as mayor, from 1971 to 1972 — at the time, the council elected the mayor — Luken won a special election to fill a vacant seat in Congress in 1974. The election came amid a backlash against Republicans in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

He lost an election for a full term that year but returned to Congress when he moved to another district in 1976. He was re-elected six times.

He found a major issue in the late 1980s: the power of tobacco companies.

“He had lost three siblings to lung cancer,” Charlie Luken said, “and he took on Big Tobacco full throttle.”

Luken introduced legislation that would have prohibited the sale of cigarettes in vending machines, stiffened warnings about the health risks of cigarettes and required that tobacco be regulated as a toxic substance by the Environmental Protection Agency.

“I would love to legislate tobacco out of existence and make it criminal,” Luken told The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1990.

He retired from Congress in early 1991 but returned to the Cincinnati City Council in 1993 to serve another term.

While there, he sponsored a law to remove tobacco advertisements from city bus shelters and buses and ban all outdoor advertising of tobacco products. He said his goal was to keep young people from starting to smoke. He told The Associated Press that advertising revenue from tobacco products was “blood money.”

“I don’t think the city wants blood money,” he said.

In addition to his son Charlie, Luken is survived by his wife, the former Shirley Ast; four daughters, Elizabeth Luken, Mary Miller, Margaret Sandman and Martha Mocahbee; two other sons, Timothy and Matthew; 15 grandchildren; and 16 great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Anne Hall, died in 2011.

During his retirement from public office, Luken became an activist against the death penalty. He joined demonstrators in Lucasville, Ohio, in 2002 to protest an execution by lethal injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility.

“I think there is a real irony in that crime-scene tape there,” he told The Enquirer in 2004, referring to a cordon outside the prison. “A crime occurred there. The state sanctioned murder.”