Former Missoula mayor Turman dies

 

December 10, 2008 12:00 am • By MIKE DENNISON Missoulian State Bureau

 

HELENA – George Turman, a former Democratic lieutenant governor who had left the Republican Party as a legislator in the 1970s because his GOP colleagues considered him too liberal, died Tuesday in Missoula. He was 80.

 

Turman was remembered Tuesday by former colleagues as a “class act” who got involved in politics for idealistic reasons and not for any personal aggrandizement.

 

“What I remember him mostly for is his decency, his ethics, and his commitment to what he did,” said former Gov. Ted Schwinden, who picked Turman as his running mate in 1980. “He was a highly ethical person.”

 

Turman got his start in Montana politics as mayor of Missoula in 1970, named to replace Republican Dick Shoup, who had resigned to run for Congress.

 

Turman won re-election as mayor that year and then was elected to the Legislature two years later. Yet at the end of his first term as a state representative, he and several other Republican House members walked out of a party meeting after it became apparent the party was organizing a committee to run primary candidates against members who weren’t deemed conservative enough.

 

Turman decided to run as a Democrat in 1974 for the state Public Service Commission, representing Missoula, and won.

 

“I remember George Turman as one of the absolutely most intelligent, most articulate and most compassionate Republican legislators I ever served with,” recalled Hal Harper, who lost to a challenger in the 1974 Republican primary and then chose to switch parties, running for a seat and winning as a Democrat in 1976. He is now an aide to Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer.

 

Harper said both he and Turman were strong environmentalists and generally pro-union.

 

Turman served on the PSC until 1980, when Schwinden tapped him as running mate in Schwinden’s quest to defeat then-Gov. Tom Judge in the Democratic primary. Schwinden and Turman won an upset victory.

 

“(George) came from a time when it was hard to tell a moderate Republican from a Democrat,” said Schwinden, himself a conservative Democrat. “The last thing in the world that George wasn’t, was an extreme person. He was idealistic, but he was bathed with some pragmatism.”

 

Turman served as lieutenant governor under Schwinden for nearly all of the latter’s two terms in office, and was appointed by Schwinden in 1988 as one of two Montana representatives on the Northwest Power Planning Council.

 

Turman left that post in 1989 to become president of the National Center for Appropriate Technology in Butte, where he stayed until he retired in 1993, moving back to Missoula.

 

Turman was born in Missoula in 1928 and grew up there, earning an economics degree from the University of Montana. He served in the Army during the Korean War and was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge.

 

He married Kathleen “Kay” Hager of Big Timber in 1951. He worked for the Federal Reserve Bank in Seattle and San Francisco but returned to Missoula in the 1960s, where he had a property-management business.

 

Turman is survived by his wife, three daughters, two sons, 10 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.