As word spread that Rep. Rory Ellinger, a Democrat from University City, was critically ill with an aggressive liver cancer, his colleagues in the Republican-dominated Missouri Legislature came up with a way to pay him homage: They hurried to pass his last bill in time for Mr. Ellinger to watch the governor sign the act into law last week.
Six days later, on Wednesday (April 9, 2014), Mr. Ellinger died at his home. He was 72.
His law will provide a legal right for women who breast-feed their babies in public.
At the bill-signing ceremony last Thursday, Gov. Jay Nixon turned to Mr. Ellinger and said: “Missouri is a better and more prosperous state, and our families are healthier, Rory, because of your work.”
He was not always so appreciated.
Mr. Ellinger was a lawyer who got his start in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. More recently, he was known as the state’s most liberal legislator. That meant that his labors often got sidetracked in the GOP-dominated Legislature.
But that was politics, not personal. Many of those across the aisle said Mr. Ellinger was able to make a difference.
Mr. Ellinger practiced law for more than 30 years, and he could spot problems other legislators had missed. He once flagged a noncontroversial bill about sawmills. Mr. Ellinger realized that an apparently unintended result would be to bar injured sawmill workers from receiving workers compensation benefits.
He alerted Republicans and got the measure changed.
“You can make change, if you don’t care who gets the credit,” he sometimes said about being a liberal minority in a sea of conservatives.
Republican Rep. Jay Barnes of Jefferson City said Mr. Ellinger realized that he wasn’t going to win the big battles.
But he used “logic and sincerity” to win battles he wasn’t supposed to win and to advance his causes in the “nooks and crannies of the law” that don’t make headlines, Barnes said.
Rory Vincent Ellinger grew up in a politically active family in Webster Groves. His father, a businessman, was a pro-labor Republican; his mother was a Republican committeewoman.
“The Republican Party made him an activist,” said his wife, Linda Locke. “The old Republican Party. His parents were very involved in social justice.”
Mr. Ellinger graduated from Bishop DuBourg High School and majored in history at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he also earned his law degree. He earned a master’s degree in history at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
While in college, he witnessed demonstrations in 1959 when a Woolworth’s store in Kansas City refused to serve African-Americans. He joined the Young Christian Student Movement. He was inspired by the civil rights activists he saw.
He went to Selma with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was one of a group of young people who acted as bodyguards for King. He went to jail with King in Selma and marched with him in Boston.
At Mizzou, he was president of the Students for a Democratic Society chapter. He demonstrated against the Vietnam War and for student and civil rights. He got his first taste of politics and liked it.
Before he was elected to the Legislature in 2010, he served for 12 years on the University City School Board. He was on the founding board of the Missouri Foundation for Health.
He worked as a lawyer for the Missouri Public Service Commission, which regulates utility rates, and was press secretary to Lt. Gov. Tom Eagleton.
In the Legislature, he represented University City, Pagedale and Wellston.
Mr. Ellinger was an avid historian who loved to visit battlefields in Missouri and Illinois.
“He could not remember my cellphone number, but he could detail the designs of the uniforms the Nazis wore when they invaded Hungary,” his wife recalled.
Mr. Ellinger died wearing a T-shirt bearing one of his favorite quotes from Winston Churchill: “Never, ever give in.”
Visitation will be at 4 p.m. Friday at Lupton Chapel, 7233 Delmar Boulevard, University City. A service to celebrate his life will be at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Ethical Society of St. Louis, 9001 Clayton Road in Richmond Heights.
Survivors, in addition to his wife, include his daughter, Maggie Ellinger-Locke of St. Louis, and his son, Martin Ellinger of Chicago; a brother, Jim Ellinger of Austin, Texas; and sister, Kathleen Ellinger of Australia.
Michael Sorkin is a reporter at the Post-Dispatch. Follow him on Facebook.