DALLAS (AP) — Lou "Honey" Bullington Tower, former wife of late U.S. Sen. John Tower, died Monday of natural causes. She was 81.
Her tireless efforts on the campaign trail are credited with helping her husband win a special election to the Senate in 1961, when he became the first Republican elected statewide since Reconstruction.
She was the daughter of 1930s GOP gubernatorial candidate Orville Bullington and was raised in Wichita Falls, Texas.
She married John Tower in March 1952, and after a year in England they returned to Wichita Falls, where he was a college teacher.
The couple divorced in September 1976.
In 1991, the senator and the couple's 35-year-old daughter, Marian, were among 23 people killed in the crash of an Atlantic Southeast Airlines flight near Brunswick, Ga.