Mr. Enzi served in the Wyoming National Guard from 1967 to 1973. He married Diana Buckley in 1969, and the two moved to Gillette, where he ran a shoe store.
She survives him, as do his daughters, Amy Strom and Emily McGrady; a son, Brad Enzi; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Enzi did not initially intend to get into politics, he said. But he was a member of the Jaycees, a national leadership training and civic organization (for only men at the time), and served as president of its Wyoming chapter. When he was 29, he recalled, he was asked to speak at an event in Cody, Wyo., where another speaker, Alan Simpson, a state representative who would go on to serve in the United States Senate, pulled him aside and encouraged him to run for mayor of Gillette, the city to which he had moved only a few years earlier.
On the way home from that Cody meeting while my wife was driving, I told her what Senator Simpson had said, and that I was thinking maybe I should run for mayor, Mr. Enzi said in his retirement speech. It must have come as quite a shock, because she ended up swerving into the barrow pit and then coming back up onto the road.
At the time, Mr. Enzi said, Gillette was a place where recent discoveries of oil, gas and coal were drawing more and more people and putting a strain on municipal services. The city, he said, was in need of three things that would become a recurring theme in Mr. Enzis political career: budgets, agendas and planning.
Not the most exciting topics, he said.
Mr. Enzi was elected mayor in 1974 and served two four-year terms, during which he traveled to and from Washington as a member of the Coal Advisory Committee for the U.S. Department of Interior and served as the president of the Wyoming Association of Municipalities.
He soon set his sights on state politics, joining the Wyoming House of Representatives in 1987 and the Wyoming State Senate in 1991. He was first elected to the United States Senate in 1996. He led its Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions from 2005 to 2007 and was the chairman of the Budget Committee from 2015 to 2021.read more
Michael Enzi, Former Senator From Wyoming, Dies at 77
