When John and Rose Olver were awarded tenure in the late 1960s — he at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she at Amherst College — she thought they’d celebrate by traveling abroad.
A chemistry professor who had graduated from college at age 18, Dr. Olver had another idea. He wanted to run for a state representative seat.
“So we spent the first half of our sabbaticals campaigning. He won,” his wife, Rose Richardson Olver, recalled in a 1991 Globe interview. “My sense was that he just couldn’t tolerate the fact that what he was doing in the laboratory had no relationship to the problems and issues in the world.”
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Dr. Olver, who never lost an election in the nearly 44 years he served as a state representative, state senator, and US representative, died Feb. 23 in his Amherst home. He was 86 and had retired from politics when his final term ended in early 2013.
He was elected to Congress in 1991, and his victory was historic — wresting the seat from the Republican Party for the first time in nearly a century and giving Democrats full control of the state’s congressional delegation.
“You have known me,” he had told supporters in Northampton while announcing his First Congressional District candidacy in 1991. “What you see is what you get.”
What they got was a liberal Democrat with a substantial legislative record accrued during four years as a state representative and 18 years in the state Senate, where he served as the chamber’s chairman of the Taxation Committee.
In the 1980s, as anti-tax sentiment grew statewide after voters approved the property tax increase-limiting Proposition 2½, Dr. Olver helped found the Tax Equity Alliance of Massachusetts, or TEAM, which advocated for progressive tax policies.
The organization played a key role in the 1990 election defeat of Question 3, a tax rollback proposal.
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“John’s organizing of TEAM neutralized the anti-tax, anti-government juggernaut in Massachusetts, a contribution still being felt to this day,” said Jim Braude, who was executive director of TEAM when Question 3 was defeated, and ended his years-long tenure hosting “Greater Boston” on GBH-TV in December.
Often called “professorial” by political colleagues, Dr. Olver was respected for his behind-the-scenes work crafting legislation and brokering compromises.
He did so while backing issues that weren’t popular with everyone in his congressional district.
During his career, he supported abortion rights, championed land conservation, and backed sanctions against Iraq in 1991, rather than the use of military force in the Persian Gulf, when the United States launched Desert Storm.
Tall, lean, and laconic, Dr. Olver spoke in the flowing, full paragraphs of a classroom lecture, rather than in the sound bites many politicians favor, particularly on the campaign trail.
“He talks like a professor and all his answers are in 15-minute shots,” the late state Representative John Flood, a Canton Democrat, said in 1986 when the two chaired the Legislature’s Taxation Committee.
Nevertheless, Dr. Olver’s dry wit never failed to elicit laughter in campaign appearances when he passed a hand over his bald head and said it was clear he wasn’t a blow-dried politician.
“He may not have charisma, but he is a leader,” the Springfield Union-News opined in 1991, when Dr. Olver was in the midst of his successful special election campaign to fill the seat left open by the death of longtime US Representative Silvio O. Conte.
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Even opponents who disagreed with Dr. Olver’s political stances and his support of progressive tax policies praised his character.
“He is the consummate liberal,” the late David H. Locke, a Wellesley Republican who was then the Senate minority leader, said during Dr. Olver’s 1991 candidacy. “I don’t think he ever saw a tax he didn’t love. But he is perfectly honest in that regard. I view him as a person of conscience.”
In 1996, when Dr. Olver won yet another in a series of his congressional reelections, his Republican opponent was Jane Swift, who was then a state senator, and a future lieutenant governor and acting governor.
“As a colleague in the Massachusetts Senate and an opponent in my one losing race for Congress, I respected John Olver’s serious commitment to public service and his work ethic,” she tweeted last Friday.
Ever low-key, Dr. Olver had refrained from offering a personal boast that 1996 night when he claimed victory in their contest.
“It seems like a good day for Democrats,” he said simply at his victory party.
John Walter Olver was born in Honesdale, Pa., on Sept. 3, 1936, and grew up in Beach Lake, Pa., with his sister, brother, and parents, who ran a dairy farm and a boarding house.
Dr. Olver attended a small, rural school where four grades gathered in each classroom, his wife once told the Globe, and he often worked through more than one grade in a year.
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As a result, he was 15 when he finished high school and 18 when he graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York with a bachelor’s degree. He received a master’s from Tufts University and was 24 when he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a doctorate.
He taught at Franklin Technical Institute and MIT before joining the faculty at UMass Amherst, where he was a professor until leaving to serve as a state representative.
Dr. Olver met Rose Richardson when they were both graduate students. They married in 1959.
Rose Olver, who died in 2014, was the first woman appointed to be a tenure-track faculty member at Amherst College, where she retired as a professor emerita of psychology and sexuality, and women’s and gender studies.
Dr. Olver’s interest in grassroots politics was driven in part by his involvement in the 1950s with the Cambridge Civic Association.
“I was a very young graduate of high school and college, and clearly I was just plowing ahead with no sense of direction,” he told the Globe in 1991, and politics provided a sense of purpose.
“His idea of a heavy date was to go out campaigning. He would give me a sheaf of literature and assign me a street,” Rose recalled in the same interview, joking that “he was at MIT and was going to be a chemist. I thought he would come to his senses.”
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Among Dr. Olver’s congressional accomplishments was sending federal funding to Massachusetts.
“There’s probably not a transportation project in the state that doesn’t have John Olver’s fingerprints on it,” US Representative James P. McGovern, a Massachusetts Democratic colleague, said in 2011, when Dr. Olver announced he would retire at the end of that term.
A death notice Dr. Olver’s family placed said he leaves two daughters, Martha Jane Olver of Amherst and Cary Plumer Frye of Virginia; a son, Douglas Plumer of New York City; and a grandson.
A memorial service will be held the afternoon of April 16 in the John W. Olver Design Building on the UMass Amherst campus.
Away from politics, Dr. Olver liked to spend time rock climbing, which he took up to challenge his deathly fear of heights.
“I’m not sure that I have ever gotten over it,” he told the Globe, “but I conquered it.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.