Maryon Pittman Allen, who replaced her husband Jim Allen as a U.S. senator from Alabama for five months in 1978, has died at age 92.
Allen, who lived in Birmingham, passed away Monday night according to her nephew, Sen. Trip Pittman of Baldwin County.
"She was always a great, wonderful, loving aunt," Pittman said. "She was an older sister by 12 years to my father Jim. We were always close and she always loved her state and country and always cared a lot about what was going on."
Allen was a journalist who met Jim Allen when she interviewed him for the Birmingham News in 1964, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama. Jim Allen was lieutenant governor at the time and was a widower. They married four months later.
Jim Allen was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1968 and reelected in 1974. He died of a heart attack on June 1, 1978, and Gov. George Wallace appointed Maryon Allen to replace him until a special election.
Allen lost the special election in a runoff to Donald Stewart. She served in the Senate until November.
Allen was born in Meridian, Miss., in 1925 and her family moved to Birmingham the next year. She attended public schools in Birmingham and studied journalism at the University of Alabama.
After leaving the Senate, Allen worked as a columnist for the Washington Post before returning to Birmingham. She was public relations and advertising director for C.G. Sloan & Co., an antique and auction firm, and owner Maryon Allen Company, a restoration and design firm in Birmingham, according to her U.S. Congress biographical summary.