Idaho Democrats are celebrating the life of Ed Stimpson, one of our state party's greatest champions, who died the day before Thanksgiving. Ed was a legend in aviation circles and - together with his wife, Dottie - a lifelong supporter of robust civic engagement and Democratic candidates and causes.

A memorial service for Ed will be held at 3 p.m. Saturday, December 5, at St. Michael's Cathedral, 518 N. 8th St., in Boise. A second service is set at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., on December 12. Our thoughts and heartfelt sympathy are with Dottie and the rest of their family.

Ed's longtime friend, Ted Van Dyk, wrote a tribute to him on the Northwest news website Crosscut, in which he noted how the Stimpsons "helped transform Boise from a conservative political bastion into the state's Democratic stronghold." He wrote about learning of Ed's diagnosis of lung cancer - even though he never smoked - and told of their last visit together:

As my own good luck would have it, I spent last Saturday with Ed and Dottie at St. Luke's hospital in Boise. He was heavily medicated. He argued unsuccessfully with his nurses that he be allowed to dress and "have lunch and conversation at a more suitable place" than at his hospital bed. Characteristically, he talked not about himself or his illness but about current public issues, his involvement in an aviation-industry study, and his pride in his part in strengthening the Idaho Democratic Party. Denny Miller visited a day later. Then Ed was sent home to hospice care. He passed almost immediately — spared, as it turned out, from a long ordeal for him and for Dottie which might have followed.

E-mails have flowed from the Stimpson network since his passing. That is because he was held in such love and respect by all whose lives he had touched. Over his lifetime he was never known to speak cruelly or harshly about another person. He preferred instead to make his own positive contributions wherever he could. His integrity shone. He was the archetype "other-oriented" person, always seeking to help other people and causes, never to advance himself. He was a good and rare human being.

Read the whole tribute here, and Ed's obituary from the Idaho Statesman here.