Mel Carnahan was born in the small Ozarks town of Birch Tree, Missouri in 1934. His parents were public school teachers and both went on to become school superintendents in rural Missouri. Mel's father, A. S. J. Carnahan, represented southeast Missouri in the U.S. House of Representatives for 14 years before accepting an appointment by President Kennedy as the first U.S. ambassador to Sierra Leone in 1961.

Growing up, Mel attended public schools and was active in the Baptist church. He met his high school sweetheart, Jean Carpenter, at a church youth meeting. The pair later graduated from high school and college together. Mel and Jean were married in 1954.

After graduating from George Washington University with a B.A. in business administration in 1954, Mel served two years in the U.S. Air Force, assigned to the Office of Special Investigations. In 1956, he enrolled in law school at the University of Missouri in Columbia. He graduated in 1959 with the highest scholastic honors: Law Review and the Order of the Coif.

After law school, Mel and Jean moved to Rolla where Mel started a law practice and the couple raised their growing family. In 1961, at the age of 26, Mel was elected a municipal court judge in Rolla. In 1962, he was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives and served there until 1967. In the second of his two terms, his colleagues elected him majority floor leader.

In 1967, after an unsuccessful bid for the state senate, Mel focused on his law practice and his community. He served as president of the Rolla school board, helped supervise the construction of a new high school and chaired the building committee overseeing the construction of the new sanctuary at the First Baptist Church of Rolla. Mel and Jean remained active in the First Baptist Church of Rolla where they both served as Sunday school teachers and where Mel served as a deacon.

Mel re-entered government service in 1980 when he was elected state Treasurer. He quickly earned a reputation as an innovative reformer and champion of taxpayers when he insisted on ending the practice of awarding investment management contracts to political supporters and, instead, required that the contracts be competitively bid.

In 1988, Mel was elected Lt. Governor -- the only Missouri Democrat running for statewide office to win that year. He was elected governor in 1992 and 1996, both times by landslide margins.

As governor, Mel Carnahan used mainstream, common sense approaches to help Missourians address the challenges they face in their day-to-day lives. The education reforms he enacted raised academic standards, reduced class sizes in the early grades, established career paths for non-college bound students and expanded early-childhood development programs. His widely acclaimed Safe Schools Act is giving school districts new tools and resources for making our classrooms safer.

To help Missouri's families, Carnahan also fought successfully to require that health insurers cover child immunizations and 48-hour maternity stays so new mothers and infants can't be discharged from hospitals prematurely. And tens of thousands of previously uninsured children who had little or no prospect of getting health coverage are now receiving adequate health care under a children's health initiative recently launched by Carnahan.

Governor Carnahan tripled funding for in-home health care for seniors, led the fight for better regulation of nursing homes and successfully pushed for stronger laws against senior abuse and neglect. Carnahan also passed the toughest anti-crime measures in Missouri's history, lengthening the average prison time served for the most dangerous and violent offenders by about 10 years and significantly strengthening the state's sexual predator and juvenile crime laws.

Governor Carnahan's sound fiscal management and innovative policies continue to enrich the lives of Missourians. His job training programs, economic development policies and welfare reforms have helped Missouri create more than 300,000 new jobs while reducing welfare rolls by about 50%. Over the past seven years, Governor Carnahan cut annual sales, business, and income taxes by a net total of more than $300 million, while balancing the state's budget and maintaining Missouri's triple-A bond rating.

Governor Carnahan was running for the United States Senate at the time of his death. Mel Carnahan was running on his proven record of doing what’s right for Missouri’s working families. He sought to ensure that the mainstream ideas and values of ordinary Missourians were fully and forcefully represented in Congress.

Governor Carnahan will forever be remembered as an advocate for children and working families. The family is asking that those who wish to contribute to The Children's Trust Fund, a not-for-profit charitable organization that helps abused and underprivileged children, do so by sending contributions to The Children's Trust Fund, P.O. Box 1641, Jefferson City, Missouri 65102-1641.