His daughter Elizabeth Hughes said the cause was complications of pneumonia.
After Agnew, who had resigned to become vice president, pleaded no contest to felony tax evasion in 1973, and Mandel, his successor, was convicted of racketeering in 1977 (the conviction was later overturned), Hughes promised Maryland voters an honest and understated administration. That is largely what he delivered.
He collaborated with neighboring states to protect Chesapeake Bay from pollution; raised gasoline taxes to pay for road repairs; appointed a record number of women and minorities to state posts; aggressively pursued drunken drivers; expanded the prison system; restructured formulas for financing public education and for imposing taxes to make both more equitable; and presided over the celebration of the state’s 350th anniversary.
Beginning in 1971, as Maryland’s first secretary of transportation, he transformed modest Friendship Airport into Baltimore-Washington International and successfully lobbied for the Metro SubwayLink in Baltimore, which opened in 1983.
Barred from seeking a third term as governor, he sought the Democratic nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in 1986 when the Republican incumbent, Charles Mathias, retired.
But he was dogged by what some considered the state’s sluggish response to the savings-and-loan crisis, which left taxpayers with a bill for protecting deposits and heralded a nationwide financial debacle. Most depositors eventually recouped their money.
Rep. Barbara Mikulski won the Democratic Senate primary with nearly 50 percent of the vote; Hughes ran third with less than 15 percent.
He retired from politics to practice law and became board president of what is now the Harry R. Hughes Center for Agro-Ecology at the University of Maryland in Queenstown, a research operation. (It was named for him in 2006.)
“He was the change agent in Maryland at a time of fairly widespread corruption — a man for whom the question of integrity in government and public service was a deeply held moral issue, not a political issue,” Parris Glendening, who was governor of Maryland from 1995 to 2003 and is now the president of Smart Growth America, an environmental group, said in a telephone interview. “And since he was governor, no one runs for statewide office without a plan to protect Chesapeake Bay.”
“He was one of the best governors,” Glendening said, “and one of the least appreciated.”
Harry Roe Hughes was born Nov. 13, 1926, in Easton, Maryland, on the shore of Chesapeake Bay. His father, Jonathan Longfellow Hughes, worked for an electric cooperative and at one point was on the congressional payroll through political connections. His mother, Helen (Roe) Hughes, taught high school English and French.
Harry was steeped in politics early on. When he was not yet 6 years old, he argued the merits of the 1932 presidential candidates with his maternal grandfather, a staunch Republican. She supported Herbert Hoover; Harry championed Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“I have to say,” he recalled in his memoir, “My Unexpected Journey” (2006), written with John W. Frece, “my political views have been fairly consistent ever since.”
He enlisted in the Navy at 17 and was still in flight school when World War II ended. In 1949, after earning a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, he pursued his dream: spending a summer with the Easton Yankees, a Class D farm club of the New York Yankees.
Hughes’ baseball career was short-lived. He said that while he had become disillusioned over the lack of teamwork, two obstacles prevented him from becoming a great pitcher: his fastball and his curveball.
In 1951, he married Patricia M. Donoho; she died in 2010. In addition to his daughter Elizabeth, his survivors include another daughter, Ann Fink; a grandson; and three great-grandchildren.
After a primary campaign that cost him $156 and was propelled by the popularity he had gained from his college baseball exploits, he represented his home district, Caroline County, in the Maryland House of Delegates from 1955 to 1959. He then served 12 years in the state Senate.
As a lawmaker, he voted to open public accommodations to black people and cast the deciding vote on a bill that guaranteed at least one legislator from each county.
In 1964, he lost a congressional challenge to Rogers C.B. Morton, the Republican incumbent, whose record on civil rights was considered mixed. After his defeat, Hughes was elected state Senate majority leader and Democratic state chairman.
He did not seek re-election in 1970, but Mandel named him to the newly created position of transportation secretary, to coordinate a half-dozen previously autonomous departments that were often at odds. He quit in 1977 after charging that undue influence was being exerted to steer a Baltimore subway contract to a politically potent campaign contributor.
In 1978, in a stunning upset, Hughes toppled Blair Lee III, who had become acting governor when Mandel was imprisoned, for the Democratic nomination for governor. Hughes defeated the Republican candidate, J. Glenn Beall Jr., that November with 71 percent of the vote. It was the largest victory margin in a Maryland governor’s race.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.