DaytonDailyNews.com

Joe Shump, chairman of the Montgomery County Democratic Party for a quarter-century ending in 1994, died Wednesday at Kettering Memorial Hospital after a 13-year battle with leukemia.

"True to form, Joe fought to the very end," his cousin Pam Taynor said.

Shump, 83, was somebody whom any ambitious Democrat — or anybody else wanting to get something done — was well-advised to get to know.

Coming to politics out of the labor movement, he had the job of keeping the Democratic Party united at a time when working-class people were splitting more and more along racial lines.

Dayton Mayor Rhine McLin found it fitting that the life of this man, a champion of labor, ended on the eve of Labor Day weekend.

"He worked himself up through the ranks of labor," McLin said. "He ran the party with a steel hand, but a fair hand."

Ohio Sen. Jeff Jacobson, R-Butler Twp., was the Republican Party chairman during the final years of Shump's career.

"There was a code of honor about the way he did business. Whether you were Democrat or Republican, he expected you to operate under those same rules," Jacobson said. "I thought he was a gentleman, a man of integrity."