James Mountain Inhofe was born in Des Moines, Iowa, on November 17, 1934, the youngest of four children of Blanche (Mountain) and Perry Dyson Inhofe Sr., an insurance adjuster. James and his siblings, Marilyn, Joan, and Perry Jr., attended public schools in Des Moines. When James was 8, his father moved the family to Tulsa, where he had been offered a job as an insurance manager.
At Tulsa Central High School, James ran track and field and learned to fly small planes, which became a lifelong passion. After serving in the Army, he enrolled at the University of Tulsa, where he studied economics. Official biographies claimed he earned a degree in 1959, but when challenged years later, he acknowledged that he was a few credits short and did not officially graduate until 1973.
In 1959, Mr. Inhofe married Kay Kirkpatrick, who survives him. He is also survived by three of their children, Molly, Jimmy and Katy, the family said. A fourth child, Perry II, died in a plane crash in 2013. .
After Perry Inhofe Sr. died in 1970, his children inherited interests in Mid-Continent Casualty, which their father had helped found. James and Perry Jr. became directors. In a 1979 stock trade, Perry Jr. acquired control of Mid-Continent, and James acquired a spinoff, Quaker Life, which later went bankrupt. Lawsuits roiled the family, and James won a $3 million settlement from Perry in 1990.
James, who became active in Oklahoma Republican politics in the mid-1960s, served in the state House of Representatives from 1967 to 1969 and in the state Senate from 1969 to 1977. He was a popular mayor of Tulsa, where he ran unopposed for his second term and won 59 percent of the vote in his third term.
