Sponsored law requiring mining companies to restore land where they have worked to its previous state after ceasing operations.

Led movement that resulted in the U.S. Postal Service's being made a semiprivate corporation.

Helped write campaign-finance-reform laws that led to the creation of political-action committees.

Negotiated first of what is expected to be many water-rights settlements with Arizona Indian tribes, for the Tohono O'odham Tribe in southern Arizona. The settlements will establish claims to water rights of all communities and landowners in Arizona.

Sponsored an Indian mineral-development act that permits individual tribes to enter negotiations with mining companies and prospectors so a tribe can negotiate the best possible return on its resources.

As chairman of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, was instrumental in getting funding for the Central Arizona Project, which diverts Colorado River water for use in the Valley and Tucson.

Sponsored law recognizing traditional Indian religions and protecting their practice on public lands.

The last flickering reminder of a bygone era of Arizona politics has finally gone out.

When Morris King Udall, diminished by insidious disease to a shell of the giant who once bestrode Capitol Hill with incomparable dignity, wit and intelligence, called it quits after 30 years in Congress, he brought an end to a long and glorious chapter of Arizona's political history.

The once-lanky, now-stooped, Congressman was a practitioner of the kinder, gentler politics of yesterday. But he was more.

In a very real sense, he was a bridge between the clubby bipartisanship of Arizona's first half-century, when friendship outranked ideology and State preceded party, and the image-oriented, headline-grabbing, get-a-leg-up politics that evolved in the 1960's and 1970's.

His manner--ever gentle, self-effacing and patient -- evoked that earlier time, but his politics--unabashedly liberal, environmentally attuned, socially compassionate, all tinged with the reformer's zeal and an engaging candor--were thoroughly modern.

Gone now are all the other paragons of that old school, who preceded him to the exit.

Barry Goldwater has retired to his mountaintop, joined there by old-politics gurus Paul Fannin, Jack Williams and John Rhodes. Carl Hayden, Ernest MacFarland, Howard Pyle and Wesley Bolin have long since passed on, and legislative giants like Stan Turley and Burton Barr have sought quieter pursuits.

Either natives or decades-ago transplants, these were men (women hardly needed apply) whose leadership was suffused with a palpable love affair with their State, and was seldom sullied by rank partisanship.

Udall's departure finally closes history's circle.

In their place has grown up an Arizona populated by baby-boomers and refugee snow-shovelers, people who can't remember when Midwesterners flocked here for their sinuses, who have never driven to Tucson on a two-lane highway and who certainly can't envision the stubby Westward Ho as Phoenix's preeminent skyscraper.

It's an Arizona now governed by a man who hadn't even moved in when Udall was already waging his second battle to unseat a House leader (which, like the first, was unsuccessful).

Talk about newcomers. He'd completed 10 terms by the time a retired Navy captain named McCain showed up in Arizona.

But seeing Udall only as a symbol distorts the vision.

Symbols, after all, are icons of a sort, and this most unpretentious of men, who raised humorous self-depreciation to an art form, never got the hang of iconhood.

Of course, he never even tried.

"I got out of the race because of illness," he used to say, after losing a string of 1976 Presidential primaries to Jimmy Carter in the first serious stab at the White House by a House Member in decades. "Voters got sick of me."

What Udall did try, and with stunning success, was legislative and political business.

For all the endless jokes that punctuated his speeches and oiled his uncanny skill at bringing antagonists together, Udall was first and last a man of substance. In an age when politicians point to study committees and pilot projects as evidence of great achievement, he leaves a legislative legacy of prodigious dimensions.

He led a bitter fight (on Carter's behalf, ironically) for the most sweeping civil service reform in a century, and steered major civil rights bills through the House floor in 1964.

Historic legislation regulating the reclamation of strip mines bore his signature, as did a bill--which he counts as his proudest achievement--nearly doubling the National Park System and setting aside 55 million acres for Alaska natives in one fell swoop. He tripled the wilderness system, secured funding for dam safety projects and midwifed the settlement of major Indian water claims.

He restructured the post office into a pseudo-corporate empire, earned undying affection from his colleagues (but not taxpayers) by making it easier to raise congressional pay, rewrote campaign finance laws and led a revolt of House Turks which democratized the rigid seniority system of picking committee chairmen.

And, of course, there was the Central Arizona Project, now nearing completion, the fulfillment of a dream as old as statehood to water the desert with the Colorado River.

Udall was a key player in the 1960's, along with Senator Carl Hayden and Representative John Rhodes, in securing authorization of the project, and was the player in assuring that the Federal money to build it didn't dry up. Many observers doubt the CAP could be passed in today's pro-environmental climate.

Much of this incredible legacy, say friends, is due to his gentility, his bent for peacemaking.

"The Interior Committee was more a forum for accommodation than confrontation," said Mike Rappaport, a utility lobbyist and longtime confidant of Udall's. "The common theme in all his negotiations was fairness. He always saw to it that everyone got a seat at the table, and that nobody went away without getting something."

Not surprisingly, by the 1980's, Udall was showing up regularly in polls of his colleagues as "most respected" and "most effective."

Once his abortive bid for national office had sated his restless ambition for a larger stage, Udall in 1977 seemed to find peace in the House, assuming the committee gavel for the first time and diving into legislative arcana with a passion few could match.

But that immersion produced more than bills. It brought with it a belief that he was indispensable (indeed, to CAP backers, he was) and an inability to imagine life anywhere else.

As a result, he resisted friendly suggestions to step down, even as the disease sapped his strength and dulled his once-acute mind. "Then what would I do?" he asked a friend plaintively.

"The rhythms of the House were his music," observed Jim McNulty, a close friend of four decades who served there with him for 2 years. "He felt he could play them better than anyone else, and you know, he was probably right." It was perhaps Udall's only concession to vanity.

Luckily for him, and more luckily for those he served so long and faithfully, his awesome legacy of political reform, environmental protection, gentle humor and unfailing decency is beyond the reach of the squabblers to disturb.

The political flame may be gone, but the light it cast will shine.

Mo Udall has been prone to tell jokes at his own expense.

He has frequently referred to himself as "a legend in my own mind." He has described himself as a one-eyed, divorced ex-Mormon from St. Johns, AZ -- a town so small that it "wasn't quite the end of the Earth, but you sure as hell could see it from there."

To a certain degree, Udall has defined political humor on Capitol Hill since the Kennedy administration.

"He may have invented the parody salutation," political humorist Mark Russell said. "He would link various issues and get that irony in that salutation. He'd say 'My fellow taxpayers, right-to-lifers and other advocates of the death penalty.'"

If Udall was known at all when he arrived in Washington in 1961, it was as the younger brother of Interior Secretary Stewart Udall.

That all changed the following year at the annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association.

"Mo was completely unknown. We giggled at his crew and his turquoise belt buckle but didn't know what to expect. He was an overnight success. Immediately, everybody in town knew his name," Russell said.

Washington discovered in 1962, as humorist Erma Bombeck wrote later, that "Mo Udall is one of the fastest wits in the West and shoots straight from the lips."

His wit and family connections combined to open doors in the Kennedy administration when he needed it. And the wit and respect he had garnered prompted party bosses in 1974 to push Udall into challenging Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

After losing the New Hampshire primary, he voiced the view that novelist Thomas Wolfe was wrong. "You can go home again. In fact, the people of New Hampshire insisted on it in my case."

On the morning after a bitterly disappointing defeat to Carter in the 1976 Wisconsin primary -- a defeat so narrow the Milwaukee Sentinel had proclaimed "Carter Upset By Udall" -- the lanky Arizonan pointed to the reporters' notebooks and suggested that they "take those statements I made last night and every instance where you find the word 'win,' strike it and insert the word 'lose."'

Asked how it felt to come in second for the seventh time, Udall replied: "In the grand scheme of things, not everyone can be first. As you may recall, even George Washington, the Father of our Country, married a widow."

Udall has always thought of humor as a tonic for personal and political setbacks.

"For one thing, it helps you roll with the punches -- and there are a lot of punches in politics," Udall wrote.

He often quoted Abraham Lincoln, who when asked in the face of Civil War and personal tragedy how he could tell jokes, replied, "I laugh because I must not cry."

"Too Funny To Be President" was a 5-year labor of anguish. Like much of Udall's political efforts, the book represented a compromise with an unyielding opponent: his editor at Henry Holt and Co.

The editor wanted a Udall memoir. The equally intransigent Udall, who rigorously guarded his privacy, wanted to write a book of political humor, including the gems from his 40-year collection of jokes and anecdotes.

The impasse finally broke when Udall agreed to let his son Randy interview him about his personal and political lives. The result was a book that is half joke book and the rest autobiography.

"Wit is something more than oratorical ornament," Udall wrote in his 1988 book. "It is a gentle pry bar with which to open the minds of your constituents and colleagues."

Udall was a student of humor as well as a practitioner, and he has often been compared to some of the enduring political humorists of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Russel said Udall "was in the same vein with Will Rogers and Mark Twain. There's no mean-spiritedness with Mo. It's like Will Rogers said: 'Don't get me wrong. I like these politicians. I'm just trying to understand them."'

Sometimes Udall would tell jokes that might now be considered to have demeaning references to women and ethnic groups. But as often as not, he could carry it off.

"I heard him tell a joke about Irishmen at a dinner that must have had 2,000 people, including the Irish ambassador," said Erik Barnett, Udall's press secretary. "You'd almost be embarrassed about that sort of thing, but the fact of the matter is Mo's the only one who could have done it and gotten away with it."

His ability to do so is evident from reading the jokes in his book. Women or Indians or Catholics or Italians are never the objects of the jokes; they merely set the stage.

One of Udall's favorite stories involved a politician giving a speech on an Indian reservation. Every time the politician made a promise, the Indians would interrupt him, enthusiastically chanting "Goomwah!" After the speech, the tribal leader presents the politician with a pony.

As the politician leads the pony away, the chief calls after him, "Be careful you don't step in the goomwah."

Among his favorite collections are introductions that went awry, including one where the speaker was introduced as the virgin of the Governor Islands and another where a Member of Congress was described as a person "who is equal to few and superior to none."

He has surrounded himself with evidence of his foibles. Next to his desk hangs a framed front-page of the 1976 Milwaukee Sentinel proclaiming his victory over Carter. Next to it, but less conspicuous, is a framed quotation from Will Rogers: "We come here for just a spell and then pass on. So get a few laughs and do the best you can. Live your life so that whenever you lose you are ahead."

Morris King Udall was born to a life of public service.

And good humor.

The man who announced his retirement from Congress on Friday is recalled by friends of his youth as a leader, an athlete, a prankster and gifted lawyer.

"He was a leader of his friends," said Charlie Patterson, a retired auto dealer who grew up with Udall in remote St. Johns in eastern Arizona.

"We always had something to do, be it throw rotten eggs together or working on baling crews together. We did a little bit of everything that came up."

"He was a leader. He inspired other kids to work harder."

Patterson and others credit Udall's success to his parents. Udall was born June 15, 1922, in St. Johns, which was founded by his Mormon pioneer grandfather. He was the fourth of six children of Levi Stewart Udall, a correspondence-school lawyer who went on to become chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, and Louis Lee Udall, a schoolteacher who installed in her children a will to succeed.

"Someplace early he learned to achieve, and I think that came from his family," Patterson said.

"The big influence on him, and on all of us, was our mom and dad," and Burr Udall, the youngest child and a lawyer in Tucson.

"They were both very strong people. They always taught and prodded and hollered that we had to get an education to succeed.

"If you say anything, say that my dad had a lot of influence on us all, and probably the one who had the most influence was my mom in her own quiet way," Burr Udall said.

"They were our parents. They taught us what they believed in, what they stood for," said Elms. Udall, one of Morris' three sisters.

"One time my mother was complaining about all the things my father was involved in--in church and politics -- and my father said, 'If good men don't run for office and try to make things go, the bad men will,"' said Elma Udall, 73.

"They believed if you want a better world, you should go out and do it," she said.

The Udalls talked. Talked and read. There was no television, of course, and their radios pulled in only two stations.

"We sat around and talked, and we did a lot of that. And we did a lot of reading," Burr Udall said. "The lights went out at 10 p.m., and we each had a flashlight and we'd read in bed."

"Our parents taught us to work hard, do what was right and that whatever you did you were supposed to be honest about it," he said.

Morris Udall lost his right eye to a friend's rusty pocketknife when he was 6. Much has been made of the future Congressman overcoming this early adversity, but Burr Udall only recalled his brother taking the loss in stride.

"I don't think it ever had much to do with anything," he said.

Instead, Burr Udall recalls the regular shipments of glass eyes from Salt Lake City and the evenings in the living room when the whole family gathered around young Morris to fit a new eye.

"It was a family job. Everybody would pick out eyes and try them in the socket until they found one that would fit."

Although Morris Udall, like Burr and his older brother, Stewart, would later fall away from the church, the Mormon faith in which they were raised also was a major influence.

"It's a church for everything," said Jim McNulty, a former Arizona Congressman and friend of Udall's since their college days. "It's a church for your religious disposition, your attitude, your education, your social obligations. Their lives revolved around the church."

"He was at odds with the church on a number of things, certainly with the feeling (at the time) that black people were not worthy to share in the experience," McNulty said.

Whether it was stuffing rotten eggs in the pipes of a circus calliope or serving as student council president, Morris Udall always seemed to be where the action was in St. Johns, friends recall.

He shook off a childhood bout with spinal meningitis and grew to be a tall, strapping athlete. In high school he played basketball and football, and at halftime, still in uniform, played the trumpet in the school band.

He even commanded the attention of opposing teams.

"I remember when we were seniors in high school and the basketball team went down and played five schools in Mesa, Phoenix, and Tempe and beat them all," Patterson said.

"Our uniforms didn't even match. We were playing Phoenix Union, which was the biggest high school in the State, and they had this fancy little cart that they pulled around to bring water to the players. All we had was a gallon jug. Morris watched this for a while and then he mentioned it to them and they brought that water cart to us."

World War II, which broke out when Morris Udall was 19 and a freshman at the University of Arizona, was, at the time at least, "the most important event of my young life, and I longed to be part of it," he wrote in his book "Too Funny To Be President."

First rejected as a one-eyed 4-F, Udall eventually found his way into the Army Air Force and ended up on Iwo Jima, 155 days after the invasion, "with a piano and an assortment of softball gloves, bats and balls."

"He was very good with a jury," McNulty said. "He was one of the most persuasive people who ever lived."

Charles Ares, a University of Arizona law professor and onetime member of the Udalls' firm, said Morris Udall "could put himself in the shoes of a jury and know exactly what was going to influence them. He was a great lawyer."

He was a great lawyer who was not above a good prank. Ares recalled the Udalls winning a civil lawsuit against the Southern Pacific railroad, which was not prompt in paying the damages their client won.

"Mo and Stewart sat down and faked up a writ of execution that directed the sheriff to proceed to the Southern Pacific depot on such and such a date and such and such a time and seize property of said railroad, to wit, a locomotive called the Sunset Limited.

"They had it delivered to the railroad's lawyers. It virtually blew the top off their building."

In 1952, Udall, just three years out of University of Arizona law school, successfully ran for Pima County attorney. It was the first political step on the road to Washington.

And it was the beginning of his lifelong collection of stories, jokes and anecdotes.

"One of the first cases I prosecuted involved a man accused of drunk driving." Udall wrote in "Too Funny To Be President."

"The defendant surprised me by hauling in five of his drinking buddies to attest to his sobriety on the night in question. In summation, I told the jury that the defense's argument reminded me of the bartender who shoved the last five patrons out the door at closing time. When the group reached the car, the leader turned to one of the men and said, "Simpson, you drive, you're too drunk to sing."

After he won the case, the judge took Udall aside, told him another joke and complimented him on his skilled use of humor.

"This was an epiphany," Udall wrote. "An apt yam, which took less than a minute to tell, could be more persuasive than an hour of logical argument.

"From that moment on, I began to collect funny stories and use them regularly in opening and closing statements. . . . As I made the transition from attorney to politician, the use of humor came naturally, and over the years it served me when nothing else could."

Tom Chandler, a longtime Tucson attorney and a courtroom opponent of Udall's on many occasions, called him "one of the best courtroom lawyers I've ever seen, if not the best."

"He was very bright. He worked hard. He had a great appreciation for the law, and he had a keen understanding of people and how to get them to do what he wanted them to do," Chandler said.

"He didn't amble into the courtroom, he stalked in. When the judge called the case and asked if he was ready, Morris would stand up and say 'I'm ready,' and he meant it. He was ready. He was always prepared. If you weren't careful, he'd have

Udall considered a run for Congress in 1954, but deferred to Stewart. He ran for a county judgeship and blamed his loss on a confusing ballot that made his name virtually impossible to find.

In 1960, President Kennedy named Stewart Udall as Secretary of State, and Morris won a special election to fill his brother's congressional seat.

"Morris always knew what buttons to push, what we had to do to get people to do what he wanted them to do," Burr Udall said.

"Morris and Stewart both were always involved in politics," he said. "Being raised the way we were, that's what they did."

I will miss Mo Udall when he leaves Congress next month. So will the rest of Arizona.

Indeed, I have a special place in my heart for Morris King Udall. He was elected to Congress the year before I moved to Arizona. He doesn't know it, but Udall is the first elected official I ever met.

It was at a conference in Tucson, probably in the late 1960s. I wasn't old enough to vote, but I remember shaking hands with the lanky congressman with the quick wit and friendly smile. I forget what he said to me then, but I remember thinking he sounded wise.

I guess what impressed me most about Udall back then was the fact that my father, not normally a fan of liberal Democrats, respected Mo Udall. He probably even voted for him a few times before he moved out of Udall's district. He thought Udall was honest, straightforward and uncommonly constructive in his approach to solving problems.

He was. And is.

Indeed, it's difficult to write a column commemorating a man who has become a beloved Arizona institution, and who is about to retire, without making it sound like an obituary.

Udall isn't dead. He's just stepping aside.

Nevertheless, the prospect of an Arizona congressional delegation without Udall in it for the first time in 30 years is a sad one. That's because Udall's basic human decency, old-fashioned commitment to public service and inviolate inner strength make him a national treasure.

Crities blasted the federal water as a multibillion-dollar boondoggle and almost succeeded several times in killing its funding.

Almost, but not quite.

Probably his proudest achievement is the Alaska Lands Act of 1980. It's appropriate that a man who arrived in Washington shortly after Alaska became a state was the chief architect of an Alaskan measure that doubled the size of the national-park system and tripled the size of the national-wilderness system.

Some call it the most important conservation legislation since Theodore Roosevelt created the national-park system.

More important to Arizona was Udall's winning passage in 1984 of the Wilderness Act. This measure set aside more than a million acres in Arizona for protection as

In his earlier years, Udall challenged Congress' seniority system and forced through civil-service reforms designed to streamline the federal bureaucracy. He authored a major stripmining law, was a leading force in Indian water-rights settlements and helped steer civil-rights legislation through Congress in 1964.

In short, Udall has come a long way from his birthplace of St. Johns, the tiny hamlet his grandfather, David King Udall, staked out in eastern Arizona when he and 50 other Mormon families settled there from Utah in 1880.

TUCSON.--A physically debilitated Representative Morris K. Udall, whose wit and wisdom have been credited with reshaping Congress and the American landscape, announced through his staff Friday that he will resign his 30-year seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Udall's resignation, effective May 4, came in a one-sentence letter to House Speaker Thomas Foley. A copy of the letter was sent to Governor Fife Symington, who will call for a special primary election to be held in the dead of summer.

Udall, a liberal Democrat who once ran for president, will step down two days after the 30th anniversary of his election to the first of his 16 terms as the representative from Arizona's 2d Congressional District. Udall won the seat vacated by his brother, Stewart, who resigned in 1961 to serve as Interior Secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

The May 4 resignation date was established "because it was important to 'Mo' -- he always wanted to hit the 30-year mark," said Matt James, Udall's administrative assistant.

During his tenure, Udall spearheaded efforts to pass a number of notable laws in fields ranging from the environment to campaign and civil-service reform. And he led successful efforts to streamline legislative procedures and to overturn strict seniority rules for picking committee chairmen.

Udall's colleagues in Congress were quick to bemoan his departure, focusing primarily on what he has meant to environmental issues.

"I am convinced that for generations now and to come, whenever Americans shoulder a backpack to explore that part of the country where the skies are ever clear and the air is refreshingly cool, Mo Udall will be remembered," said Foley, (D-WA) one of Udall's closest friends.

Senator John McCain, (R-AZ) said, "Thousands of beautiful, natural settings around this country ... offer silent testimony to his commitment to assuring the preservation of our natural heritage for generations to come."

Friday's announcement put the official stamp on what had become a poorly kept secret. Udall's health, weakened through a 12-year battle with Parkinson's disease, a degenerative disorder, worsened after a January 6 fall at his Virginia home. The fall has left him hospitalized ever since with several broken bones.

In the past month, and with greater fury in the past week, rumors flew that resignation was imminent.

"Mo was probably the most popular person in Congress," Stump said.

Anne Udall, 36, one of Udall's six children and the only family member who attended the Tucson news conference, said her father has made "a lasting imprint on the world he lives in, and no one could ask for more."

Udall is the senior member of Arizona's congressional delegation. At the helm of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee since 1977, he has been the only current Arizona congressman to hold a committee chairmanship.

Although a date for the election of Udall's successor has not been set, the scramble for succession has begun.

Maricopa County Supervisor Ed Pastor is expected to announce next week, and county officials already are organizing to select Pastor's replacement. Tucson Mayor Tom VoIgy has said he will make an announcement by May 4. Former U.S. Representative Jim McNulty also is considered a potential contender. All three are Democrats.

Republicans also are seeking a candidate from the predominantly Democratic district.

State law gives Symington until may 14 to call a special primary election. The election period would fall from July 18 to August 17. The general election must occur 35 to 45 days after that.

Symington said at another Tucson news conference, held two hours after the resignation announcement, that he will meet Monday with Attorney General Grant Woods and Secretary of State Dick Mahoney to work out an election schedule.

Symington, a Republican, described Udall as "an Arizona legend" and said he "has been an inspiration to me personally as well as to my entire generation."

Senator Dennis DeConcini, Arizona's only other Democrat in Washington, said of his colleague, "He will be missed. Udall had no enemies. He was a challenger who was able to take on the system."

Representative Morris K. Udall's brother, Stewart, a former Arizona congressman and secretary of the interior, has been an outspoken voice in his family urging his brother to step down.

After visiting his brother in a Washington hospital last month, Stewart Udall composed a poem, "Elegy at a Brother's Bedside."

The poem, which begins with a quote from Shakespeare's "King Lear," follows:

The eyes are open, but the sense is shut. 
Like the hawks he knew as a boy, 
His spirit soared and darted here. 
And now, crushed, we see him supine, 
His face fixed in an empty gaze.
Our vigil is to no avail.
Gone is the wit which sped the dance of laughter, 
Gone the lambent lacework of the mind.
What savage civility impels us to prolong "life" when the fight for life is over? 
When will we allow loving hands to close lives that have closed?