BRENTWOOD – (INT) – Former Riverside County Congressman John Tunney died Friday of prostate cancer at his home at the age of 83.

Tunney, the son of former world heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney, went to Congress in 1964 and later service a single term in the US Senate from California.

Tunney, a lawyer and rising Democratic political star, grew up on the East Coast and then moving with his family to Riverside eventually establishing his Congressional office at the Mission Inn.

During his time in the Senate, Tunney wrote 38 bills that became law including antitrust legislation and shepherded two difficult and important bills onto the books — the Noise Pollution Control Act of 1972 and the 1975 extension and expansion of the landmark Voting Rights Act. He was only 36 when he won a Senate seat in 1970 turning incumbent George Murphy out of office.

After his loss for re-election in the Senate to Republican S.I. Hayakawa, Tunney told the Los Angeles Times "I think that I would have been far better off not just in a political sense of getting reelected but better off as a person if I’d spent more time in California learning that one of the major things that was on people’s minds out here was that they didn’t want Washington to do things.”

Story Date: January 20, 2018