Zell Miller, the cantankerous former Georgia governor and senator who had a more profound effect on the University of Georgia than any governor since perhaps Eugene Talmadge, died today at the age of 86.

Miller was born into a poor family in Young Harris, in the North Georgia mountains, and raised by a single mother. He spent three years in the Marines, then earned bachelor's and master's degrees in history from UGA. The influence his upbringing had on his politics was apparent in his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1992, in which he criticized Republican Vice President Dan Quayle:

I know what Dan Quayle means when he says it's best for children to have two parents. You bet it is! And it would be nice for them to have trust funds, too. We can't all be born rich and handsome and lucky. And that's why we have a Democratic Party. My family would still be isolated and destitute if we had not had FDR's Democratic brand of government. I made it because Franklin Delano Roosevelt energized this nation. I made it because Harry Truman fought for working families like mine. I made it because John Kennedy's rising tide lifted even our tiny boat. I made it because Lyndon Johnson showed America that people who were born poor didn't have to die poor. And I made it because a man with whom I served in the Georgia Senate, a man named Jimmy Carter, brought honesty and decency and integrity to public service.

He entered politics while teaching at Young Harris College, running for mayor in 1955. He served two terms in the state Senate, ran unsuccessfully for Congress twice, then became segregationist Gov. Lester Maddox's chief of staff. (Miller wasn't known as "Zig Zag Zell" for nothing.) In that job, he mentored a young Hank Huckaby, who would go on to become a UGA administrator, state representative for Athens and chancellor of the University System of Georgia.

Miller was elected lieutenant governor in 1974—serving a record four terms—then governor in 1990, defeating former Atlanta mayor, congressman and U.S. ambassador Andrew Young, future Gov. Roy Barnes and future Sen. Johnny Isakson.

By then a moderate Democrat in the Bill Clinton mold, Miller's signature achievement was convincing state legislators and voters to create a lottery, which has paid for free pre-K and college for hundreds of thousands of Georgia children. The HOPE Scholarship led to a spike in the quality of students applying to UGA, and thus the university's academic standing, and spurred growth that affected Athens in countless ways, good and bad. UGA renamed the Student Learning Center the Miller Learning Center in 2010.

In 2000, Miller's successor, Barnes, tapped him to replace the late Paul Coverdell in the U.S. Senate. Miller took a hard turn to the right in Washington. The Democrat even gave a stinging speech at the 2004 Republican Nation Convention attacking Democratic nominee John Kerry for opposing military expenditures at a time when the Iraq war was still fairly popular.

That lead to one of the most memorable interviews in the history of politics, when Miller challenged MSNBC host Chris Matthews to a duel. (While both shocking and hilarious at the time, in retrospect, this was probably the beginning of the combative Trump-style interactions with the media we see so often today.)

Miller retired from politics a year later and spent his last years in Young Harris, rarely appearing in public due to poor health.

For more on Miller, check out the AJC or New York Times, or this New York magazine piece by Ed Kilgore, a protege of James Carville, who engineered Miller's 1990 gubernatorial victory and later spearheaded Clinton's presidential campaign.