Was there anyone in New Mexico who hadn't been greeted by Bruce King as if we were friends, even family? Long before Gov. Bill Richardson laid claim to a quantified record number of handshakes, his three-term predecessor set standards in political neighborliness that, most likely, no one will ever match.

He died yesterday, at the age of 85 — and his passing strikes thousands of his fellow New Mexicans as a death in the family.

In his as-told-to biography written by Charles Poling, he notes that the idea of being governor first entered his head when he was a seventh-grader down in Stanley, where his dad, Bill, who'd built up a ranch from a homestead tract, was active in politics. What started young Bruce dreaming was a 1936 visit to his school by then-Gov. Clyde Tingley. Tingley told the kids that he hoped to live to see one of them sitting in the governor's chair. "Well," said King, "I got to thinking, if it was going to be one of us, it might as well be me."

After Army service at the tail end of World War II, he married Alice Martin, who passed away last year. He got active in politics as an aide to Sen. Dennis Chávez. Then a down-home campaign put him on the Board of Santa Fe County Commissioners in 1954. He was part of a partisan change: He and two fellow Democrats replaced an all-Republican board.

He quickly established himself as a man of his word, standing by his road-building priorities while making sure the next project in line was carried out — most famously the paving of Hyde Park Road to the ski basin, which took deft diplomacy in dealing with Sen. Chávez as well as state leaders and The New Mexican, where editor Tony Hillerman had been on his case. King's honesty and modesty in turning that road's plans into reality gained him this paper's support when he ran for the Legislature in 1958.

"There were two keys to getting elected back then," King told biographer Poling: "One was a lot of people-to-people contact. The other was always attending the county political meetings ..." He and Alice tended to show up half an hour early, "because that's when you got to do your electioneering."

Bruce King was a master of that art, the best of the good ol' boys. His keen mind was rarely the first thing you'd notice about him, since his cowboy-folksy way of speaking charmed the socks off whoever he was talking to — political grandees or everyday people. He'd look you in the eye, grab you by the elbow of the hand he was shaking, and, invariably, talk plain to you. Political rallies doubling as social events, he and Alice, with their gift for making folks feel comfortable, conveyed warm feelings wherever they went.

His knack for charming his way past any social and cultural barriers, along with his sharply honed political skills and solid grasp of our state's many challenges, made him a natural for governor. During the early 1970s, then into the '80s and, eventually, the '90s, that's what he was — to the point that he seemed synonymous with the governorship.

Moderate to conservative, as so many New Mexico Democrats remain today, King was able to work with his party's ascendant liberals as well as with many of the minority Republicans, to make reality of his dedication to social advances as well as brick-and-mortar progress. Exemplifying the first was creation of the state's Cabinet-level Children, Youth and Families Department — one of Alice's strongly advocated reforms. As for the second, wherever you find better roads in New Mexico, Gov. King probably had something to do with the improvement, while our state can thank him for his work with our congressional delegation in the creation of the Mexican border crossing at Santa Teresa west of El Paso. Other economic-development advances under his leadership include the Intel plant in Albuquerque.

For all his accomplishments, however, Bruce King will be remembered as the kindly cowboy, the eternal optimist who could see today's enemies as tomorrow's friends — which, so often, they became.