Alan K. Simpson - Early Life

Early Life

Simpson was born in Denver, Colorado, the son of the former Lorna Kooi and Milward Lee Simpson. His middle name, "Kooi", comes from his maternal grandfather, whose parents were Dutch immigrants. In his youth, Simpson was a Boy Scout. He visited Japanese American Boy Scouts who, along with their families, had been interned near Ralston, Wyoming, during World War II. There, he developed a friendship with Norman Mineta, who later became a Democratic U.S. representative from California and the United States Secretary of Transportation in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush. They served together in Congress and on the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution and remain close friends.

Simpson has an older brother, Peter K. Simpson of Cody, a historian and a former administrator at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, who served in the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1981 to 1984, having represented Sheridan County, while he was then an administrator at Sheridan College. Pete Simpson was the 1986 Republican gubernatorial nominee, having sought the highest office while his younger brother was serving in the U.S. Senate.

One of the Simpsons' babysitters as a young boy was the future Lieutenant Governor and Education Superintendent of Louisiana, Bill Dodd, who played baseball for a time as a young man in Cody with teammate Milward Simpson.

In a recent brief in support of the claimant in the Supreme Court case, Graham v. Florida, Simpson admitted that as a juvenile he was on federal probation for shooting mailboxes and punched a cop and—in his own words—“was a monster.”

Alan Simpson graduated from Cody High School in Cody, Wyoming, in 1949 and attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 1950 for a postgraduate year. He graduated in 1954 from the University of Wyoming with a Bachelor of Science degree and in 1958 with a Juris Doctor. In 1954 he married the former Susan Ann Schroll, who was a fellow UW student from Greybull, Wyoming. He served in the United States Army in Germany from 1955 to 1956 with the 10th Infantry Regiment, Fifth Infantry Division and with the 12th Armored Infantry Battalion, Second Armored Division.

Like his brother, he was a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity at the University of Wyoming.