Bill Pascrell Jr., 14-Term House Democrat From N.J., Dies at 87

Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., a blunt progressive Democrat from northern New Jersey who was poised to become the oldest member of the House of Representatives, died on Wednesday in Livingston, N.J. He was 87.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his deputy chief of staff, Mark Greenbaum.

Mr. Pascrell, who was serving his 14th term in Congress, checked himself into a hospital on July 14 with a fever. Ten days later, his staff said he had suffered a setback while being treated for a respiratory infection and was receiving “breathing assistance,” according to The Record of Bergen County, N.J. He had recently discharged himself from the hospital but then found he had to return, Mr. Greenbaum said.

Mr. Pascrell was heavily favored to win re-election. Had that happened — and had he lived to be sworn in in January, just before his 88th birthday — he would have become the oldest member of the House. Representative Grace F. Napolitano, a California Democrat, will turn 88 in December, but she did not seek re-election.

A former high school history teacher and the grandson of Italian immigrants, Mr. Pascrell served as a state legislator and as the mayor of Paterson, N.J., the once-thriving industrial city a dozen or so miles west of Manhattan where he was raised, before being elected to Congress in 1996.

He reclaimed the district, which at the time included 21 cities and suburbs in Passaic and Essex Counties, for the Democrats by narrowly unseating a one-term Republican, Bill Martini, who had been elected as part of the so-called Republican Revolution in 1994. A Democrat had held the seat — then the Eighth District, later remapped as the Ninth — since 1961. The Ninth District now includes parts of Bergen, Hudson and Passaic