Gerald Heaney, who fought for the flag, the DFL and the downtrodden, has died at the age of 92.

Heaney was best known for his 40 years of service on the 8th District U.S. Court of the Appeals. He retired from the bench in 2006.

While on the appeals court, he was involved in several monumental cases, the biggest, he believed, a desegregation ruling in 1980 that allowed minority children in St. Louis to attend suburban schools with the state picking up the transportation costs. But in a judicial career in which he offered more than 3,000 opinions, there were many other major civil rights rulings.

Heaney was appointed to the federal bench in 1966 by President Lyndon Johnson, after being nominated by Sen. Eugene McCarthy. He was self-deprecating about the influential people who supported that nomination, including Hubert Humphrey, who was vice president at the time, and Orville Freeman, who was the secretary of agriculture.

With friends like that, Heaney once said, “I would have had to be pretty awful” not to gain the seat on the bench.

But those four decades on the bench are only a portion of Heaney’s remarkable life.

Following law school, he joined the Army as a 26-year-old private but quickly was promoted to lieutenant. He was a D-Day hero, earning a Silver Star and Bronze Star for heroism during that invasion.

At the end of the war, Heaney, who grew up in Goodhue, moved to Duluth and became a hard-charging labor lawyer. Among the cases he took on was a fight for female teachers in the Duluth school district seeking the same pay as men.

It was during this time that Heaney became active in the DFL as an insider who befriended the stars of the party. In 1960, he received a personal thank you letter from John Kennedy following JFK’s presidential triumph. Kennedy’s campaign staff said it was Heaney’s work as an organizer that allowed the president to carry the 8th district by 50,000 votes.

His power as a federal judge diminished in the last two decades of his career with the appointment of more conservative judges to the appeals court.

Services are expected to be held next week in Duluth.