Born on January 22, 1928, in Terre Haute, Indiana, to a basketball coach and a high school teacher, Bayh attended Purdue University and served in the Army. A Golden Glove light heavyweight boxer who tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers but couldn’t hit a curveball, the folksy Bayh worked as a farmer until he got the itch for politics and ran for the Indiana’s House of Representatives. He was first elected in 1954. Four years later, at 30, he was elected speaker of the Indiana House, the youngest in the state’s history. Four years after that, he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

Lugar was born on April 4, 1932, to a farming family in Indianapolis. An Eagle Scout, he managed his family’s 604-acre corn, soybean and tree farm. He graduated from Denison University and from Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar before enlisting in the Navy and serving as an intelligence briefer for the chief of Naval operations. In 1964, Lugar won a seat on the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners, where he championed the integration of his own high school, a move that was so unpopular it led to his ouster from office. In 1967, he became mayor of Indianapolis, serving two terms and paving the way for the city’s modern transformation from “Indiananoplace” to a Midwestern metropolis.

Bayh’s and Lugar’s ambitions collided in 1974, when they faced off for Bayh’s Senate seat. Lugar’s nickname as “Nixon’s favorite mayor” didn’t help in a post-Watergate era, and he lost by 5 percentage points. Even then, the Hoosiers modeled civility. At the end of the campaign, Lugar hailed Bayh as a “first-class campaigner,” saying, “I learned a lot.”

Two years later, on Lugar’s first day in the Senate, where he had arrived after defeating Vance Hartke, Bayh and his staffers greeted Lugar and his staffers, offering to help them move into their new Senate digs. In 2003, more than two decades after Bayh had left the Senate, Lugar sponsored legislation that would rename the U.S. Courthouse and Post Office in Indianapolis after Bayh, who attended the ceremony.

Both flirted with the presidency but failed to make it through Iowa, nonetheless foreshadowing Indiana’s outsize role in national politics today. Another Rhodes scholar, Navy veteran, Indiana mayor and presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg, keeps a photo of himself with Lugar in his South Bend, Indiana, office. In fact, Lugar was perhaps the only thing that could bring together Buttigieg and fellow Hoosier Vice President Mike Pence. Lugar, Pence said earlier this year, would be “remembered among a discrete pantheon of senators who commanded the respect of his peers in both parties and exercised enormous influence in foreign affairs.” Buttigieg called Lugar “a great mayor, senator, and mentor [who] made the world safer, stood up for better foreign policy, and knew how to work across the aisle.”

The senators’ work remains resonant in 2019. In 1965, Bayh introduced an amendment to abolish the Electoral College in favor of a direct election. He told his biographer, Robert Blaemire, that not passing the amendment was his “greatest legislative disappointment.” Buttigieg has made the cause one of his key campaign agenda items. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which the Economist called “the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted in America over the past half-century,” allowed universities to retain patents to academic innovations, paving the way for companies like Google. Both champions of equality, Bayh and Lugar sought to increase the influence of women in American society—Bayh through Title IX, and Lugar through a program that trained women for public leadership, the Richard G. Lugar Excellence in Public Service Series; it has graduated more than 500 women, many of whom are local and state elected officials or in the White House.

“It is not very often you can see a page of history turning, and you can see the end of an era,” former Senator Evan Bayh, Birch Bayh’s son, said at a May memorial service at the Indiana Statehouse. “But in the passing of my father and in the passing of Richard Lugar, that is what you see.”

At Lugar’s memorial in Indianapolis a few weeks later, Pence returned the bipartisan gesture, citing the two Hoosiers’ epic 1974 Senate race. “It’s remarkable to think that two giants of 20th-century Indiana politics departed this world within a few weeks of each other,” Pence told mourners. “This truly is the end of an era. And on this day, I know Dick wouldn’t mind if we took a moment to express our gratitude and condolences to the Bayh family as they grieve the loss of another great Indiana public servant.”