Wallace Hyde, a Raleigh businessman, who a major Democratic Party fund raiser for decades died Monday after a long illness. He was 89.
Hyde was a major fund raiser such Tar Heel Democrats as Jim Hunt and John Edwards, and for such national Democrats as Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale and Al Gore.
He was such an insider that he watched the 1984 convention from inside Mondale's San Francisco hotel room. But the cigar-smoking Hyde was particularly close to Gore, who helped arrange for his wife, Jeanette to be named U.S. Ambassador to Barbados.
