So this lady died too - Democratic Underground

ruggerson

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Sun Jun-15-08 11:33 PM
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So this lady died too

She led a remarkable life, was a resolutely committed progressive, and actually DID something instead of just making observations about what others do.

So, no five day tributes for her on national television.

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Anne C. Martindell, who entered politics in her 50s, found true love as ambassador to New Zealand in her 60s, earned a college degree in her 80s and published a memoir titled “Never Too Late” in her 90s, died on Wednesday in Princeton, N.J. She was 93.

Anne C. Martindell in 2005.
Her death was announced by her son Roger Martindell of Princeton.

Her birth, her breeding and her iron-willed father seemed to have condemned Ms. Martindell to a life she later dismissed as utterly conventional — “I didn’t do anything real until I was 50,” she once told a reporter — but feminism and the 1960s changed all that.

Racing to make up for lost time, she carved out a career in New Jersey politics, serving as a state senator in the 1970s, and held posts in President Jimmy Carter’s administration, including that of ambassador to New Zealand. She also resumed her education at Smith College more than six decades after her freshman year, and in her 90s wrote her memoirs, published last month by Boxed Books. The book’s theme, neatly expressed by its author in two words, is carpe diem.

Anne Clark was born in 1914 in the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. Her memoirs describe a pampered but miserable childhood. Her sickly, mentally unstable mother, the former Marjory Blair, was the heiress to a railroad fortune. Her cold and distant father, William J. Clark — an alcoholic, she later discovered — was a prominent lawyer who in 1938 became a judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

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In the early 1960s, a friend persuaded her to teach an experimental reading class at a primary school in Princeton. A few years later, dismayed by the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, she began raising money for the 1968 presidential campaign of Senator Eugene J. McCarthy.

After Mr. McCarthy failed to win the nomination, she agreed to become the vice chairwoman of the New Jersey Democratic Party and worked to bring disaffected liberals back into the fold.

It was a sobering experience. “I was appalled at how women were treated in politics — good for making coffee and licking stamps, period,” she said.

In a genteel way, she pushed. Once, she arrived at an important meeting on party reform only to be told that she would not be allowed to participate, for her own good: She might be offended by the four-letter words the men used. Using one of her own, she made it clear that she did not give a darn, adding, “Now, let’s get in there and get to work.”

In 1972, Ms. Martindell was the state chairwoman for Senator George McGovern’s presidential campaign, and she led the New Jersey delegation to the Democratic National Convention, the only woman heading a state delegation. In 1973, Ms. Martindell won a seat in the New Jersey Senate from Mercer County, ousting a seemingly entrenched Republican incumbent. Her first act in the Senate was to prepare a resolution calling for the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon.

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