I suppose you could say that she's the Grande Dame of women's politics in Sonoma County. But no one who knows her would use that term to describe Helen Rudee.
Even as she approaches her 95th birthday, it's clear that she's not the Grande Dame type. If we were casting an actress to play her in a biopic, it would be Angela Lansbury, not Maggie Smith.
Helen, the first woman elected to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, didn't cut her teeth on the trappings of political power like Nancy Pelosi, the daughter of a congressman. Nor did she grow up planning to be a political activist.
She grew up on a farm in the Great Plains, five miles out of the very small town of Anamoose, North Dakota. She has a painting of Anamoose - the whole town - on the wall of her study. That's how small it was/is.
And if you doubt that she's a farm girl, just enter a cow-milking competition with her at the county fair. I did that once. She smoked me.
I interviewed Helen for a video history six years ago. When I decided to catch up on things last week, I thought it would be a short session. Two hours and 15 minutes later I left, chuckling over stories told, with enough notes to write a short book and a firm of belief that this is, indeed, a remarkable woman.
For starters, she is the "poster person" for the beginnings of women's politics in Sonoma County.
In 1976, she was the first woman elected to the Board of Supervisors. In her 12 years in office, her quiet determination and her refusal to be angered or dissuaded by opponents - or newspaper editorial writers who didn't think a woman could do the job - earned her a leadership role in this new "movement. "
Growing up in a houseful of brothers, she says, is where she learned to hold her own.
"I had five older brothers. And when I came to San Francisco to live with a great aunt and go to school, I had five older male cousins. "I always felt like I was the cat's meow." And she learned never to let them intimidate her.
"I was well-prepared for the Board of Education," she says, referring to her first foray into local politics. Her appointment and subsequent election to the Santa Rosa Board of Education put her with four strong (these days one might say "macho") men. Only one chauvinist put me down," she recalls. He only lasted one term.
Born in 1918 on that North Dakota farm where her family raised "just about everything - except ducks and geese. My father thought they were messy."
She has vivid memories of the Dust Bowl years, of the black clouds that blotted the sun and withered the crops. She remembers walking to high school with a kerchief wrapped over her mouth and nose, to keep the choking dust out of her throat.
The former Helen Browning came to Santa Rosa not once but twice - first in 1940 as a recent graduate of Stanford School of Nursing and as a new bride. Her physician husband, Ford Shepherd, was a resident at the county hospital. Bill Rudee, who would spend his professional life as a general practitioner in Santa Rosa, was in the same resident class.
Nearly 20 years later, after World War II, when Ford became ill and died at age 42, bachelor Dr. Bill Rudee courted and wed his friend's widow, bringing her and her four children back to Santa Rosa.
The Parent-Teacher Association was Helen's springboard to politics. She became active as soon as her oldest was in school and, in the 1960s was asked by Santa Rosa's superintendent, Lloyd K. Wood, to be moderator for a series of parent-teacher panel discussions.
When Alice Zieber resigned from the board, Helen was appointed. Like the women before her, she was promptly designated board clerk. She accepted this secretarial role - for a while. But before her 10 years ended, she had taken her turn as board president.
Just as PTA was her entry into the politics of education, so the school board provided impetus to look beyond, to the politics of local government.
She unseated the short-term Third District incumbent in '76 despite the men who patted her on the head, figuratively, and said, "You're a nice girl, Helen, but I can't vote for a woman." The Press Democrat editorials said pretty much the same thing.
Her determination got a boost when her opponent, at a town meeting, suggested that a man in his 40s had a lot more energy than a woman nearing 60. Helen was 58. And mad.
She walked her district, which included almost all of Santa Rosa and some of Rohnert Park. And she won.
She served with the two youngest members ever, Brian Kahn and Eric Koenigshofer - "I had children older than they were."
Once again, all those brothers and cousins paid off. In her 12 years on the board she worked happily and productively with her colleagues, including Nick Esposti and Ernie Carpenter, and later, "the other Helen" Putnam, former mayor of Petaluma.
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