Word: grasso
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ella T. Grasso...
...tough, deal-cutting, back-slapping politician, and at the same time a warm, disarmingly rumpled matron. During her 28 years in public life, Connecticut's Ella Grasso never lost an election. In an era when feminism was just beginning to dawn in the male preserve of politics, she became the first U.S. woman Governor ever elected in her own right (a few others followed their husbands). Admirers talked about Grasso as a future Vice President or Cabinet member, but she preferred Hartford to Washington. She kept a sign in her living room: BLOOM WHERE YOU ARE PLANTED...
Just about everyone expected Grasso to finish her second term-and perhaps a third or fourth-but last April doctors discovered she had ovarian cancer. By December the disease had spread to her liver. Grasso valiantly ran the state government from her hospital room for weeks, finally resigning on New Year's Eve. After slipping in and out of a coma several times, she died last week...
Lieutenant Governor William O'Neill, 50, was sworn in as Grasso's successor. A former state legislator and house majority leader, O'Neill will finish the two years left in her term. He is expected to continue Grasso policies, including a commitment to avoid levying a state income tax. He is known more for skills at behind-the-scenes compromise than for the high-profile leadership of his predecessor. Ella Grasso, Connecticut's favorite daughter, will be a hard act to follow...
...governor, Grasso was not a great legislative innovator. But she did guide her state through a time of difficult fiscal adjustment with crafty and sensitive intelligence and left the Hartford treasury in a state of health that Connecticut's neighbors to the north and south can only admire enviously. Throughout her six years, she never forgot her dedication to the consumer and the handicapped, to the worker and the impoverished, and acted with a compassion rarely seen in politics today. Her resignation last year was an act of consumate political grace. And her death quieted a voice that still very...