[B]arbara Snelling had just lost her husband, Vermont Gov. Richard Snelling, to a heart attack. But on Aug. 17, 1991, she stood before a crowd of thousands celebrating the state’s bicentennial and offered “a toast to the future.”
“You have to do your darnedest to wall off emotions just in order to get through some of those times,” she recalled in an interview 10 years later. “For me to be there was a continuing presence for him. I wasn’t worried about my own future at that point.”
Yes, the woman who once waited tables to earn college money often was known for the man she married. But the former Barbara Tuttle Weil was a respected force in her own right, going on to win election as lieutenant governor and Chittenden County state senator, all while battling back from two life-threatening strokes.
That’s why Vermonters across the political spectrum heralded Snelling’s tenacity upon learning the 87-year-old died Monday, surrounded by family at her South Burlington home.
In years past, sitting down with Snelling in her living room, you’d be struck by personal mementos that represented decades of 20th century Vermont political history. But her story started simply in a hospital in the hardscrabble mill town of Fall River, Massachusetts, where she was born on March 22, 1928.
Her father was an Episcopal minister. Her mother took care of Snelling and her older brother as the family moved about Massachusetts, then scraped up enough Depression dollars to buy an old farm without electricity or running water in the Green Mountain town of Newfane.
“We were three miles out of town on the top of a hill,” Snelling recalled in a 2001 interview. “We would walk to get milk and groceries. The problem was not carrying the groceries home, it was that we went to the library and loaded up on books. It got very heavy going back up the hill.”
The promising student — nicknamed “Swifty” by her classmates — won scholarships to private schools, then to Smith College.
“I was interested in politics, but being a bit more practical I was thinking of social work. But at that point I’m not sure I was all that career-oriented.”
She instead was in love with a boy with plans of his own. Barbara Weil met Richard Snelling when she dated a friend of his who went into the military.
“Dick being the shy guy went up to him and said, ‘You’re leaving — is it OK if I date Barbara?’ Our first date he told me he was going to marry me.”
She needed a bit more time to make up her mind, but eventually did in 1947. After the wedding, she transferred to Radcliffe College to be closer to her husband at nearby Harvard. She had a young daughter, Jacqueline, and was nine months pregnant with a son, Mark, when she graduated in 1950, earning a philosophy degree magna cum laude.
The college wouldn’t let her parade with fellow students at commencement, fearing a gap in proceedings if she went into labor.
“I don’t think they wanted a pregnant woman marching across the stage,” she recalled in 2001. “They gave me a seat in the audience. They were way behind at that point. I accepted that. I’m mad at myself I wasn’t more aggressive about it.”
Snelling went on to give birth to Diane (now a Chittenden County state senator) and Andrew as her husband climbed the career ladder to Vermont at the start of the 1950s.
“When we came we’d heard Vermonters take a while to get to know you. But we had some of the leaders in this town come to call on us and say, ‘What would you like to do?’”
Snelling volunteered to help start a town nursery school, served as a local Girl Scout troop leader and Cub Scout den mother, and ran for the Shelburne School Board.
“I knocked on every single door in town.”
And won the election. Snelling didn’t run on a party label, although she considered herself a Republican.
“My parents were Republicans who had supported F.D.R. (Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt), so they were not solid one-party people, but Dick had worked for (Roosevelt challenger Thomas) Dewey as a kid.”
Her husband soon followed her into elected office, serving as state legislator and House majority leader. She herself went on to a seat on the state Board of Education, then a vice presidency at the University of Vermont.
“I’ve always joked the first paying job I had after having been a waitress was vice president of the University of Vermont,” she said. “I’m not sure it’s the usual career path.”
Snelling would be the school’s first female executive, a fact not lost on former Vermont Lt. Gov. Consuelo Bailey, the first woman in the nation elected to a state’s second-highest office.
“Connie Bailey called me up and said, ‘Just remember, Barbara, you’re going to have to work twice as hard as any man in order to be accepted.’ I did feel very definitely that I was a woman in a place where there hadn’t been any and I couldn’t fail. I didn’t take an active role as a feminist, but I did spend time explaining to young women how they should behave in order to be taken seriously — the fact the way they talked could make a difference, things like that. If they always spoke softly and were reticent, they weren’t going to get anywhere. They had to be willing to step up and be noticed to be successful.”
Snelling’s husband offered his own advice about the job.
“He said, ‘Absolutely not,’” she recalled in 2001. “We went out on the lake and had a big battle over that. The lake carries sound better than land, so probably anybody anywhere around heard everything we said. But when we came back he said, ‘If you want to do it that badly, then you’d be the best possible vice president they could have.’”
He got a new job, too, winning election as governor in 1976. The new first lady promoted the restoration of the Statehouse in Montpelier and joined her husband for public appearances.
“It was interesting to go off to an inauguration or National Governors Association meeting and be treated like royalty. I remember Jimmy Carter’s inauguration. We had two Marines assigned to us. They paid a lot of attention to detail. They went and sat in the seats to find the right one so I would be in the sun.”
Spotlight aside, she considered herself a working woman back home. This wasn’t as accepted then as it is today. She remembered meeting a similar first couple, Bill and Hillary Clinton, when he was governor of Arkansas.
“Hillary really had nothing to do with the wives. She considered us all to be inferior — she was working, she had a job … Well, so did I. But she didn’t really bother to find that out or care about it.”
Snelling left the university in 1980 and set up her own fund-raising consulting firm. (“The inner politics of a university are as bad if not worse than state politics,” she said.) Her husband left the governor’s office in 1985, lost a U.S. Senate bid for Patrick Leahy’s seat in 1986, then won his old job back in 1990.
“The race for Senate was something he really hadn’t had his heart in — Reagan asked him to run — so I was glad to see him run for major office again and succeed.”
Her husband returned as governor in January 1991, the state’s bicentennial year. He savored every small-town celebration he was invited to. But four days before a culminating “Birthday Bash” that drew thousands of Vermonters to the Statehouse lawn in Montpelier Aug. 17, he suffered a heart attack and died. Lt. Gov. Howard Dean, a Burlington physician and a Democrat, succeeded him in office.
The state hadn’t lost a sitting chief executive in 121 years. Barbara Snelling planned a memorial service in the House chamber for hundreds of local, state and national representatives — “the president (George H.W. Bush) said he did not want to disturb the service by his presence and his security,” she said after — then followed up with her poignant toast to the future.
“The bicentennial was something he had planned on and worked on,” she recalled 10 years later. “I thought it was important for the family still to have a part.”
‘I should have run for governor’
Soon people were talking about keeping the Snelling name in state office.
Instead, she ran for lieutenant governor, saying in her announcement the part-time post was “the right thing for me at this time.”
Vermont voters agreed, electing her in 1992.
Snelling arrived in Montpelier in 1993 and met Mr. Wright — Democratic Speaker Ralph Wright, her counterpart in the House.
Things went wrong.
Snelling, for example, had a female assistant ask Wright for a committee schedule.
“I thought I was doing something that was pretty routine. But he announced I was ‘an aggressive woman.’”
Snelling had her grandchildren make lapel pins declaring “Aggressive woman at work.” The buttons soon appeared on not only lawmakers, but also the front page of state newspapers. Wright, speaking to a reporter, dismissed the disagreement with Snelling that started it all by saying, “She may have been a little tipsy.”
Snelling, if anything, was more than sober to what she was hearing.
“Was he an aggressive man to say ‘aggressive woman’ as an insult? I had the feeling he felt he had to knock me down early and show he was in charge. It stunned me that anybody could be as petty as he was.”
(Wright replied of the “aggressive woman” episode in his 1996 autobiography: “It wasn’t exactly a statement that calls for a slap to the chops, but it wasn’t a response that would have pleased my mother.”)
In 1996, Snelling decided to run for governor against Dean.
“I felt strongly we needed as strong a candidate as we could get to run against him, and I felt some responsibility to do something about that.”
Beating the odds
But everything changed at a seemingly routine Republican meeting in Hartland on April 13, 1996.
“I had a neck ache and just wasn’t feeling very energetic.”
She went to the rest room.
“I don’t remember a lot of what happened afterward.”
Rescue workers did. They pried open the door with a crowbar, found Snelling unconscious on the floor, offered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, put her in an ambulance and sped to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in nearby New Hampshire.
Her children rushed to her side. They learned their mother had a major “cerebral hemorrhage.” That meant a blood vessel had burst in her brain and put her in a coma.
That meant something else.
“The doctor told them I was going to die and they shouldn’t count on me being alive through the night.”
Her children took turns talking to her in hopes she’d wake up.
Miraculously, she did.
The drama played out in newspapers and on television and radio statewide. Take this front-page lead paragraph of April 17, 1996: “Lt. Gov. Barbara W. Snelling ate a turkey sandwich, drank some milk and coffee and took three short walks in a hospital hallway less than 24 hours after undergoing brain surgery for a life-threatening aneurysm …”
Snelling didn’t know she was such news.
“I was very well protected in the hospital. I didn’t even go to rehab because my family didn’t feel I should be out in that much of a public situation. When it was time to go home the hospital let me out a side door so there wasn’t any chance of reporters seeing me. I was sheltered from the outside as well as the outside being sheltered from me.”
She returned home to upward of 1,000 cards and letters.
“I don’t know how to express it accurately, but even though I didn’t know there was that much attention, I felt that support while I was in the hospital. I really felt some kind of connection with Vermonters. I don’t know whether it was spiritual or what, but it was a caring that came through.”
When her doctor ran into Snelling on the floor of the Republican National Convention in San Diego four months later, it was clear she was back in business. Snelling opted out of the governor’s race that fall and instead won a seat in the state Senate, then ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in 1998 (she lost by 500 votes) before returning to the Senate in 2001.
Snelling knew the ups and downs of politics. Several decades earlier she had pushed to close Shelburne High School and create the current Champlain Valley Union High School in Hinesburg — not necessarily a popular move for citizens concerned about tradition or taxes.
“I was giving my pitch about we all want the very best education we can provide our kids and a hand went up in the audience and a man said, ‘Why?’ I was stunned anybody could voice that.”
More surprising was the challenge the lifelong Republican faced in the 2000 election.
“I made the statement that had I been in the Legislature I probably would have voted for the civil union bill. Whereupon I became target No. 1 for a Baptist minister from Williston who said I had to be defeated.”
That minister barraged Chittenden County with advertising and mailings against her.
“He had never met me to my knowledge. I called him and asked why he was saying ‘Watch out for your children — don’t vote for Barbara Snelling.’”
She didn’t agree with his answer. Neither did voters, who elected her one of her county’s few Republican state senators in an otherwise Democratic delegation.
Snelling found she wasn’t the only Vermont Republican facing criticism from conservatives. She empathized, for example, with Jeffords’ decision to leave the party in 2001.
“I was sorry to see him do it, but I can understand how he felt,” she said later that year. “I think moderates belong in the party and the party needs moderates. I didn’t have to make that statement (about civil unions). I was told I should have thought about making it. But I’m so glad I did.”
Snelling was up for more challenges. In the summer of 2001, she squeezed in an interview with this reporter between a Planned Parenthood meeting (she was pro-choice) and a press conference with then Rep. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Days later, the 73-year-old suffered another stroke.
Doctors said the second incident, sparked by a clot in a neck artery, was different from when Snelling almost died in 1996 after a blood vessel burst in her brain. One thing, however, stayed the same: The incident may have affected her balance in the present (“We’ve been teasing her she’s now a left-leaner,” son Mark joked at the time), but not her memories of the past or hopes for the future.
Resigning from the Senate, Snelling continued to live an active life. Looking back, she had few regrets.
“I should have run for governor when Jeffords said I should,” she said in 2001. “Transportation, health, education … all of those are things that have not been dealt with as thoughtfully as the people deserve. I’d like to run for governor or lieutenant governor — preferably for governor — but my kids have very clearly said they don’t want me running statewide anymore. They’d like to protect me a little bit. But the doctor said if I ran for governor of Vermont, his vote would be mine.”
Snelling, it seemed, was still up for the spotlight.
Kevin O’Connor, a former staffer of the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, is a Brattleboro-based writer. Email: kevinoconnorvt@gmail.com