As a young woman she taught school in Prince George's, but she left the classroom after a few years and was drawn into the vortex of such suburban PTA and civic association concerns as zoning controversies, construction of new schools and the like.ĭuring the early 1960s, she was active in the fight for a home rule charter form of government for Prince George's, and in 1962, running on a reform slate, she was elected to the Board of County Commissioners.
She was reared in Washington, attended Eastern and Roosevelt high schools and graduated from George Washington University. Gladys Noon was born in New York City on March 2, 1918. Periodically, she would commend one in a Beautiful Bureaucrat column in her newsletter, insisting that the vast majority of federal employees were people who "far from slowing down the wheels of government are really the people who keep them churning." Her federal constituents tended to be the clerks, secretaries, elevator operators and the midlevel professionals. She also supported such other local causes as the funding of Metro. As chairman of the compensation and employee benefits subcommittee of the Post Office and Civil Service Committee, she was influential in opposing measures that would have held down pay increases or required freezes on hiring. In Congress, she played a key role in defeating efforts to merge the federal retirement system with Social Security. She had an engaging smile, a warm handshake, an unusual ability to remember names and an uncanny ability to work a crowd.Īlmost 40 percent of the work force in her district was employed by the federal government - the highest percentage of any congressional district in the nation - and Spellman was careful to respond to its needs. liked to call her "Madame Tinkerbell" for what often seemed like a magical ability to float into a crowded room bubbling with happiness and cheer. Former Prince George's County executive Winfield M. She went to Congress from the County Council in 1974, but continued to spend most of her evenings meeting with civic and neighborhood associations, hosting open complaint sessions and attending receptions in her district.
Her years of PTA and civic association activism as a young mother and housewife in Cheverly during the 1950s led to leadership positions in the reform movement that seized control of the county's government during the 1960s, ousting the old guard Democratic organization that had managed affairs in Prince George's for decades. The following February the House voted to declare her seat vacant, the first time in history a House seat was declared vacant because of a disability.Ī consummate politician, Spellman was part of the wave of young, new suburban dwellers who moved to Prince George's County from Washington and elsewhere in the years after World War II, and that group remained her constituency throughout her political career. Widely regarded as the most popular local politician in Washington's Maryland suburbs at the time, she easily won the 1980 election five days after the heart attack, although she was comatose in a hospital. She died of complications from the heart attack.
31, 1980, while visiting a children's Halloween costume contest in Laurel, less than a week before her election to a fourth term. Spellman, who also served a term on the first County Council in Prince George's, never regained consciousness after a severe heart attack on Oct. Gladys Noon Spellman, 70, a three-term Democratic member of Congress from Prince George's County who began her political career as a PTA and civic association activist and served two years as head of the Board of County Commissioners before her election to the House of Representatives, died yesterday at the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington in Rockville.
0 kommentar(er)
