Last February’s death of a Maine icon, Lewiston’s Georgette Berube, was a landmark event.

Aside from being the longest-tenured woman in Maine legislative history, serving for 26 of the 30 years between 1970 and 2000, she also seldom failed to mince words in advocating her ideals. Her candidly expressed conservative philosophy was unusual for a woman in the Democratic Party in Maine. She stood out.

Reliving her distinctive career has now been made a bit easier by the recent publication of “Thank You, Georgette,” a memoir of her public service.

Borrowing a concept from the evangelical Protestants whose political outlook – though not their religion – she often shared, she has in a sense been born again. The book, which is a series of some four dozen crisp vignettes, brings home in a single volume the views and insights that made her an unconventional and respected institution in Maine public policy.

In 1970 as the 43-year-old co-manager of a Lisbon Street furniture company, housewife and mother of two, Berube launched her first campaign for public office.

She sought to become the first woman in 40 years to represent Lewiston in the Maine House. Not since the dawn of the Depression, when Maude Morey, wife of former five-term mayor Frank Morey, had Maine’s second-largest city sent a woman to the State House. But Morey served only a single term and was relegated to the Library and Temperance Committees.

It was also to a peripheral position – setting up tables for the local Democratic Women’s Club – that the longtime leader of the Lewiston legislative establishment, “Mr. Democrat” Louis Jalbert, sought to consign Berube when she first ran.

Berube’s own reaction was that she preferred to make policy, not coffee.

She succeeded in her first step by defying Jalbert’s pronouncement that she could not win by leading the ticket and running ahead of even him in an election that sent both of them as part of a six-member, city-wide delegation to Augusta.

Having won, then what did Berube do with her mandate?

A priority soon became to rein in government spending. This was not easy to do in a state that the year before her election had adopted its first income tax and in the two years before that had boosted the sales tax twice.

It was an uphill battle in her first two terms, but help would arrive from an unexpected quarter with the upset election of Lewiston Independent James Longley to the Blaine House in 1974.

Though Berube had not supported Longley, his priority of trimming the increase in state spending was also a major Berube theme. Her emerging seniority would also put her in a position to chair the Performance Audit Committee, which had the authority to scrutinize fiscal misbehavior.

The new book combines a sampling of her legislative addresses with some personal reflections on the people and the issues of her era. It strikes not only a number of notes on fiscal accountability but also gives Berube a posthumous opportunity to express other concerns.

Like Longley, her views were independent and not always predictable. She supported a limited version of gay rights but opposed abortion and voted against ratification of the proposed U.S. Equal Rights Amendment for women.

On the means of guaranteeing equal rights for women, her position reflected tensions that had historically existed among feminist leaders. On the one hand, legislation designed to curb workplace abuses against women and children that had been on the books since the 1920s had limited both the weight employees could lift and hours they could work. Since many of these laws had applied only to women or children, they provided a means of protection that some – including at one time Eleanor Roosevelt – believed would be struck down as they applied to women if an ERA were adopted. It was against this backdrop that Berube voted against ERA ratification even at the same time as conservative GOP Senate President Ken MacLeod and a majority of other Maine legislators were voting for it. When Berube later determined that the old protective labor laws were no longer being enforced, she changed her position to support the ERA concept, however.

Berube’s most daring adventure was her run for governor against incumbent Joe Brennan in the 1982 primary, the only time a woman has sought the Democratic nomination in Maine. There have been five who have run in GOP primaries. For a public figure accustomed to taking on the establishment, such a campaign should not have come as a surprise.

Her treatment of this experience in the book, like the outcome – the only election she ever lost – is a bit disappointing. Though she does make it clear that she was disenchanted with a party that she perceived was drifting too far to the left, her thoughts on what made her run for Maine’s highest office and her experiences while engaged in such a lofty pursuit seem a bit short-winded.

This may be because the profile of her run for governor is, like Berube’s other messages, concise and to the point. Being verbose just wasn’t her style.

For those of us curious about why she did not say more, there is a suggestion from her son Claude a U.S. Naval Academy government instructor, that a more expanded version of her writings and speeches may be in the offing. It would be one that this columnist would welcome.

Proceeds from sale of “Thank you, Georgette” will go to the Berube Scholarship Fund at St. Dominic’s High School.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail: [email protected].