LIBRARY
Campaigner for America’s National First Ladies’ Library
Mary Regula, who led a successful campaign to establish a national library to research and commemorate the disparate and often unsung roles played by presidential spouses, died on 5 April at her family’s farm in Navarre, Ohio. She was 91.
Her death was confirmed by her son Richard.
Regula enlisted her husband, Rep Ralph Regula of Ohio, as well as Hillary Clinton and other former first ladies, historians and donors in the mid-1990s to establish a National First Ladies’ Library in Canton, Ohio.
It opened in 1998, housed in the Saxton Mckinley house, a Victorian brick mansion that was the home of Ida Saxton Mckinley, the wife of President William Mckinley. It was later designated a historic site under the auspices of the National Park Service.
“We will never be about gownsandgloves,”maryregula said in 1999. “We are an educationalandresourcefacility.”
Regula, a Democrat, once said she had barely met a Republican until she encountered her future husband at college in Ohio. But when he won a seat in the state Legislature in 1960, was elected to Congress in 1972, and was returned to Washington by his constituents 17 times, the couple formed a political and personalunionthatwouldendure for 66 years, until Ralph Regula died last July.
She often filled in for her husband on the stump, including once when he was scheduled to speak about Abraham Lincoln. For that occasion, Mary Regula, a former teacher and American history major in college, decided to focus on Mary Todd Lincoln instead, only to be stunned to learn that the source material was relatively sparse.
And when she accompanied her husband to Washington, where, as an admirer of Eleanor Roosevelt, her fascination with first ladies was further piqued, she searched in vain for a definitive bibliography of presidential spouses.
Regula conceived of a first ladies library soon afterward and recruited 13 women from northern Ohio to raise $100,000 and to hire historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony, an authorityonpresidentialfamilies. He helped them compile a bibliography of 40,000 entries.
She also persuaded her husband to wangle a $1.2 million House appropriation for the project. (“I could not have had the opportunity had Ralph not been in Congress,” she was quoted as saying.)
Rosalynn Carter cut the ribbon for the site’s opening in 1998, and Clinton, who served as the library’s honorary cochairwoman, dedicated its website.
Two years later, President Bill Clinton signed legislation establishing the library as the First Ladies National Historic Site, a designation that facilitated fundraising and placed its management in a partnership with the Park Service.
The library expanded to create an Education and Research Center in a nearby 19th-century building that had housed the City National Bank in Canton. Laura Bush dedicated it in 2003. It also became part of the historic site.
In 1999, the library inaugurated a First Ladies Salute First Women ceremony to honour women in politics, the arts, sport and other fields.
Regula was born Mary Ann Rugosky on 29 November 1926, in Girard, Ohio, to Andrew Rugosky, a steelworker, and the former Josephine Evansheen. The families of both parents came from Eastern Europe.
After a high school teacher helped her win a scholarship, she graduated in 1949 from Mount Union College (now the University of Mount Union, home to the Ralph and Mary Regula Center for Public Service and Civic Engagement) in Alliance, Ohio. She taught in local schools and married in 1950.
In addition to their son Richard, she is survived by another son, David; a daughter, Martha Regula; and four grandchildren.
Regula had a desk in her husband’s Washington office for much of his tenure. Until the congressman retired in January 2009, the couple commuted almost every weekend from Washington to their farm in Navarre, which covers 170 acres about 12 miles southwest of Canton. Their phone number was listed in the public directory.
The couple came from contrasting backgrounds but learned to compromise. She had been brought up as a Roman Catholic, he as a Methodist, a difference that caused a temporary break up when they were dating, but which they resolved.
“That’s actually how we became Episcopalian,” their son David said.
As a Democrat, she was his sounding board, leading to give and take that helped cast him as a moderate Republican in Congress.
On rare occasions, they agreed to disagree, as in the presidential election of 2016. It was apparently the first time since they began going to the polls together in 1952 that they had cancelled out each other’s vote.
Ralph Regula had supported other Republicans in the primaries but told the newspaper The Independent in Massillon, Ohio, that he had no quarrel with Donald Trump that November. Mary Regula, who voted for Hillary Clinton, demurred.
“It’s time for a woman,” she said. Newyorktimes2018.distributed by NYT Syndication Service