Sherwood Boehlert, GOP congressman with strong environmental record, dies
Sherwood Boehlert, who championed environmental causes and science education during his 24 years in the House of Representatives, often battling his own party’s leaders as one of the last moderate Republicans in Congress, died Sept. 20 at a hospice facility in New Hartford, N.Y. He was 84.
The cause was de- mentia, said David Goldston, a former chief of staff of the House Science Committee, which Boehlert chaired.
Boehlert, who was widely known by his nickname of Sherry, was first elected to the House in 1982 as a fiscal conservative with liberal views on some social issues. He was an affable lawmaker who formed friendships and strategic alliances across political lines and was a leader in a wing of the Republican Party that is all but extinct.
“Sherry was a pleasure to work with and could interact with anyone,” Christopher Shays, a former GOP congressman from Connecticut, said in an interview. “He was part of the moderate, centrist Republicans in Congress, and at that time there were a number of us.”
Boehlert represented a district in central New York that included many rural areas and small cities, such as Utica, Ithaca and Cooperstown, the site of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. ( Boehlert’s office was decorated with baseball memorabilia, and he was a part-owner of the Utica Blue Sox minor league team.)
His signature issue during his 12 terms in the House was the environment, inspired initially by the Adirondack Mountains and many waterways in his district. In 1990, Boehlert worked with Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., one of the more liberal members of the House, to sponsor amendments to the Clean Air Act, aiming to reduce acid rain and other forms of pollution.