Ella Grasso

WHEN CONNECTICUT'S then-secretary of state first ran for governor in 1974, her bumper stickers said only, "Ella"; no further identification was needed. Ella Grasso always enjoyed a comfortable friendship with the people of Connecticut. From her roots in the state's unique reform "machine," she learned a healthy respect for citizens' wishes and a pugnacious dedication to getting things done. When she became the nation's first woman governor elected in her own right, she proclaimed, with characteristic honesty, the victory first and foremost for the working people of the state and, in her six years in the statehouse, sought always to justify their confidence in her.

As governor, Grasso was not a great legislative innovator. But she did guide her state through a time of difficult fiscal adjustment with crafty and sensitive intelligence and left the Hartford treasury in a state of health that Connecticut's neighbors to the north and south can only admire enviously. Throughout her six years, she never forgot her dedication to the consumer and the handicapped, to the worker and the impoverished, and acted with a compassion rarely seen in politics today. Her resignation last year was an act of consumate political grace. And her death quieted a voice that still very much needed to be heard in Connecticut and in the nation.