Helen Rudee, pioneering supervisor, turns 100

Helen Rudee became the first woman elected supervisor in Sonoma County in 1976. She has enjoyed watching other women follow in her footsteps.|

Helen Rudee didn’t set out to become the first person in her family to turn 100 years old, any more than she sprang from bed one day to declare, “I will become the first woman elected to Sonoma County Board of Supervisors.”

In both instances, the former North Dakota farm girl just did it.

Rudee intends to mark her 100th birthday Wednesday with tea and cake with six friends at her fine home since 1957 on Santa Rosa’s McDonald Avenue.

Amid a chat there Tuesday, with daughter Anne Haskins of Washington state alongside, Rudee recalled that when she ran for the Board of Supervisors in 1976, it wasn’t to make history or a feminist statement.

“I didn’t really care that I was the first woman,” she said. Rather, she’d served for a decade on the Santa Rosa school board, risen to the office of president and come to savor the politics and policymaking and chance to make positive change.

She decided in 1976 she was ready for a larger arena. Not everyone she encountered was ready to help her make the step to the five-member Board of Supervisors.

She told a reporter two years ago, “I remember a moment very vividly when I was running. I met a man on the street and he said ‘Helen, you’re a nice woman, but I could never vote for you because you’re a woman.’”

But Rudee ran for the board and she won. She served for 12 years and decided at age 70 to retire, mostly because the health of her husband, well-known family doctor Bill Rudee, was starting to fail.

Though Helen Rudee didn’t run for office to prove that women are perfectly capable of making laws and budgets and policies, she has in recent decades endeavored to encourage women to seek elected office or to go for what whatever it is they aspire to do.

Since charting her pioneering role in county history, she said on the eve of her birthday, “I just decided it was important for other women to follow along.”

How have women fared since the days that it raised eyebrows for them to achieve positions of power long held by men?

“I think we could do better,” said the mother of four, grandmother of eight and great-grandmother of eight. “But we’re moving along.”

She added, “Nobody even thinks if they’re voting for a man or a woman now.”

Rudee grew up holding her own in the company of males.

Five boys already were seated at the table when the former Helen Browning was born Feb. 21, 1918, on a farm outside of the tiny Great Plains town of Anamoose, N.D. She said once, “I grew up with brothers - and I know how to kick.”

She did her part on the farm to raise just about everything - “except ducks and geese,” she said. “My father thought they were messy.”

Far messier were the Dust Bowl years. Young Helen Browning walked to high school with a kerchief over her mouth and nose to guard against the choking dust.

After high school she moved to San Francisco to live with a great aunt and study to become a nurse. There, the sister of five brothers lived with five older male cousins.

“I always felt like I was the cat’s meow,” she said.

While at Stanford School of Nursing in San Francisco, she met Ford Shepherd. They married and in 1940 sojourned for nearly a year in Santa Rosa while Dr. Shepherd served as a resident physician at was what then Sonoma County Hospital on Chanate Road.

The Shepherds had four children: Carolyn, Anne, John and Elaine. The couple had been married less than 20 years when Dr. Shepherd fell ill and died at age 42.

His widow later fell in love with and accepted a marriage proposal from Bill Rudee. In 1957, they settled in Santa Rosa, where Dr. Rudee became a beloved family practitioner physician and his wife immersed herself in the Parent-Teacher Associations at her kids’ schools.

Introduced to school politics through the PTA, Helen Rudee in 1965 seized an opportunity to step up to the Santa Rosa school board upon the resignation of longtime trustee Alice Zieber. As had happened with the women trustees before her, she was promptly designated the board’s clerk.

She became the first woman to move from serving as the school board’s clerk to its president.

In 1976, she declared herself a candidate for the 3rd District seat on the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. She prevailed over Wayne Bass, who’d been sworn in only months earlier after the recall of Supervisor Charles Hinkle.

Rudee was 58 when she joined four male supervisors.

“I grew up with men,” she said. “I have always been surrounded by men, so I know how to work with them.”

Two of the men were newcomers Eric Koenigshofer and Brian Kahn, who were still in their 20s. Rudee mused, “I had children older than they were.”

A registered Republican who later switched to the Democratic Party, Rudee - her hair perfectly tied into a French twist and her glasses perched at the tip of her nose - dug in to county issues and politics. She firmly but civilly resisted anyone who might dismiss her because of her gender.

Chief among the challenges facing her and the board were the need to develop a General Plan to regulate land development in the county and a lawsuit that demanded the construction of a new county jail.

Rudee took some heat for taking time to gather opinions from people in her district before casting a vote.

“I’m a slow decision-maker,” she explained. “I’ve always believed that the decision is not yours alone. It is made with your constituents.”

In 1979, she became a party to history when her colleagues elected her the county board’s chair - not “chairman,” she insisted.

Her concern with the growing crisis of hunger in the county prompted her to take the lead in the creation of a Blue Ribbon Task Force that investigated the issue and sparked a response that evolved into what is now the Redwood Empire Food Bank.

She became deeply involved in the Women’s Political Caucus in the Bay Area and in the formation of the county’s Commission on the Status of Women.

She served three four-year terms and retired from the board, at age 70, in early 1989. But she stayed active, hosting a women’s political networking group at her home and encouraging women to run for office.

She also cared for her husband, Dr. Rudee, for several years prior to his death in 1995.

In 2000, Rudee was part of a group of women who went to Washington, D.C., with to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Sonoma County-based Women’s History Project.

And in January of 2017, the Board of Supervisors honored her by inviting her to take part in swearing-in ceremonies that marked the first time women made up the majority of the board, including newly elected Supervisor Lynda Hopkins and Supervisors Susan Gorin and Shirlee Zane.

A day before she would turn 100 years old, Rudee said her eyesight isn’t what it was, so sometimes someone will read the newspaper to her.

“At 100,” she said, “I just want to make sure the garden is taken of, and the family is well situated.”

If a visitor or someone on the phone cares to talk politics, that’s good, too.

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