TodayKnoll’s pioneering spirit will be missed
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Editorial
Article RatingIn a year when glass ceilings were a major topic in the presidential campaign, thanks to Sen. Hillary Clinton and Gov. Sarah Palin, the notion of women executives was old news to Pennsylvania voters.
That’s because we already had experienced the service of former state treasurer and current Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll, who died Wednesday evening after a struggle with a rare form of cancer.
She grew up in a time when women’s ambitions outside home and hearth were often discouraged by family and friends, so it wouldn’t have been surprising for her to have settled for her status as a schoolteacher, the wife of a U.S. postmaster, mother of four and manager of a family restaurant.
But it was her activism in the Democratic Party that led to her becoming a top official at PennDOT and eventually inspiring her pioneering campaigns for public office.
Her two terms as state treasurer came only after she was defeated in two attempts to win the office, and she was disappointed again in 1994 when she reached for the governorship. But she rose from a field of nine people in 2002 to win the nomination for lieutenant governor and held off a primary challenge in her re-election campaign.
That level of competition for the lieutenant governor’s office belies the position’s reputation as being a ceremonial post. Gov. Ed Rendell, however, found her a valuable running mate, as her Western Pennsylvania origins helped balance his Philadelphia residency, a point of candidate history that worked against that city’s gubernatorial hopefuls for the better part of the last century.
Knoll, like all her predecessors in the no. 2 seat, presided over the state Senate and chaired the state Board of Pardons, but Rendell also named her to lead the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Council and the Local Government Advisory Committee. Her signature achievement, according to her biography, was her effort to create the 529 Tuition Account Program to help Pennsylvanians finance their post-secondary educations.
She worked with Project ChildSafe, which advocates keeping personal weapons properly stored to prevent harm to children, and Dress For Success, which helps low-income women make a better impression when seeking employment. And she belonged to a wide variety of community action groups, from the YMCA to the NAACP.
Though she got most of her press coverage in recent years for her gaffes, like accidentally referring to Rendell as “Edward G. Robinson,” she was well liked as lieutenant governor and her record as state treasurer was mostly positive.
Today there are a fair number of women holding influential posts in state government and the commonwealth’s congressional delegation. That’s as much due to changing times as anything Knoll has done, but she will be remembered, rightly, as a pioneer who led that change through her persistence and “can-do” spirit.
As she said upon winning the lieutenant governorship, “I happen to think that Pennsylvania is like a 10-speed bicycle. We have gears we haven’t even tried yet.”
