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She was a down-home New York gal who was as passionate about women’s rights as she was about the fledgling political aspirations of her grandson.
And up until the end, Geraldine Ferraro was still a beloved firebrand.
Ferraro, the first woman vice-presidential candidate on a major-party ticket, died yesterday morning at 75 in Boston, where she was being treated for complications from multiple myeloma, a blood cancer she bravely battled for 12 years.
The three-term congresswoman shot to national prominence in 1984 when Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale chose her as his running mate against Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
“It was breathtaking. She was always a person of grace,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, who was with Ferraro on the floor of the convention in San Francisco when she accepted the nomination.
He even credited Ferraro with helping name his daughter, suggesting the name Jessica to him on the House floor.
Ferraro’s rousing acceptance speech galvanized American women.
“My name is Geraldine Ferraro,” she declared. “I stand before you to proclaim tonight: America is the land where dreams can come true for all of us.”
“It changed my life,” recalled Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan).
In the end, Reagan won 49 of 50 states, the largest landslide since 1936.
Ferraro was born to an Italian-American mother and Italian-immigrant father of modest means in upstate Newburgh. Her father died when she was 8 and the family moved to the South Bronx. She was a co-ed at Marymount Manhattan College in 1954 when she met John Zaccaro, a handsome Brooklynite she would marry in 1960.
That same year she enrolled in Fordham Law School, unsatisfied with the traditionally female profession she had originally chosen — teaching.
She became a Queens assistant district attorney in 1974, and won the first of three terms in Congress in 1978.
“She broke a lot of molds and it’s a better country for what she did,” Mondale said yesterday.
Ferraro was dogged by ethical questions during the 1984 campaign that centered on the business dealings of her real-estate-lawyer husband. Zaccaro pleaded guilty in 1985 to fraud in the financing and purchase of five apartment buildings.
Ferraro would tell interviewers years later that she would have not accepted the nomination if she had known it would focus criticism on her family, but she still celebrated her political ascent.
“I went from being a kid who lost her father and who lived in the South Bronx to almost going in to live in the White House,” said Ferraro, who made unsuccessful bids for the US Senate in New York in 1992 and 1998. “That just tells you what this country is all about.”
Ferraro’s place as a political pioneer was hailed yesterday by two women who followed the trail she blazed.
She “put the first cracks in America’s political glass ceiling,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said.
And Sarah Palin wrote of Ferraro on Facebook: “She broke one huge barrier and then went on to break many more.”
Ferraro is survived by her husband; three children, Donna, John Jr. and Laura; and eight grandchildren.