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158 W o m e n i n C o l o r a d o S t a t e P o l i t i cs insisted on paying workers decent wages even as the Great Depression of the 1930s prompted other companies to slash pay and jobs. Unlike Love, Roche set her sights on high office. In 1934, backed by her friend Edward P. Costigan (US senator from Colorado, 1931– 1937), she tried to run for governor—an audacious move at the time. In a 1974 interview, John A. Carroll (US senator, 1957–1963) explained to me that no one of stature within the Democratic Party was willing to nominate her at the state Democratic convention, so he, then a neophyte in the Costigan camp, accepted the task. Roche won enough convention votes to get her name before the public as a primary election rival to Edwin C. Johnson, only to be easily bested by Big Ed. Coloradans were not ready for a woman governor. On the other hand, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was prepared to include a woman of Roche’s talents in the top tier of his administration. In 1934 he appointed her Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, a post that made her the second highest ranking woman in the federal government. Betty Eyre Pellet Like Roche, Elizabeth “Betty” Eyre Pellet led something of a soap-opera life. A Broadway actress, she traded big-city glamour for marriage to a Colorado mine operator and life in the rugged San Juan Mountains. In her book “That Pellet Woman!” (1965), which she wrote with Alexander Klein, she recalled that as a county delegate to the 1934 state Democratic Convention she had intended to cast most of Dolores County’s votes for Big Ed Johnson even though she personally favored Roche. Shortly before the vote “a key party official ” told Pellet, “Don’t you dare vote for her [Roche].” The threat so angered Pellet that she gave all of the county’s votes to Roche. Pellet survived crossing Big Ed. In 1940 she was elected to the Colo­rado house of representatives and, although out of office between 1943 and 1948, she resumed her house service in 1949 where she remained until 1964. Her term as house minority leader (1955–1956) made her the first women to hold that leadership position. 159 W o m e n i n C o l o r a d o S t a t e P o l i t i cs Her risky support of Josephine Roche in 1934 reflected Pellet’s stubborn willingness to buck the odds. Seven years later such doggedness paid handsomely when after twenty-seven days of lobbying in Washington, DC, Pellet helped rescue the Galloping Goose, one of the strangest railroads ever to operate in the United States. Property of the Rio Grande Southern Railroad, the Goose was a weird contraption of regular railcars pulled by an automobile—sometimes a Pierce Arrow, sometimes a Cadillac, sometimes a Rolls Royce— mounted on railroad wheels. It ran on 162 miles of narrow-gauge track though the San Juan Mountains, hauling passengers, mail, ore, and other freight. Decades of poor earnings and high costs cooked the Goose into bankruptcy. By 1941 it was honking its last—an ugly blast that blew death to the mines and towns that depended on the little engine that could no more. Pellet’s skillful lobbying helped get the Goose federal loans as if it were a foreign country eligible for Lend-Lease money, and the plumped up bird kept galloping through World War II. Euodchia Bell Smith Euodchia Bell Smith’s many causes kept her galloping most of her life. Her election to the Colorado house of representatives in 1936, her reelection in 1938, and her election to the Colorado state senate in 1940, where she served until 1946, put her among the most successful Colorado women politicians during the first half of the twentieth century. Generally Smith has remained in the historical shadows, but Phil Goodstein, in From Soup Lines to the Front Lines: Denver during the Depression and World War II, 1927–1947 (2007), gives a glimpse of her career by focusing on her anti-Communism in the late 1930s. Her biographer, should she ever get one, will no doubt mention Smith’s chapter on Colorado women in volume 2 of LeRoy Hafen’s Colorado and Its People (1949) and will emphasize her push to amend Colorado’s constitution so...

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