COLUMBUS — A 24-year Toledo veteran of the Ohio General Assembly — who at one point, disillusioned with politics, simply walked away from the statehouse in mid-term — died Tuesday just days shy of her 100th birthday.
In a pre-term limits era, Marigene Valiquette served six years in the House of Representatives and 18 in the Senate from 1962 to 1986, becoming the longest serving woman. At one point she was the only woman in the Senate.
Decades after walking away from politics, she spent her final years in a central Ohio assisted-living facility.
"She just kind of walked away," said her friend and former Ohio Senate colleague from the Dayton area, Neal Zimmers. "They said she disappeared, but that wasn't really the case. She just left and didn't stay in touch with people afterward."
She officially retired at the end of 1985.
“Things changed back home,” she told Joe Hallett, a former statehouse reporter, in 2023 in a special report for The Blade. “I had had it. It’s like eating a fine dinner. At a certain point, you don’t want anymore. And everything changes.”
A Democrat at a time when Democrats held a Senate majority long since lost, she advocated for women, children, and labor and co-wrote legislation creating the Ohio Lottery.
"She was such a history buff ...," said Mr. Zimmers' wife, the former Billie Jean Fiori, a former Licking County Republican Party chairman. "When she graduated, all the men went to war. ... She had to go to work, and then college, became a lawyer, worked with the union, and that took her to the statehouse. She never saw women like her around.”
She served as chairman of both the Judiciary and Ways and Means committees, as Democratic floor leader, and as a member of the Senate Finance and Rules committees. She attended national conventions and worked on presidential campaigns.
She championed Ohio’s ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, although it ultimately fell short of the number of states needed to be added to the U.S. Constitution.
In her interview with Mr. Hallett, she recalled attending budget negotiations with the late Republican Gov. Jim Rhodes.
“Rhodes didn’t know what to do with me, and I wasn’t nearly as sassy as I could be,” she said. “He was very upset about me being there, but I was one of the leaders. He said, ‘I don’t know, what do I call you?’ and I said, ‘Well, you can call me senator.’ I thought, ‘What do you want to call me — Honey?’”
Born in Toledo on Aug. 22, 1924, she was the only child of Charles and Blanche (O’Neill) Valiquette. She graduated from Toledo Central Catholic High School, the University of Toledo, and UT school of law.
A Catholic, she credited her elementary school nuns for teaching her the value of reading and women getting an education.
She will be privately buried alongside her parents in Calvary Cemetery, Toledo.
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