Rose Ann Vuich, a conservative Democrat from the Central Valley who built a reputation for unswerving honesty as the first woman in the state Senate, died Thursday at her home in Dinuba. She was 74.
The cause of death was complications of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.
Vuich integrated the all-male preserve of the Senate in 1977 and was a forceful advocate for Central Valley agriculture for the next 16 years.
"What's in it for Dinuba?"--referring to the farm town southeast of Fresno--became her signature line, as she pored over colleagues' bills, questioning the numbers, the motives and what, if any, good her vote might bring to her constituents.
But her penchant for detail--nitpicking, her male colleagues often grumbled--got the attention of the other senators, who knew soon after she arrived that business as usual would no longer cut it in the Legislature's upper chamber.
First, there was the matter of the women's restroom: There was none. Vuich not only got one built--fast--but had it named after her.
No one dared call her a feminist; she made it clear to anyone who asked that she was "not a part of the women's liberation movement." But whenever a male colleague rose to address the "gentlemen of the Senate," she reminded him of her presence--with a cowbell.
"She was enormously respected," said former Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti. "It was a men's club, but she knew how to be pleasantly assertive. . . . She let them know there was a new gal in town."
The daughter of a Serbian-born farmer, Vuich had no intention of making history when she decided to run for the Senate in 1976. She was an accountant by training and ran her family's 180 acres of citrus, olive and fruit trees with her brother, Bill.
It wasn't until two weeks after the farmer and accountant filed her papers that she learned there had never been a female state senator in California. Of the four women running in state Senate races that year, the no-nonsense, schoolmarmish Vuich was the one pols thought was least likely to win.
But the other three women lost while Vuich squeaked to victory, defeating a Republican assemblyman from Fresno who had better name recognition and outspent her 2 to 1.
"I drove up in front of the Capitol building, and I just sat there a long time, looking up at the dome," Vuich, then 50, said of the morning she arrived in Sacramento to be sworn in. "And then I took a deep breath and said to myself, 'Well, old girl, here you are. Give it all you've got, because that's what you promised the people back home.' "
