By Paul Mills
My last column featured Edie Beaulieu. She’s the cleaning lady who as a state legislator three decades ago led the successful campaign for mandatory smoke detectors. It’s a bill that has since saved the lives of countless Maine citizens.
The proposal won passage only after the third time in her first three terms that Beaulieu had submitted it. Prospects for the measure were improved by the intervention of her seatmate, Lewiston’s legendary Louis Jalbert, who helped steer through an amendment exonerating landlords from responsibility for tenants who didn’t replace the batteries. Even then, the bill still confronted challenges. Opponents complained about inflicting more restrictions and visiting greater expense on Maine citizens.
Beaulieu countered that the $10 cost of a detector was minimal compared to the licensing mandates on the typical electrician or plumber already involved in the construction process. Through Beaulieu’s fervent arguments the bill finally won approval, just 30-years ago at this time. Beaulieu herself credits her unrelenting persistence as another reason for the bill’s passage. “Let’s shut her up and do it,” is how she today assesses the motivation of those who changed their minds to reluctantly support her cause.
Though as a one time newspaper guild shop steward for Press Herald maintenance workers, Beaulieu usually aligned herself with causes supported by labor interests, she was no rubber stamp for union leadership. She joined conservatives in 1983, for example, in helping to block a bill that would have extended more minimum wage protection to waiters and waitresses. Beaulieu argued that such a law would have posed a risk to the tipping privileges of such workers.
Beaulieu also parted company with some of her liberal colleagues when she voted to require jail terms for those convicted of a second offense for drug trafficking. This arose out of her concern for the safety of her Munjoy Hill neighbors whom she saw increasingly victimized by such offenders.
It was in the drama over workers compensation reform in her last term in 1985 where Beaulieu was put most on the hot seat. A crisis over Maine’s skyrocketing premiums was perceived even by many labor oriented Democrats including Governor Brennan as requiring urgent attention. As House Chair of Labor, Beaulieu was a central figure in the controversy that pitted many Democrats on one side and labor leaders on the other in an arena of intense sensitivity to both business and labor interests.
Beaulieu was caught in the middle but realized that since a new law was inevitable she could best serve worker interests by attempting to temper the proposal rather than engage in a futile campaign to defeat it. Wiping tears from her face at the time of passage, Beaulieu voted for a compromise she helped to broker even though she was personally disturbed by the benefit curtailments it contained.
Fire safety and labor were by no means the only causes to captivate her interest. Legislation for a cargo port in Portland was an accomplishment few expected including fellow Portland Democrat Governor Joseph Brennan, who warned her that the measure would be “shot down as another Portland bill.” But Beaulieu carried the day by adding a provision to award cargo port status to Searsport, thus winning the support of upper coastal solons.
On some of the intriguing figures that towered over the State House in her 10-years at the State House, Beaulieu today offers these evaluations:
Governor Longley: “I never saw the Democrats and the Republicans work so well together to stop him from what he was trying to do. I wish that could be the case today.”
Speaker John Martin: “I kept reminding John Martin that I knew who to swear in both French and in English. John was very good to me,” she said of her fellow Franco American who tapped Beaulieu three times to be House Chair of the Labor Committee and for whom one of her favorite cats, “Mr. Speaker” was once named. Beaulieu and Martin did not always agree, however. When she considered de-clawing the cat, she observed, “When I fight with John Martin, I threaten to make an appointment for both of them.”
Lewiston State Rep. Louis Jalbert (Beaulieu’s seatmate for five terms): “Before they took a roll call vote he could tell you within two votes how the vote was going to go.” Beaulieu also recalls Jalbert’s mastery of the state budget and his love of horse racing.
Today, the 74-year old Beaulieu offers a critical report card on her State House successors. “When I was there, I felt a majority of the legislators represented the people. It was ‘we’ the key word. ‘We passed this law’ or ‘We killed that bill.’
“Today, it’s me, myself, and I. ‘I don’t care what my seatmate believes in I put in this bill and I’m going to fight for it even though it’s a rotten bill.’”
Closer to home, however, Beaulieu praises accomplishments of those who now fill her shoes in Portland city government. Cleaning up the city’s blighted Bayside neighborhood, that used to be “one big junkyard,” was “a great thing to do.” So also extols the city’s efforts to find housing for its poorest citizens even though her own old neighborhood is one in which she could no longer afford to live.
Home today is her daughter and son-in-law’s in South Portland. Here, she has continued to be a power with which to be reckoned, successfully beating back a proposal to change the name of the street where they reside.
Among her many crusades, those undertaken on behalf of the state’s firefighters remain most memorable to her, however. They’re signified in her home today by both a framed firefighter’s axe and a plaque from firefighter that – in keeping with her sometimes uninhibited speaking style – proclaims: “You’ve done a *!##!* Good Job, Edie.”
It’s thus a testimonial to both a colorful and an accomplished public servant.
