HANOVER — On paper, Marion Copenhaver embarked on her 28-year tenure in the New Hampshire House of Representatives with a winning write-in candidacy in the Democratic primary in 1972.
As a practical matter, she started campaigning almost as soon as she and John H. Copenhaver Jr., a newly minted professor of biology at Dartmouth College, settled their growing family in a house on Lyme Road in 1953.
“She was a high-energy person, always doing something, even before she got into politics,” Lisa Copenhaver, one of her three daughters, recalled last week. “Right away when they got here, she and my father were movers and shakers in the Unitarian fellowship, holding early meetings in the living room and Sunday school in the basement, except in spring when the basement flooded.”
And Copenhaver, who died on Nov. 19, 2019, at age 94, was just warming to her life’s work.
For several springs, the mother of five organized a day camp at Storrs Pond for the Girl Scouts.
She joined and served as president of the Hanover Parent-Teacher Organization.
She taught skiing in the Ford Sayre youth program.
She golfed, relentlessly.
She co-founded the Upper Valley affiliate of Planning Parenthood, and with John was active among area Democrats.
Along the way, Copenhaver impressed the daylights out of young Marisa Smith, daughter of her friend Madlyn Smith.
“She did so many things that my mother and her friends didn’t do,” Marisa Smith, now a playwright living in Hanover, recalled last week. “I didn’t know any women who were involved that intensely until Marion. I was amazed by her energy.”
Even more so by Copenhaver’s refusal to sugarcoat what she thought.
“She was really forthright,” Smith said, “very direct, but never impolite. She was so herself.”
Behind the scenes, Copenhaver won over uncounted other young people, from Dartmouth undergraduates from far away who stayed on campus over holidays to friends of her own children who lost parents or just needed a safe haven.
“She’s always been very committed to the community,” said John Copenhaver, one of her two sons. “All those kids and their families were an instant network.”
By the end of her 14th term in the legislature, in 2000, Copenhaver had widened her network enough to become assistant minority leader of the New Hampshire House, and a go-to person for legislators in both parties as well as for behind-the-scenes people in state and Grafton County government.
“She and I and (Hanover Rep.) Mary Chambers were all freshman legislators the same year,” said Durham resident and former Executive Councilor Dudley Dudley. “While it wasn’t unheard of for women to serve there, it was still an unusual thing, so having Marion and Mary there, coming in as a team, made it more fun. Marion was a wonderful person. I honestly can’t remember much of what we did during my two terms there, but I remember her spirit. She was such a lively, energetic, persuasive, charming person.”
Over the next quarter-century, Copenhaver rarely hesitated to persuade with authority as well as charm.
“She could deal with any type of crowd,” Lisa Copenhaver said. “She was not intimidated by anyone with fancy titles. She could communicate with farmers and everyday people, not just the academics and the doctors you see in Hanover.”
As everyone at the Statehouse learned, early and often.
In a commendation issued at the end of Copenhaver’s tenure, then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen observed that the Hanover legislator had “not been shy about letting legislators — or the governor — know when she believes them wrong on an issue, expressing herself with a rare combination of clarity, conviction, respect and good humor.”
The commendation also cited Copenhaver’s willingness to travel around the Granite State “studying the need to reduce acceleration of health care costs,” her “leading role in the passage of a bill to require hearings and analysis before expansion of health facilities or duplication of equipment” and her efforts “to create better, cost-effective long term care for the elderly and disabled,” including her shepherding of a House bill that “significantly reduced lead poisoning among New Hampshire children.”
And when it came to benefits, the commendation reads, Copenhaver was “a constant goad insisting the state make timely payments because late checks mean the sick get sicker and poor families go on short rations.”
With that determination, Copenhaver set an example that Susan Almy has aspired to follow since entering the House in 1997 to represent Lebanon.
“I’d been working overseas for some years and had no sense of how state government works,” Almy recalled last week. “She was terrific at making contacts with people. … She knew everybody in health and human services and in state government. If I was trying to help someone who was having trouble with the bureaucracy, I would go straight to her and she would either call the right person or give me the name to pass on.”
During breaks in her legislative schedule, Copenhaver kept both feet in her Hanover sphere, including her golf buddies at the Hanover Country Club.
“She’d get an early morning tee time,” Lisa Copenhaver recalled. “And she’d be finishing her 18 holes while most people were just getting their act together for the morning.”
In a letter at the end of 1990, which Lisa Copenhaver recently found among her mother’s correspondence, longtime friend and neighbor Kay Guest — whose husband Bob co-led Copenhaver’s first campaign for the House — thanked Copenhaver for a number of holiday favors, from a loaf of braided bread that “came in handy when the tribe gathered Christmas Eve” to a hastily and seamlessly assembled celebration of Guest’s birthday.
“It is a wonder to me how you manage to dash to Concord for the day, return and produce an elegant dinner,” Guest wrote. “How do you find time to bake goodies for old ladies, visit patients at the hospital and nursing home, remember birthdays and anniversaries, go to high school plays, attend meetings all over the state, write letters to the Valley News, keep up with a large family and maintain a respectable game of golf?
“You leave me breathless and admiring.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com or 603-727-3304.