Ann Uccello and what might have been.

Former Hartford mayor Ann Uccello died Tuesday at the age of 100. She enjoyed a remarkable run in elective office between 1963 and 1971. A Republican, Uccello won a seat on Hartford’s city council in 1963 and was er-elected two years later.

As the highest vote-getter for the city council in 1967, Uccello became mayor of Hartford in 1967, he first woman in the nation to lead a state capital. Direct, partisan elections for mayor resumed two years later. She entered the 1969 campaign as a distinct underdog. Democrats enjoyed a vast advantage in voter registration. They nominated lawyer Joseph Adinolfi. Two petitioning candidates, Wilbur Smith and Ned Coll, attracted Democratic voters from Adinolfi.

Uccello eked out a narrow victory in 1969, cementing her place as a formidable statewide political figure. She was a steady hand in a tumultuous era. She considered bids for governor and U.S. Senate in 1970. State Democrats entered the year in considerable disarray. A large state deficit loomed. Incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator Thomas Dodd had been weakened when censured by the Senate in 1967.

Republican leaders, including President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, urged Uccello to run for the open First Congressional District. With her path blocked by U.S. Representatives Thomas Meskill, who was running for governor, and Lowell Weicker, a loyal Nixon supporter and the party regulars’ choice for the Senate, Uccello gave way and ran for the 1st, which had not elected a Republican since 1956. She was so well-known that her campaign bumper stickers did not include her name but featured Uccello’s photograph and the slogan “Courage to Do What Must Be Done.”

Divided 1st CD Democrats’ nominating convention lasted two days, followed by a summer primary won by state insurance commissioner William Cotter, a party organization loyalist. Uccello lost to Cotter that November by 1,100 votes, losing only Hartford and Bloomfield. Meskill and Weicker won their races–as Uccello likely would have done.

Uccello resigned as mayor the next year to take a position in the U.S. Department of Transportation. She ran in a special election for the 1st CD after Cotter’s 1981 death. Uccello lost to then-Secretary of the State Barbara Kennelly, who would hold the seat until ran for governor in 1998.

Ella Grasso–who won a narrow victory for the U.S. House in 1970, would become the first woman elected governor in her own right four years later. Connecticut has not come close to electing a woman to the U.S. Senate.

Published March 15, 2023.