Booth Gardner has died.
Gardner died Friday at his Tacoma home, family spokesman Ron Dotzauer said Saturday. He was the state’s 19th governor.
“We’re very sad to lose my father, who had been struggling with a difficult disease for many years, but we are relieved to know that he’s at rest now and his fight is done,” said Gail Gant, Gardner’s daughter, in a statement.
The millionaire heir to the Weyerhaeuser timber fortune led the state from 1985 to 1993 following terms as Pierce County executive, state senator and business school dean.
Since then, he had worked as a U.S. trade ambassador in Geneva, in youth sports and for a variety of philanthropic works. But his biggest political effort in his later years was his successful “Death with Dignity” campaign in 2008 that ultimately led to the passage of the controversial law that mirrored a law that had been in place in Oregon since 1997.
The law allows terminally ill adults with six months or less left to live to request a legal dose of medication from their doctors.
Gardner knew that he wouldn’t qualify to use the law because Parkinson’s disease, while incurable, is not fatal. But at the time, he said his worsening condition made him an advocate for those who want control over how they die.
“It’s amazing to me how much this can help people get peace of mind,” Gardner told The Associated Press at the time. “There’s more people who would like to have control over their final days than those who don’t.”
The Booth Gardner I knew was a genuinely nice guy who did a lot to heal the party after the Dixie Lee Ray era. The Republicans were in the grip of the Helen Craswell theocrats, the teabaggers of the era. The Dems crushed the Rs in two election cycles and they really never recovered in the state.
Booth visited all over the state and pressed the flesh in little towns that hadn’t seen a governor in more than thirty years.
@1 Well, I guess he was all right in those important ways, but state employees got no relief during his governorship. The state workers in the trenches during that time considered him an all-talk, no-walk, do-nothing governor. But even that was a welcome change from Spellman, who gave you the impression he would have liked to render state workers into glue, and Gardner undoubtedly was light-years better than the goofball Craswell, who seemed hell-bent on dismantling state government altogether.
Don’t forget Spellman, as was Dixie Lee Ray before him, was a Westinghouse/John Cherberg stooge and fought tooth and nail to keep the Hanford plutonium factory going even though it was a totally primitive and obsolete facility that was rapidly deteriorating and becoming a serious threat to everyone.
He also tried to get the sales tax applied to foodstuffs of all types, which was really what was one of the main things Gardener was able to campaign on.
Booth Gardner was able to beat a sitting Republican Governor in the year of a Reagan landslide, that in itself was quite an acomplishment.
@2 A baboon on meth would have been better than Craswell.
Meanwhile, back at the subject….Booth seemed to be a genuinely decent guy who did his job well in office, and who subsequently advocated with dignity for others struggling with burdens similar to his.
@5 A termite on LSD would have been better than Craswell.
I’ll always remember the David Horsey cartoon about Craswell, with her spewing her usual deranged gibberish, with a Democratic donkey cheerfully jumping up and down in the background, shouting “preach it, sister! Hallelujah!”
“A termite on LSD would have been better than Craswell.”
To say something nice about Craswell, she might have made for an amusing troll.
“Dixie Lee Ray”
To say something nice about Dixie Lee Ray, she certainly knew her marine boring organisms.
@9 Actually, she knew about a lot of stuff, much of it inconvenient and the rest of it…well, smelly.
Gov Gardner was a helluva Governor of the State of Washington and a damn fine citizen period.
If you’ve not seen it, see this
The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner