When a tough grandmother went to Congress: UNR displays a trove of materials from the Barbara Vucanovich collection

When members of my generation of Northern Nevadans think of Congress, the first name that comes to mind is probably Barbara Vucanovich. 

Barbara Farrell was born in New Jersey in 1921, and she came to Northern Nevada in 1949 for the most old-school Reno reason possible: She wanted a quick divorce from her first husband. What was supposed to be a short stay in the divorce capital of the world turned into a lifetime, when she met Kenneth Dillon, an attorney involved in Republican politics; they fell in love. They married in 1950 and had five children.  

After Dillon’s death in 1964, she was working on then-Lt. Gov. Paul Laxalt’s unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign when she met a gentleman by the name of George Vucanovich; the two married a year later. As Laxalt’s political star rose—he was elected governor in 1966, and to the U.S. Senate in 1974—she at times continued to work with him, and became his district director after he was elected to the U.S. Senate. When Nevada received a second congressional seat after the 1980 Census, Laxalt encouraged her to run in 1982. 

She took his advice. Her campaign motto: “What Congress needs is a tough grandmother.” She won, becoming the first Nevada woman elected to Congress, and went on to serve seven terms before retiring in 1997. 

The life of Vucanovich is the subject of an exhibit assembled by the University of Nevada, Reno, Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives department. Nevada’s Silver Lady: Barbara Vucanovich and Nevada Women in Politics opened last fall and will be on display through May on the third floor of the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center on the UNR campus. 

The exhibit was curated by Elspeth Olson, an assistant professor and the outreach and public services archivist for Special Collections and University Archives. Olson said the university has intended to do a Vucanovich exhibit since UNR received her papers—which consisted of about 150 boxes of materials—several years after Vucanovich’s passing in 2013.  

“Political collections are quite large,” Olson said. “Doing exhibits can be quite an undertaking, and for a number of reasons—partly to do with the pandemic and then the university’s sesquicentennial celebrations—this was the first open slot we had to put it up. Luckily, I had her memoir to go off of, to give me a framework. … The memoir was fundamental, because it told me what Congresswoman Vucanovich thought was important about her career.” 

The exhibit includes a variety of items, ranging from documents to campaign materials, posters and even license plates.  

“She apparently got a custom license plate for every Congress that she was in,” Olson said.  

Olson said the true magic of the exhibition comes from the photographs.  

“I knew from her memoir that congressional delegation work was something that she was really interested in,” Olson said. “She served at such an interesting moment in geopolitics, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first democratic elections in Nicaragua. We thought those would be really interesting things to highlight with the photographs that we had. She traveled to central Europe a couple of times, both before and after the Berlin Wall came down. There are some great photographs of the Berlin Wall. There are also some photographs of her visiting Chernobyl in 1995, where they were still talking about what happened in 1986 with the explosion.” 

Olson said one of her favorite photos in the exhibit is a picture of Vucanovich with a fighter pilot. 

“I really love that photo,” she said. “I love how wide they’re both grinning. Her story about getting to ride in that fighter jet is pretty funny in the memoir. She got to pilot it for about, I think, three seconds before things went completely haywire, and they took over the controls again.” 

In part to put Vucanovich’s career in the proper context, the exhibit also includes a timeline of women in Nevada politics. 

“Our history department was founded by Anne Martin, who was a prominent women’s suffrage activist and the first woman in the country to run for the (U.S.) Senate back in 1918,” Olson said. “… I wanted to place Barbara Vucanovich within that timeline. It’s a sample of women who have served in elected office who are represented in our collections, starting with Anne Martin, and going all the way to the current congressional delegation”—which, today, is mostly female. 

Olson said she was “really taken” by the relationship Vucanovich had with her husband, George.  

“I am really inspired by the supportive relationship they had with each other, and the way he was able to be welcomed into an extant family, which had already lost a father,” she said. “He would show up to her rallies wearing a name tag that just said, ‘The Husband.’ We have one of the name tags.” 

Olson grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and came to UNR about five years ago. 

“Over the year-plus of working on this exhibit, when I’ve mentioned that I was working on this, more often than not, people would smile and have some story to tell about meeting Barbara Vucanovich in person,” Olson said. “The intimacy of the politics here is something that seems really special.” 

Vucanovich was a staunch conservative, for the most part, although she supported equal pay and equal treatment for women in the work force, and fought for funding for early cancer screenings, as well as cancer treatment and research (after surviving breast cancer early in her congressional career). After her retirement, she bemoaned the increasingly polarized and contentious environment in Washington, D.C. In 2013, she told the RN&R’s Dennis Myers: “There’s just no cooperation. Nobody wants to get anything done. But it’s sad because it’s more of a battle than it is representing people and governing properly. They’re not doing that.” 

Polarization has only gotten worse in the 12 years since Vucanovich said that. I asked Olson if she had today’s political climate in mind as she curated the exhibit. 

“I was selecting materials when there were so many student protests last year, and I was definitely aware of that,” she said. “I was definitely thinking carefully about what we were putting on display, regarding congressional delegation work especially. It’s not to censor; it’s just, ‘Are these conversations that I want to get into in this setting?’ You always have to think about your audience.” 

Shortly after the Nevada’s Silver Lady exhibit ends in May, the Special Collections and University Archives department will open an exhibit on Reno Little Theater, to celebrate the organization’s 90th season. Olson said it’s important for the university to hold exhibits like these. 

“I think that in our increasingly digital culture, people lose track of the ‘thingness’ of things,” Olson said. “I run classes for the archives, and one of the things that I encourage our students to think about is the items as objects. It’s not just words on a page. If a book falls open at specific pages, that tells you something about how it’s been used. If you see wear and tear on it in certain ways, or kids’ doodles on it, it connects you as well. … Archives have a reputation for being very gatekeeper-y, and we’re really trying to break that down. We are a publicly accessible resource. At least half of our users are not university-affiliated. We are trying to get ourselves incorporated into more and more of the curriculum here at UNR. I fully believe the archives are for every discipline, not just history students.” 

Nevada’s Silver Lady: Barbara Vucanovich and Nevada Women in Politics will be on display through May on the third floor of the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center on the UNR campus. For more information, visit library.unr.edu/places/special-collections.