Ellen Proxmire, the widow of Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wisconsin, who made things happen in Washington in her own right as a founder of a pioneering event-planning firm, died Aug. 3 at her home in the District of Columbia. She was 90.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said a stepdaughter, Jan Licht.
As a consequence of its role in the affairs of the United States and the world, the Washington area is home to a constant round of gatherings, assemblies and conventions, large and small, public and private.
The firm founded almost 50 years ago by Proxmire and other socially connected female partners made a specialty of putting on such events. They saw to every detail of ceremonial breakfasts and delegate dinners: They provided menus, entertainment and speakers, hired florists, and contracted with caterers. They supplied for the needs of convention delegates and offered tours for the diversion of their spouses.
The firm began almost as a lark, devised by friends while they lounged on a poolside to stave off boredom. It was at first called Wonderful Weddings and, as the name implied, it tried to oversee everything needed to celebrate the rituals of matrimony.
For about five years, the firm saw to each detail, from music to catering, of about 30 or 40 weddings a year. But weddings generally are held on weekends, and at that rate, their opportunities for family life were severely curtailed.
As a result, the firm expanded into the planning of a wider range of events and became known as Washington Whirl-Around. It grew gradually into an organization with an income in the millions of dollars and the capability of putting on almost any conceivable form of gathering, prompting a name change to Washington Inc.
It pampered corporate bigwigs who visited Washington to meet quietly with federal officials, and it staged mammoth historical commemorations, including in one of the museums on the Mall, complete with a brass band.
Occasionally, it was hinted that the success of Proxmire’s business may have stemmed from her husband’s position during his 30 years as a high-profile politician. She said it wasn’t so, adding that its prosperity was owed to its expertise in making the trains run on time in behalf of those who had other things to think about.
“If the bus is late,” she often said, “they don’t care what my name is.”
The event-planning business may now be seen as one more way for Americans to earn a living, but, at least in Washington, Proxmire and her partners were credited with creating the concept and blazing the trail that others followed.
The original partners were Gretchen Poston, who served later as a White House social secretary under President Jimmy Carter, and Barbara Boggs, wife of one of the city’s most prominent and well-paid lobbyists, the late Thomas Boggs Jr.
Production Group International acquired Washington Inc. in 1993, and Proxmire spent many more years as president of PGI Washington.
Ellen Imogene Hodges was born in Pittsburgh on Nov. 14, 1924, and was raised in Washington, where her father took a government job during the Depression. She graduated from northwest Washington’s Woodrow Wilson High School in 1942.
She was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society while attending the University of Richmond, and her first marriage, to Warren Sawall, brought her to Wisconsin. She graduated in 1948 from the University of Wisconsin, where she was also a campus beauty queen. As a young woman, she became active in building the Democratic Party in the state.
She worked closely with Proxmire. Each had been married and divorced, and each had two children by the time they attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1956. They married that year.
After the death of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, R-Wis., in 1957, William Proxmire won the special election to replace him. He won a full U.S. Senate term the next year and held the seat until deciding not to seek reelection in 1988. In Washington, William Proxmire became known for advocating consumer-protection measures, and he drew national attention for his Golden Fleece Awards, which highlighted wasteful and often ludicrous spending by the government.
Ellen Proxmire managed two of her husband’s Senate campaigns and had run his Senate office in the couple’s early years in Washington. She also had been co-chairwoman of President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural ball in 1961.
In 1963, she published “One Foot in Washington: The Perilous Life of a Senator’s Wife.” That life for Proxmire, was a blend of child rearing, campaigning, working in the Senate and planning events.
Married life had its strains, some apparently owing to quirks and rigidities in the senator’s personality. The couple separated in 1971 but reconciled a few years later. An important reason for getting back together, she said, “was the gradual realization that we had invested a lot of years in each other and had more in common than not.”
Her husband died in 2005 and their son, William Wayne Proxmire, died in infancy in 1958. Survivors include two daughters from her first marriage, Jan Licht of Naperville, Illinois, and Mary Ellen Poulos of Milwaukee; a son from her second marriage, Douglas Proxmire of McLean, Virginia; two stepchildren, Ted Proxmire of Bethesda, Maryland, and Cici Zwerner of Scottsdale, Arizona; nine grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
When Proxmire and her friends launched their event-planning enterprise in 1967, Proxmire once said in an oral history interview that their spouses scarcely knew what to make of it.
“They thought we were nuts,” she said.
As time went on, Proxmire said, “We all made more than they did.” Except, she corrected herself, for Tommy Boggs.