Thirty-Five Years Ago This Week: Arapahoe County Republican activist Mort Marks was perpetuating a rumor among politicos that state Sen. Martha Ezzard, R-Englewood, was going to launch a bid for Congress against incumbent Rep. Dan Schaefer.

This even though the media had repeatedly asked Ezzard about her plans for the future and she had consistently responded that she was not running for Congress.

“I am not planning to do it – run for Congress,” Ezzard said. “I’ve got lots and lots of letters urging me to, but my inclination is to go and practice law. I can’t foresee a set of circumstances to cause me to run for the 6th CD.”

Ezzard went on to prove Marks wrong, resigning from her state senate seat three months later and even changing her party affiliation to Democrat. Her vacancy was then filled by Terry Considine.

In other news, Marks, who’d recently been announced as Colorado director of Jack Kemp’s presidential campaign, was making even more waves in an opinion article published in The Colorado Statesman. In the column, he suggested an unusual solution to the increasing numbers of children born to poor, unmarried women.

“The most effective means to accomplish this goal is different from today’s programs: I suggest we try paying these single women not to have children, rather than paying them to take care of their children,” Marks wrote.

Marks highlighted a similar Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood program. A voluntary support group of girls who’d experienced at least one pregnancy by age 15, met regularly to share stories and receive emotional support. Each girl was given one dollar for every day she did not get pregnant. After the two-year pilot program concluded, Planned Parenthood reported an 83% success rate.

“This concept of paying to prevent pregnancies is a scheme that has the virtue of being testable,” Marks wrote. “It … could be tried in one of our smaller communities. For a person to have a baby, knowing in advance that they cannot provide for it, is irresponsible, wrong, and should be condemned.”

Twenty-Five Years Ago: Bill Eggert, who’d failed to garner the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 1996, announced that he would campaign for the state’s other U.S. Senate seat in 1998.

Eggert met with Mesa County Republicans in Grand Junction and told the assembled party members that he was trying to stake his claim as “the conservative candidate” in the race for the seat, then held by once-Democrat-turned-Republican U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who had not yet announced whether he would be seeking re-election.

Eggert, who had also failed several years previously to win nomination for the 1st Congressional District, said that neither Campbell, nor Rep. Scott McInnis, R-CD3, or any other potential senatorial candidate, were “conservative enough.”

In other news out of the GOP, the state party had just announced the hiring of several new staff members after the election of its new chairman, Steve Curtis. Chief among them was Richard Sweeney, who was appointed communications director.

Sweeney, a North Carolina native, had long been active in Republican politics, serving at the head of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon’s presidential campaigns in his home county.

Sweeney told The Colorado Statesman that he was happy to come out of retirement to serve once more. He also shared his credo which would guide his time at Colorado GOP headquarters.

“Republicans will campaign and govern in an environment that is intellectually and politically friendly to our party’s philosophy,” Sweeney said. “We will think and act like the majority party by remaining the party of ideas. In this office, we’ll communicate not only what we’re for but why we’re for it and how it will improve the lives of everyday citizens of Colorado.”

Rachael Wright is the author of the Captain Savva Mystery series, with degrees in Political Science and History from Colorado Mesa University and is a contributing writer to Colorado Politics and The Gazette.