Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 18, 1994 TAG: 9404180096
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
A woman rushed up and stopped her. On a day that marked both Clute's 51st birthday and the official beginning of her campaign for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination, the woman said, it was time for a special tribute.
Someone pressed the "play" button on a tape machine. The woman began singing, to the tune of Stevie Wonder's "Isn't She Lovely?"
She's simply Sylvia
She's simply wonderful
She's every woman
She's bright and beautiful
. . . She-ee is Sylvia, our ideal.
Anna Bolling Epps, a special education teacher from Petersburg, had stayed up until 1 a.m. writing the words and then took Friday off to sing it at Clute's Richmond news conference.
Clute would go on that day to file her petitions and officially get on the Democratic primary ballot. She would have a birthday party with her staff and travel to Hampton Roads on the first leg of a weekend swing through the state.
But no scheduled moment would match the raw enthusiasm of Epps' song.
Clute, a Richmond lawyer who founded the state's first women's bank and has spent two decades lobbying for abused women and children, is going about her upstart Senate campaign with all the flamboyance of a nun in a library.
She is a self-confessed introvert who doesn't know how to glad-hand. She is a former Peace Corps volunteer in a state that depends on the war machine. She has about one-eleventh of the money that incumbent Sen. Charles Robb brings to the race, and she has but a single paid campaign staffer.
Polls show that most Virginians have never even heard of Sylvia Clute.
Clute refuses to let any of this shake her almost beatific composure. She isn't running for the Senate for fun. She's doing it because she thinks she has to.
"I was considering not even voting this time, for the first time in 30 years," said Marilyn Summerford, a real estate broker from Virginia Beach. Now Summerford was positively aglow to be attending a Friday night reception for candidate Clute. "She will allow me to go to the polls with a clear conscience."
This is part of the motivation for Clute. Letting the race go to the front-runners - alleged womanizer Robb vs. Iran-Contra figure Oliver North - was simply unacceptable. "When this spectacle started to appear on the horizon, I said, `Not in Virginia,' " Clute said.
Clute traces her compulsion for consensus to her upbringing. She was born in Rocky Ford, Colo., to a mother who was a devout member of the Church of the Brethren and a father who was an equally devout Irish Catholic.
The two sides of the family, she says, clashed in bitter "religious wars."
But between she, her parents and her three older siblings (two sisters, one brother), there was always peace. "I don't remember ever arguing about anything," said Marianne Pearce, 63, who came from Illinois to help her little sister kick off the Senate race.
Clute's own three children - Andrea, 23; Weston, 20; and Danielle, 18 - paint their mother as virtually unflappable. Family legend has it that when other high school students traded stories of parental eruptions, Clute's children could contribute only one example: One time Weston threw out a distinctive jar that his mother wanted to save, and she told him, "Weston, your name is mud." That's it .
It's not that Clute doesn't feel stress or emotions. She just believes the mind can overcome them, the same way that people can overcome differences of opinion.
She has confronted choices and chosen the hard route. After getting a political science degree at the University of Colorado in 1965, Clute joined the Peace Corps. She spent two years teaching English in a remote village in Nepal. There she met Eric Johnson, who was building foot bridges for the Peace Corps, and to whom Clute now has been married for 26 years (she kept her maiden name). He is vice president of a firm that renovates shopping centers.
Clute's Peace Corps service was difficult, she said, "but it was just something I had to do and I did it."
That is an important, recurring refrain in Clute's life.
She entered law school when Andrea was two months old, and remembers rocking Weston to sleep while studying for the bar exam. Again, "it was very trying, but I just had to do it."
The family moved to Richmond in the early 1970s, when women were not part of the city's law firms. She worked at Reynolds Metals for a little more than a year, then opened her own practice.
In the mid-1970s, Clute read about a women's bank that had been formed in New York to demonstrate that women could handle finances. It sounded like a good idea, so she talked to some experts and founded her own.
Once more, the refrain: "I had no idea how hard it was going to be. But once I started, there was no turning back. I just had to do it."
First Virginia Bank bought the women's bank in the mid-1980s. Then Clute immersed herself in legal issues involving incest and child sexual abuse. Through her efforts, the General Assembly agreed to ask voters this fall to approve a constitutional amendment allowing adult survivors of abuse to sue their molesters.
Many of the volunteers working on Clute's campaign got to know her through those issues, or the women's bank, or the Equal Rights Amendment, which she promoted tirelessly.
The bond makes them passionately committed, but some worry that passion is not enough.
"I've been urging her to get more professional help in terms of a campaign manager, someone to help with raising money, someone to help with publicity," said Jim Olin, a former congressman from Roanoke and the only big-name Democrat to endorse Clute so far. "She certainly needs to get help with regard to the necessary techniques of running for office."
It's going to be virtually impossible for Clute to attract much Democratic firepower. The party establishment is pretty well beholden to the incumbent. Most of the remaining elite are flirting with state Sen. Virgil Goode, who as a friend of former Gov. Douglas Wilder benefits from the infamous Wilder-Robb rivalry.
Clute has raised only $91,000 in the past year; Robb has raised about $1.1 million. Goode hasn't reported his contributions yet because he hasn't formally announced his candidacy.
Clute claims to be "a conservative liberal." She says there is nothing wrong with the political system, just the people running it. Asked at press conferences to take a stand on particular issues, Clute invariably advocates compromise.
Is she for a tobacco tax? Go along with the inevitable, she says, but get some revenue for the farmers.
How about defense downsizing? It's unavoidable, she says, so get money to retrain workers in environmental technology.
Is it fair to exclude women from Virginia Military Institute? The push is on for a separate facility for women, she says, so just make sure it's equal. Her solution: Close Fort Monroe in Hampton and make it into a first-class female military institute.
Here Clute gives a clue to what rattles her. She remembers a few years ago when her oldest daughter's Army Reserves unit was poised to deploy in Saudi Arabia. Andrea called her mom for help drawing up a will. She specified that her ashes be spread on the James River, as long as they weren't too contaminated by chemical warfare.
"And it was right around this time that I heard VMI didn't want to let women in because they didn't think women could take the program," Clute said. "Let me tell you, that was hard."
The tale was related Friday night while traveling to a series of small gatherings in homes around Hampton Roads. Andrea, who was driving and who had been talking rapid-fire, fell silent. The moment came across as high emotion.
Not until later, as the pair left the last reception and headed to a friend's home in Williamsburg, did Clute offer a similar glimpse of herself. Worn out from almost 12 hours of stumping, Clute made some small talk about Europe and then sat quietly for several miles.
Then she turned around and said, "That woman, this morning, who sang the song? I had never even met her before. Never even met her. Amazing."
Amazing strangers for Clute. She's going to need a lot of them.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB