Throughout a fifth of a century as a public official, she was unafraid to speak up at any public meeting where she wanted to voice her opinion.

Like her, agree with her, disagree with her, oppose her or simply just respect her right to have an opinion and let it be known, you had to give her credit. She was unflappable in the face of anyone who ever served with her. She wasn’t one to go along with the pack because it was the path of least resistance. She wouldn’t go down without a fight, even if she knew she was going to lose.

Many did disagree with Mary, including me. During her time on the Logansport City Council, it wasn’t unusual to hear her speak in opposition to an ordinance or resolution only to be the lone dissenting vote against it when the other council members cast their votes.

It didn’t deter her. Unlike the children’s rhyme we all learn, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” this Mary was never bothered by being contrary if she thought taxpayers were somehow being taken advantage of or if she wasn’t satisfied with the answers or reasons she was given for an appropriation or a policy. She knew there were two or more sides to an issue, and in case her fellow council or board members thought things were cut and dried before they came to a meeting, Mary reminded them that issues should be deliberated and ordinances and policies should be vetted for the public benefit.

But the thing that became easy to forget about Mary because she served so long is that she came to the United States as a war bride, she proudly became an American, raised a family and then ran not only for city council and won, but for mayor and then the Indiana Senate. She failed in both those endeavors, but ran for Logansport School Board and served well. She returned to the council and served again. Then, when the farewell cake and punch had already been consumed for what everyone thought was her final lap in government, she served another four years when the late John Vernon died literally hours before he would have been sworn in to succeed her.

Look for another woman in these conservative parts who ran more and had more success and you won’t find anyone. The fact that it took 140 years of Logansport voters to finally elect a woman to a city office other than clerk-treasurer says a great deal about how daunting a task it had to be for both her and Ellen Glendening, the first woman to serve on the council, to run at all. Neither was from Logansport, and that tells you that the political expectations for women in this community up until that point were primarily to serve behind the scenes and appear with husbands in family photos.

In her later years, Mary never gave up a signature phrase she realized she had become known for saying often: “Where will we get the money?” In fact at the Hometown Holidays variety show one year when a “Rowan & Martin Laugh-In” skit featured various people from the community, she uttered the line to the delight of the crowd gathered at McHale Performing Arts Center.

She was to Logansport what Millicent Fenwick was to Doonesbury, what Miss Marple was to PBS, what Angela Lansbury was to “Murder, She Wrote” and what Eleanor Roosevelt was to Franklin.

She simply wanted to get to the bottom of things.

Ironically, it was Mary’s candidacy for mayor in 1979 that allowed another woman, Jone Wilson, to become mayor. Mary ran as a third-party independent, splitting the normally dominant Democratic vote and allowing Wilson to overtake the late Tony Sabatini to win.

It was a sign of the times in Indiana. In West Lafayette, long-time Mayor Joe Dienhart predicted that no woman would be mayor of West Lafayette. He was promptly defeated in the primary, setting up a race between two women, and a 20-plus year reign for Sonja Marjerum.

Had circumstances been a bit different in 1979 – if Cotner had been the party nominee – she might have pulled off the win and written a very different story for herself. We’ll never know whether that would have happened.

What we do know is that someone from another country came to Logansport once and proved that when you become an American, you’re as entitled to be part of the political process as anyone else unless you want to run for president. Mary and her husband, Charles, were very much part of that process. There wasn’t an election that didn’t pass in which he didn’t tell me how many voters he had registered individually by hand, and that’s the nitty gritty part of the process that seems to be taken for granted in an era of bar codes and computer voting. On election night, he could call certain races simply by looking at certain precinct totals.

Another one of Mary’s favorite lines was, “I’ve had a lot of calls,” a statement she offered presumptively to suggest there was opposition to a particular issue or appointment that hadn’t surfaced in a public meeting or made its way into the press. Ironically, a 1984 photo of her campaign for Senate showed her in her kitchen at 8 E.

Mildred St., on the phone. I, too, spent many an evening talking to her on that phone, and I know she listened, and took time for the media.

On another occasion, she was voting on a matter when current Mayor Ted Franklin and his brother, Logansport policeman George Franklin, were both serving on the council. During a roll call vote when both Franklins had voted in favor, she said, “Teddy, I love my brother, too, but I could never vote for this.”

Withholding her approval was something she did often when it came to votes. It was not unusual for her to qualify a council roll call vote by saying “On first reading,” suggesting that an ordinance might be amended before final passage.

Though she lost Charles in her final years, she remained as staunchly proud of him and her family as she ever was. She never hesitated to show friends a portrait of her and her granddaughters in black, her red hair prominent in the middle of it all.

And that’s just where Mary wanted to be. For much of her life, she was in the middle of it all in Logansport, as much as any woman and more than most men have ever been. Perhaps that’s a legacy she would elect to have for herself more than any other, and one we all should aspire to have.

• Dave Kitchell is a columnist for the Pharos-Tribune. He can be reached through the newspaper at ptnews@pharostribune.com.