Meyers, Jan, 1928-2019

<p>Janice Lenore Meyers (née Crilly; July 20, 1928 – June 21, 2019) was an American Republican party politician and a member of the United States House of Representatives from Kansas.</p>

<p>Meyers was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. She attended public schools in Superior, Nebraska, and attended William Woods College in Fulton, Missouri. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 1951. From 1951 until 1954, she worked as an advertising and public relations assistant for a radio station in Omaha and a department store in Lincoln, Nebraska. From 1967 to 1972, she was a city councilwoman in Overland Park, Kansas. From 1972 until 1984, she was a member of the Kansas Senate. In 1978, she ran for the United States Senate, but was defeated in a multi-candidate Republican primary which was won by Nancy Landon Kassebaum.</p>

<p>In 1984, she was elected as a member of the Republican Party to the 99th United States Congress and to the five succeeding Congresses. She served from January 3, 1985, until January 3, 1997. During the 104th United States Congress, she was the chairwoman of the United States House Committee on Small Business. She was not a candidate for re-election to the 105th United States Congress. She was the first Republican woman elected to the U.S. House from Kansas. Her son, Phil Meyers, ran for a congressional seat in Hawaii in 2000 as a Republican against Rep. Neil Abercrombie, but was defeated.</p>

<p>Meyers died from heart disease on June 21, 2019, at a hospital in Merriam, Kansas.</p>

<p>In 1995 Jan Meyers, a five-term Representative from Kansas, became the first Republican woman in more than 40 years to chair a standing House committee. That milestone capped Meyers’s long tenure as a public servant that began on the Overland Park (Kansas) city council and included more than a decade in the state senate. Reflecting on a political career that sometimes saw her take a stand against her party on major social issues, Meyers advised would-be politicians, “Listen to your conscience and your constituents—both. Most of the time they’ll agree. If your conscience is different than your constituents’, then you’ll have a hard time.”</p>

<p>Janice Lenore Crilly was born on July 20, 1928, in Lincoln, Nebraska, the daughter of Howard M. Crilly, a newspaper publisher, and Lenore N. (Hazel) Crilly. Janice Crilly and her brother, Donn, were raised in Superior, Nebraska, where her father ran the local newspaper, <i>The Superior Express</i>, beginning in the mid-1930s. In 1948, she graduated with an associate fine arts degree from William Woods College in Fulton, Missouri, and with a BA in communications from the University of Nebraska in 1951. Following graduation, she worked in advertising and public relations. Crilly married Louis (Dutch) Meyers, who eventually became a Kansas City television station executive, and they raised a daughter and son, Valerie and Philip.</p>

<p>Jan Meyers’s career in Kansas GOP politics began in 1966, when she served as Overland Park’s chairwoman for Edward Lawrence (Larry) Winn Jr.’s campaign for a United States House seat representing suburban Kansas City. Two years later, she was district co-chair for the first of Senator Robert Dole’s string of five successful Senate races. In 1974 Meyers chaired Republican Bob Bennett’s gubernatorial campaign in Johnson County. From 1967 to 1972, she served as a member of the Overland Park city council, presiding for two years. In 1972, Meyers won election to the Kansas state senate and served there for the next 12 years, rising to chair the public health and welfare committee as well as the local government committee. In 1978, Meyers entered the GOP primary for one of Kansas’s seats in the U.S. Senate but garnered only 10 percent of the vote and finished fourth in a race eventually won by Republican Nancy Landon Kassebaum.</p>