Lloyd, Marilyn, 1929-2018

<p>Rachel Marilyn Lloyd (née Laird; January 3, 1929 – September 19, 2018) was an American politician and businesswoman who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1975 until 1995.</p>

<p>Laird was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas in 1929, the daughter of a Church of Christ pastor. She graduated from Western Kentucky College High School, a high school that associated with what is now Western Kentucky University, in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in 1945. She attended Shorter College in Rome, Georgia. She owned radio station WTTI in Dalton, Georgia, and Executive Aviation in Winchester, Tennessee.</p>

<p>Lloyd's first husband, Mort Lloyd, died in an airplane crash in 1974. In 1978, she married engineer Joseph P. Bouquard. In 1983, the couple divorced, and she resumed using the name Marilyn Lloyd. In 1991, she married Robert Fowler, a physician, who also predeceased her. Lloyd had three children, all from her marriage to Mort Lloyd.</p>

<p>Personal tragedy brought Marilyn Lloyd into the House of Representatives where, for 20 years, she represented the science and technology interests of her Tennessee district. When her husband, Mort Lloyd, died shortly after winning a Democratic nomination to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974, local leaders named Marilyn Lloyd to succeed him as the party candidate, despite the fact that she had no elective experience. When she defeated the GOP incumbent, Lloyd won a string of relatively easy re-election campaigns. But her political fortunes were tied to the fate of several large federal projects in the district as well as its shift toward a more competitive makeup in the early 1990s.</p>

<p>Rachel Marilyn Laird was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, on January 3, 1929, daughter of James Edgar Laird and Iva Mae (Higginbotham) Laird. Marilyn Laird attended schools in Texas and Kentucky and studied at Shorter College in Rome, Georgia. She married Mort Lloyd, who eventually became a well-known Chattanooga, Tennessee, television newsman. The couple raised three children: Nancy, Mari, and Mort. Marilyn Lloyd and her husband owned and managed WTTI, a radio station in Dalton, Georgia, and an aviation company in Tennessee.</p>

<p>Mort Lloyd ran for Congress in 1974 as the Democratic candidate in a southern Tennessee district including Chattanooga but was killed just weeks after securing the nomination when the light airplane he was piloting crashed. The district’s Democratic leaders convinced Marilyn Lloyd to run in her husband’s place. Her supporters wore buttons from her husband’s campaign with a piece of black tape covering “Mort,” leaving visible the words “Lloyd for Congress.” When her principal competitor, Chattanooga millionaire Franklin Haney, dropped out of contention rather than split the party, Lloyd’s nomination was sealed. Though she had no prior political experience and was running in a district that regularly voted Republican in presidential elections, Lloyd benefited from public backlash against the Watergate Scandal. She unseated two-term incumbent Republican LaMar Baker with 51 percent of the vote.</p>