After her Congressional campaign imploded, Cissy Musselman became a voice for women and girls
Elaine “Cissy” Musselman already was a star in civic and business circles when she challenged Democratic incumbent U.S. Rep. Romano Mazzoli in 1984 for Kentucky’s 3rd District seat in Congress.
Musselman, then 40 and a moderate Republican, had already served as the first woman to head the Louisville Area Chamber of Commerce. She was president of a local insurance company and served on the boards of the University of Louisville, the city’s biggest bank and the national board of the American Red Cross.
She was widely expected to give Mazzoli his toughest test.
But then a Courier Journal reporter discovered she had lied about her educational credentials. She had never graduated from U of L, as she claimed, nor earned a master’s degree in international service from American University.
Musselman suspended her campaign and ultimately withdrew from the race. She said was embarrassed and ashamed. She never ran for public office again.
But she didn’t let her colossal mistake rule her life.
“It was a crushing thing for her, but she moved on,” said friend Lois Mateus, a retired Brown Forman Corp. executive.
In an incredible story of redemption, she returned to U of L, where she attended classes with students half her age and in 1986, still a university trustee, earned the degree she had long claimed.
"Going back to school was the smartest thing I ever did," she said.
She resumed her career in the insurance business and became even better known as a fundraiser, philanthropist and advocate for women and girls, in part through the Louisville chapter of Women 4 Women, which she founded in 1993. As part of that group, she started the Women 4 Women golf tournament that raised nearly $10 million for various charities over 22 years.
“She recovered and was stronger,” Mateus said.
Musselman died March 8 at the Nazareth Home. She was 79.
She had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, according to a tribute to her on the website of Sacred Heart Academy, where she played on the field hockey and basketball teams and was named captain of both. Classmates elected her president in her freshman and junior years as well as Junior-Senior prom queen. She continued to support the school as an adult and was the SHA Alumna of the Year in 1982 and inducted into the Valkyrie Hall of Fame 10 years later.
“Throughout her illness, she always stayed positive and greeted friends, fans, and family members who visited her with her beautiful bright eyes, wicked sense of humor and signature smile,” the school’s eulogy said.
Lynnie Meyer, senior vice president & chief development officer at Norton Healthcare who was previously president and CEO of the Center for Women and Families, said “Cissy was the most positive person I ever met.”
Meyer also said she had a remarkable ability to “motivate people around a mission” and that mission was usually equity for women.
“Cissy was a courageous person who wanted women to do better,” Meyer said. “She gave women confidence in who they were.”
She chaired Benchmark 2000, a project dedicated to mobilizing public and private resources to meet the needs of women and girls in Louisville at the turn of the millennium.
She received numerous awards, including the Most Admired Woman from Today’s Woman magazine and the Top Women Business Owners Award from the Louisville Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners.
Bill Samuels Jr., chairman emeritus of Maker's Mark Distillery, Inc., said he met Musselman in the early 1970s when she made a pitch to him and his father for the company’s insurance business – and got it.
“She dazzled everyone,” he said. “She was smarter than hell.”
He said that is why the Chamber of Commerce a few years later made her its first woman chair.
Meyer said Musselman never talked to her about her traumatic congressional campaign. “It was not an issue that hung over her.”
When the Courier Journal's Washington bureau chief Mike Brown first asked her about her credentials in June 1984, she insisted she had earned both degrees. She even invited Brown to meet her the next day at American University’s registrar's office to straighten the whole thing out.
But she never got there for the meeting. That evening she swerved off the George Washington Parkway in Northern Virginia and into two bridge abutments. She was found unconscious and taken to a hospital where she was admitted to the intensive care unit.
Her campaign disclosed she hadn’t graduated from either school. By the time she recovered enough to talk to another Courier Journal reporter, she said the disclosure actually brought her relief.
For 15 years, she said, ever since she first claimed the degrees, she couldn't bring herself to tell family and friends that she had not graduated from either school. The pretense continued, she said, even after Bristol-Meyers, the company that hired her in Washington in 1969 as a lobbyist, learned the truth but retained her.
Ironically, business leaders said she would have won her seats on various boards even if she had confessed she had neither credential.
“She was a strong community leader, and we valued her," said A. Stevens Miles, president and chief executive officer of what was then First Kentucky National Corp and is now part of PNC. "Educational credentials are not a prerequisite for our board," Miles said.
Musselman insisted she hadn’t tried to take her own life, as was speculated at the time. A staunch Catholic, she said had been brought up to respect the principle of life. She said she had taken her eye off the road to look at a map.
Friends and associates today said the scandal in no way overshadowed her previous or subsequent accomplishments – including what may HAVE been her greatest accomplishment, as a “connector” of people.
Sandra Frazier, a Brown family scion who owns and runs Tandem Public Relations, said Musselman “could talk to CEOs and to the people working the tables."
“She was an incredibly warm person who was always looking for what was best for community,” Frazier said.
Meyer said that when she thinks of Musselman, a lifelong member of Saint Francis of Assisi Parish as well as a champion golfer, she thinks of family, faith, community and athletics.
“She was a giant among people," Meyer said. "I just loved Cissy.”
Services for Cissy Musselman
Visitation: 2-8 p.m., March 13, at Highlands Funeral Home, 3331 Taylorsville Road.
Funeral Mass: 11 a.m., March 14, at Saint Francis of Assisi Church, 1960 Bardstown Road.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Elaine Cissy Musselman, first woman to lead Louisville GLI, dies at 79
