Many colleagues considered Joanna Vail the “greatest public service lobbyist in Minnesota.”

“At the Metropolitan Council, she was called ‘our legislative mortician’ because she would always kill off any bad legislation,” Todd Lefko, a longtime friend and president of the International Business Development Company, told the Pioneer Press. “She was a fixture, sitting in the front row of the legislative hearing rooms, knitting and staring at any legislator who might vote against her bills.”

Vail was also a former nurse, Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party leader and aide to the late Gov. Wendell Anderson.

But to Capitol insiders, she will likely be best remembered for her furious knitting during legislative committee meetings. A political foe once mailed her a pencil drawing of a guillotine over the message: “Are you knitting, Madame Defarge?” — a reference to the fictional character in Charles Dickens’ 1859 novel “A Tale of Two Cities” who sat outside her Paris wine shop during the French Revolution endlessly knitting a scarf listing people to be killed.

Vail died May 12 at Presbyterian Homes in Arden Hills, where she had been receiving memory care since 2020. A former longtime resident of White Bear Lake and later Mahtomedi, she was 93.

“Joanna loved cats, baseball, reading and spending time at her family camp on Agate Island in Ontario, Canada,” her son, David, wrote in a profile.

“Joanna was a combination of the Massachusetts culture and the Minnesota nice,” Lefko said. “This was reflected in her humor, which could be biting, but in the Minnesota tradition, always told the truth.”

Vail was born Nov. 16, 1928, in Waltham, Mass. She graduated from Waltham High School in 1945, and then earned a nursing degree from McLean Hospital School of Nursing in 1950. She worked as a registered nurse in Massachusetts and Maryland in the early 1950s.

After attending the University of Maryland, she served as head nurse at Springfield State Hospital in Sykesville, Md., from 1952 to 1953 and was an instructor and director of nursing education at Rosewood State Hospital in Owings Mills, Md., from 1953 to 1956.

She married Dr. David Vail in 1956. They moved to Minnesota, where he became state medical director and she dove into politics.

After he died in 1971, she returned to work to support her four children. She became a staff assistant to Gov. Anderson, a post she held until 1973, when she left for a position as special assistant to the chair of the Metropolitan Council until her retirement in 1994.

A member of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union, Vail enrolled at Metropolitan State University in 1988 and became one of the first three area union members to graduate from the school’s labor studies program.

“I think people take for granted many of the things labor has fought and worked for. I don’t think they should,” she said later. “We can’t count on the benevolence of management without a strong countervailing force looking out for the interests of the workers.”

The Vails moved to White Bear Lake in 1959. She quickly became active in local politics but was soundly defeated in a 1961 primary election for a city council seat there.

She was elected Ramsey County DFL “chairman” in 1968 and Fourth Congressional District DFL “chairman” in 1970. Friends said she was the first woman elected as the top congressional district officer in either party in Minnesota.

In 1968, she was a strong supporter of Eugene McCarthy for president. DFLers elected her as a delegate to that year’s turbulent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Hubert Humphrey defeated McCarthy for the party’s nomination. While walking back to her hotel one night Vail was tear-gassed by police who were battling violent protesters.

“I remember thinking, what the hell is this housewife doing in a riot in Chicago?” she later told Star Tribune reporters.

Her family said Vail, with the help of Anderson and others, “became sober in 1971 and remained clean and sober for over 50 years, until her death.”

She is survived by sons David Rand Vail (Anne), Garrett Murphy Vail and Michael Walsh Vail; daughters Sara Vail Palmquist (Dan), Rachel Vail Doran (Michael) and Martha Vail Spittal (Thomas), 14 grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren.

Vail’s memorial service will be held 2 p.m. Aug. 27 at the White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church, 328 Maple St., Mahtomedi. Memorials are preferred to Vail Place, a nonprofit organization that provides recovery service for adults with serious mental illnesses.

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