Political activist Armstrong dies

Friday, April 30, 2004 | 8:27 a.m.

Leola Armstrong was a fourth-generation Nevadan whose battles for political reform should leave an impression for generations to come in the state.

A descendant of mountain man-prospector-horse rustler Thomas "Pegleg" Smith, Armstrong could be as ornery as that notorious Old West figure, particularly when she saw a wrong committed that hurt the people of Nevada.

She was especially steamed in 1989, when the Nevada Legislature voted itself a 300 percent retirement raise. Then director of Common Cause of Nevada, Armstrong began a petition drive to revoke that legislation.

Her efforts so shook the foundation of Nevada government, a special session of the Legislature was called on Nov. 21, 1989. In slightly more than two hours -- the shortest special session in state history -- the controversial benefit provisions of Assembly Bill 820 were repealed.

Leola Hollingsworth Armstrong, an avid human rights activist who served 32 years as a Nevada legislative employee including 24 as secretary of the Senate, died Thursday of liver cancer at her home in Port Townsend, Wash. She was 82.

Services for Armstrong, the wife of former longtime Las Vegas Sun Executive Editor Bryn Armstrong, are pending in her native Lovelock.

"With Leola, it was not liberal vs. conservative or right vs. left, it was simply right vs. wrong," said former Port Townsend City Councilman Al Frank. "One of her favorite expressions was that too many elected officials mistake motion for action."

Although she lived most of her adult life as a Democrat, co-chairing the Nevada Democratic presidential campaigns of John, Robert and Ted Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, Armstrong became so enraged with an ineffective Democratic machine in Port Townsend after she moved there in 1996 that she switched parties.

She helped three Republicans get elected to the Jefferson County Commission and became vice chairwoman of the county's Republican Party.

"Leola always believed she was on the right side of an issue and would move heaven and earth to see that the right thing was done," said longtime friend Nykki Kinsley of Las Vegas. "She also was dedicated to her church (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) where she played the piano."

Kerin Scianna Rodgers of Las Vegas called her longtime friend "a torch-carrier for every human rights cause."

"When she enlisted your participation in her causes, you could not back off -- whether it was eliminating the death penalty, fighting for prison reform or getting rid of corrupt officials," Rodgers said. "If she got a hold of you, you were involved."

Las Vegas Planning Commissioner Steve Evans met Armstrong when he was a teenager. He regularly traveled to Carson City with his father, noted state union leader Claude "Blackie" Evans, to attend legislative sessions.

"From where I sat, it looked like Leola ran the Senate," Evans said. "She was a strong woman who wielded a lot of power in her position."

James Fitch, of Port Townsend, said he was regaled by Armstrong's tales of Old Nevada, especially stories of Smith, a two-fisted drinker, brawler and notorious liar who lost a leg during an 1827 fur trapping expedition.

In one of his adventures, Smith found a mine in Southern California, from which he took black-coated gold nuggets. But on his way home he got lost and, despite several attempts, never again found the mine. Hundred of others have since sought without success The Lost Pegleg Smith Gold Mine.

Born Leola Hollingsworth on July 1, 1921, in Lovelock, she graduated from Lovelock High School with a full-ride college scholarship to play the oboe in Utah. Instead, Leola went to business school in Sacramento.

In 1950 she was hired as assistant chief clerk of the Nevada Legislative Counsel Bureau and eight years later became secretary of the Senate, a post she held until her retirement in 1982.

In the late 1960s Armstrong was named executive director of the Nevada Committee for the Rights of Women, where she crusaded for educating the public on the inequity of Nevada's abortion laws.

In the late 1980s, Armstrong served as executive director of the public interest group Common Cause of Nevada. There, she crusaded for campaign election reforms and risked losing many old friends in Carson City by battling the 300 percent retirement increase legislation.

"They have a terrible, terrible reputation now because of this," Armstrong said of the Legislature in a July 5, 1989, Sun story. "People have to take the government back."

Armstrong's husband of more than 35 years, Bryn, was Sun executive editor from 1963 to 1977. He left to join his wife in Carson City and serve as the first chairman of the Nevada Parole Board, a post he held for 16 years. In 1993, he became executive secretary of the Nevada Dairy Board, also in Carson City.

In 1995 Leola Armstrong was enshrined in the Nevada Senate Hall of Fame. The couple retired to Washington the next year.

In addition to her husband, Armstrong is survived by a daughter, La Vola Robindeaux of Bellingham, Wash.; two brothers, Eugene "Sully" Sullivan of Reno and Terry Sullivan of Washoe Valley; a sister, Marilyn Cervantes of Sparks; and three grandchildren.