BALTIMORE -- Elinor Isabel "Judy" Agnew, who as the wife of former Maryland Governor and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew preferred quiet domesticity to that of the political limelight, died June 20 in Rancho Mirage, Calif. She was 91.
"She passed away very peacefully with all of her children at her side," a daughter, Susan Sagle of Palm Springs, Calif., said Thursday. "She died of natural causes and had been in failing health since 2005."
"Judy was truly a lady and a very outstanding second lady. She loved her family, kids and grandkids," said Helen Delich Bentley, former congresswoman and federal maritime commissioner.
"She was loyal to the end," said Bentley, a longtime friend. "And despite all of the horrors that she went through, she always kept her chin up and was graceful."
In 1973, Judy Agnew's husband resigned from the vice presidency after pleading no contest to a charge of federal income tax evasion in Baltimore.
The daughter of William Lee Judefind, a chemist and vice president of Davison Chemical Co., and a homemaker, Elinor Ruth Judefind, Elinor Isabel "Judy" Judefind was born in Baltimore into a French-German family.
Judy Agnew, who shared the nickname "Judy" with her father, graduated in 1940 from Forest Park High School, where her future husband had graduated three years earlier.
Even though they lived four blocks from each other and had attended the same high school, they did not meet until both were working at the old Maryland Casualty Co. at Keswick Road and 41st Street - she as an $11-a-week file clerk.
"He says he tripped over me in the file room," Judy Agnew once told The Evening Sun of Baltimore of their first meeting.
On May 23, 1942, she married Spiro Agnew, a freshly minted second lieutenant who had just graduated from Officer Candidate School.
After the war, the couple moved in with Mrs. Agnew's parents before purchasing a two-bedroom home. After the arrival of more children, they moved to Loch Raven and finally to the Chatterleigh neighborhood in Towson.
Judy Agnew celebrated her life as a homemaker.
"I majored in marriage," she liked to say.
Spiro Agnew completed law school, opened a legal practice and became chairman of the Baltimore County Board of Zoning Appeals.
He was elected Baltimore County executive in 1962 and governor in 1966.
When Judy Agnew moved to the governor's mansion in Annapolis, she told The Evening Sun that she hoped to do some cooking.
"Ted loves my spaghetti and meat sauce ... and crab cakes," she said. She was also known for her Greek Avgolemono (lemony chicken and rice) soup.
She liked going on Saturday afternoons to the state troopers' recreation room on the ground level of the mansion and giving it a good cleaning - "just to keep my hand in," she told The Baltimore Sun in 1968.
A modest woman who stood 5 feet, 4 inches tall and had striking brown eyes, an infectious smile and carefully coiffed brunette hair, Judy Agnew struggled to maintain as normal a life as possible as the first lady of Maryland and later as vice president's wife.
"I'll still make brief remarks, at luncheons and teas and so on, but I'm not a speech maker. I'm not a real campaigner," she told The Evening Sun in 1967.
She often told reporters that making speeches was "Spiro's job."
"She was all about family and supported my father's political aspirations," said Sagle. "But she would have been just as happy leading a quiet life."
Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/06/29/2874813/judy-agnew-vice-presidents-wife.html
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