The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
Marcy Kaptur lives and breathes Toledo.
The 77-year-old has represented Ohio’s 9th congressional district (which includes her hometown) since 1983 — making her the longest-serving woman in congressional history.
“We eased into it,” she said with a smile in her Toledo office. “It’s quite an honor. The years have gone so fast. We’ve been so busy that I really didn’t give it much thought actually and it happened.”
The long-serving Democrat was one of only 24 women in Congress when she was first elected. Today, there are 153 women in Congress.
“We’re doing better,” she said.
Her office is full of personal mementos and photos of her long-standing career, including many nods to the World War II Memorial — legislation she initiated.
She has a magnificent view of the mighty Maumee River which stretches more than 130 miles from northeastern Indiana to Lake Erie. Given Toledo’s proximity to the Great Lakes, she feels a responsibility to protect the area’s waterways and maritime commerce.
“We are part of the freshwater kingdom,” she said. “We have to take care of it environmentally.”
Down the street from her office is the Veterans’ Glass City Skyway, which Kaptur helped secure federal funding for. The cable-suspension bridge on Interstate 280 took about 16 years to complete and opened in 2007. Kaptur said it’s the largest transportation project in Ohio’s history.
The ninth district is located in Northwest Ohio and includes all of Defiance, Williams, Fulton, Lucas, Ottawa, Sandusky and Erie counties and northern Wood County. The median household income for her district is $57,732, according to the U.S. Census Bureau 2021.
“As a member of Congress, I’m trying to rebuild the muscle of my district and we’re making progress,” Kaptur said. “It’s been slow, but we are heavily involved in producing opportunities.”
Growing up in a blue collar family
Kaptur grew up in Toledo with her working-class family who owned a market in the nearby city of Rossford. Her dad worked at Jeep and her mom worked at the Champion Spark Plug Company in Toledo.
“I come from a blue collar family that didn’t have it easy,” she said. “We had to struggle for every penny.”
Kaptur, who still lives in the same house she grew up in, attended Toledo Catholic schools and was the first person in her family to graduate high school and go to college. She went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and admits it was hard being more than six hours away from her family.
“It seemed like going to the other side of the world,” she said. “Now it seems like a puddle jump, but when I was 18 it seemed like a really big step.”
It was there she had to decide if she wanted to study medicine to become a heart surgeon or major in history, which is what she ultimately opted for.
“There was no immediate path for a job, but I just knew I wanted to study that,” she said.
She took an urban studies class her senior year that inspired her to work as a city and regional planner for 15 years in Toledo and Chicago until she was appointed domestic policy advisor to President Jimmy Carter.
Kaptur earned her masters in urban planning from the University of Michigan in 1974 and started to pursue a doctorate in urban planning and development finance at Massachusetts Institute of Technology — but that’s when her career really took a turn.
Running for Congress
A trip to a Toledo supermarket with her mom to buy some hamburgers during Thanksgiving break from MIT inspired Kaptur to run for Congress. At the time, the United States was feeling the effects of the 1970s oil crisis.
Kaptur recognized the woman behind the meat counter as a grade school classmate and they struck up a conversation.
“She was always so happy, and she broke down in front of me crying, sobbing,” Kaptur recalls.
Her former classmate explained how her husband was out of job and she was the only person working in the family trying to help support her grandchildren, all while family members were battling various illnesses.
“I ran for office because my district was in deep trouble,” Kaptur said.
So she withdrew her tuition from MIT (a degree she never finished), packed her things in a U-Haul and made the 17 hour drive from Massachusetts back to Ohio through a snowstorm to begin campaigning.
She raised thousands of dollars through bake sales and defeated incumbent Republican Ed Weber 58-39% in 1982, becoming the first woman to serve Ohio’s ninth district.
Kaptur’s time in congress
Kaptur’s congressional career so far has left its mark on Washington D.C., and Toledo — and she’s not done yet.
She first introduced the bill to authorize the National World War II Memorial in Washington D.C., in 1987 after constituent and veteran Roger Durbin approached Kaptur at a Toledo fish fry.
She thought the bill would easily pass and the memorial would be built in five or six years, but that wasn’t the case. Similar legislation was again introduced in 1989, 1991 and 1993.
“I was so mad at Congress,” Kaptur said. “So many things happened to stall it. And the people from their generation were dying, and they wouldn’t get to see their memorial.”
It wasn’t until 1993 that Congress passed the bill to authorize building the World War II Memorial and President Bill Clinton signed it into law. The memorial opened in 2004 — four years after Durbin died.
“With this Memorial’s dedication, America honors for all time our World War II forebears,” Kaptur said on May 29, 2004, during the dedication ceremony. “The most unselfish generation America has ever known.”
Locally, Kaptur has used federal dollars to help the Toledo Farmers Market, projects at the University of Toledo, Toledo’s Center for Innovative Food Technology, the Lake Erie Center, and the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge visitors center.
She fought against the North American Free Trade Agreement, which created a free-trade zone in North America. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement replaced NAFTA in 2020.
“NAFTA … emptied jobs out of this region to a frightening level,” Kaptur said. “We’ve been trying to rebuild ever since.”
Ross Perot asked Kaptur to be his vice-presidential running mate as an independent candidate in 1996, but she declined.
Kaptur is on the House Appropriations Committee and is the first woman to serve as Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development.
She serves on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense and the Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration. She is a co-chair on the Congressional Hungarian Caucus and is also on the Ukraine Caucus.
She wrote the book, “Women in Congress: A Twentieth Century Odyssey” that was published in 1996.
2024 re-election
Kaptur has been re-elected 21 times and she is hoping to make it 22 times this November. She attributes her success of continuously being re-elected to getting work done for her constituents.
“We make life better for people and they see it,” she said.
Three Republicans are vying to be her challenger this fall, which will be determined in the March 19 primary. Former Napoleon mayor Steve Lankenau, state Rep. Derek Merrin, and former state rep. Craig Riedel are running in the March 19 primary.
“We are going to fight really hard to hold on to the seniority that I have,” she said. “God’s given me good health so far. I hope that lasts.”
News 5's John Kosich sat down with Kaptur in 2019 to discuss all things Congress. Watch that report in the player below.
