The upcoming birth centennial of an Arlington civic icon may be an opportunity to reimagine “the Arlington Way” of community-based, consensus government.
County Board Chairman Takis Karantonis tells ARLnow he wants to use the 100th anniversary of the birth of the late Board member Ellen Bozman in April both to honor her legacy and lead to the county into the future.
Bozman, who served in office from 1974-1997, was emblematic of “the ideas, the passion of the Arlington Way,” current Board chair Takis Karantonis said.
He is referring to the phrase, frequently used from the 1970s to the 2000s, to describe a consensus-based approach to governance.
With one of his goals to re-imagine that community-based governance ideal, Karantonis said he wants the county to mark the 100th anniversary of Bozman’s birth in late April with an as-yet-unspecified event.
The 24 years in office of Bozman is a record for the governing body, which dates to 1932. She also chaired the Board a record six times.
The issues Bozman (1925-2009) focused on during that tenure were wide-ranging. From transportation to farmers’ markets to the county’s first Extended Day program for youth and a focus on senior citizens, few topics were off-limits to her curiosity.
She also served stints on a number of regional bodies, including the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments and Metropolitan Washington Area Transit Authority.
To salute her service, the county government’s headquarters at 2100 Clarendon Blvd has been named in Bozman’s honor.
A Post-War Arrival in Arlington
Ellen Bozman’s story is like those of many who helped changed the landscape of Arlington in the post-World War II era.
Born April 21, 1925, in Springfield, Ill., Ellen Marie McConnell graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Northwestern University in 1945 with a degree in political science.
After graduation, she traveled to the D.C. region to serve an internship with the National Institute of Public Affairs. From 1947-52, she worked at the Bureau of the Budget.
She met William Bozman when he, also a rising federal-government employee, was dating one of her roommates. After that relationship cooled, the two connected. The somewhat diminutive Bill Bozman would acknowledge later in life that it was his future wife’s long legs that first attracted him to her.
Married in December 1949, Bill and Ellen Bozman settled in Arlington and would raise a family that included two sons (Mac and Bruce) and a daughter (Martha).
Like many of the era, they had upward mobility owing to government employment, moving from Barcroft Apartments to a number of single-family homes. Ellen Bozman left federal-government service in 1952 to focus on raising her family and getting involved in the community.
A County Divided Upon Her Arrival
Arlington in the 1950s was a place where conservative and liberal factions were vying for control of the local Democratic establishment and community organizations. Ellen Bozman, one of the newer and more liberal arrivals, plunged right in.
“You did the first thing because it was the right thing to do,” she said later in life about community involvement. “You just kept on doing what needed to be done.”
Bozman joined the Arlington League of Women Voters in 1952, ultimately rising to lead it. She served on the Arlington Committee to Preserve Public Schools during the integration battles of the late 1950s, chaired the Arlington Committee of 100 in 1970-71 and was president of the church council of Rock Spring Congregational United Church of Christ from 1971-73.
Service on the county’s Planning Commission and Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority board, and work in the political campaigns of Mary Marshall for House of Delegates and Joseph Wholey for County Board, led Bozman to consider making a run for office.
Conventional wisdom suggests that Bozman won all six Board races without breaking much of a sweat. But a look at the historical records shows it wasn’t always quite that simple.
Helped by Watergate Scandal
Bozman made her first bid for County Board in 1973 under the banner of Arlingtonians for a Better County (ABC), a liberal-leaning organization created so federal workers could participate in local government without running afoul of Hatch Act rules prohibiting partisan political activity.
She faced off against Republican Henry “Hank” Lampe, a former member of the House of Delegates, and independent Sherman Pratt.
“A woman offers a different point of view,” Bozman said during the 1973 campaign, tacitly reminding the electorate that Arlington’s governing body had not had any female members in the preceding 14 years.
Republican Lampe was well-regarded and likely better-known than Bozman, and in any year other might have been considered the favorite.
But the unfolding Watergate scandal upended politics, and was “one element of the total picture,” Bozman said of 1973’s election results.
She made that comment during a victory celebration at Our Lady Queen of Peace Catholic Church, surrounded, a newspaper reporter noted at the time, by “a jubilant crowd of beer-drinking supporters.”
Bozman’s election marked the first time that all five board members were ABC endorsees. During the campaign, Lampe predicted that would create “tunnel vision” among Board members — a charge sometimes leveled these days against the all-Democratic Board.
Bozman would continue to run as the endorsee of ABC for her first five elections, in conjunction with Democratic backing. By the 1990s, ABC had faded as a political power broker — at one point being taken over by conservatives — but in its heyday was a seminal force in local politics.
Just a Coincidence?
In the archives at the Charlie Clark Center for Local History at Central Library is a photocopied newspaper clipping from the Arlington Journal newspaper dated mid-July 1974.
It notes that the home of Bill and Ellen Bozman had been broken into.
Burglaries were a relative rarity in their North Arlington neighborhood, and police suggested that since nothing was known to be missing, it probably was juveniles behaving delinquently.
But that same weekend, police reported that someone had fired shotgun blasts at the home of Board member Joseph Fisher, who was running for Congress.
Bozman and Fisher both told the newspaper they saw “no connection” between the events. At the urging of police, however, Fisher — who would defeat incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Joel Broyhill in November 1974 — kept his porch light on throughout the night for a time.
Things Get Weird After 1977 Election
In her first bid for re-election, Bozman in 1977 faced off against Pratt for a second time, as well as Arthur Vogel.
The Northern Virginia Sun, whose editorial page could have a curmudgeonly and contrarian streak at times, nonetheless endorsed the incumbent.
Bozman brought moderative views an “a touch of pragmatism” to local governance, the editorial said. It also criticized her challengers for “inherently negative views” during the campaign.
Bozman won by a healthy margin in November 1977, but things got weird less than a month later.
Pratt, an attorney and amateur historian, filed suit to force Bozman off the Board. His reasoning: She, like several Board members before her, was filling a slot on the county’s Health Center Commission concurrently with holding elected office.
Under state law, Pratt alleged, Bozman couldn’t serve simultaneously on both bodies.
John Purdy, a fellow Board member who himself had once held both posts simultaneously, called the lawsuit “nonsense,” but Bozman nonetheless resigned both from the commission and the County Board.
Her time away from elected office was expected to be exceedingly brief, since she could be reappointed to serve the last month of her existing term by a majority vote of the remaining four Board members.
But in December 1977, with Bozman sitting in the audience doing needlepoint, the two Republicans refused to go along with the appointment, leaving Bozman’s seat vacant for a few weeks until she began her new term Jan. 1, 1978.
County Attorney Jerry Emrich said at the time the whole matter, related to a dusty state statute from 1936, was the “most technical of technicalities.” Louise Chestnut, a civic activist, said the episode made Arlington look like a laughingstock.
“All of us break, at one time or another, old and obscure laws,” Chestnut said.
Another Snafu in 1989
A potentially more serious election snafu occurred in 1989, when Bozman was seeking her fifth term. Victory would make her the longest serving board member in county history.
The State Board of Elections that spring disqualified Bozman from the ballot, saying it had not received the certificate of candidacy required by the June 16 deadline.
Bozman’s campaign manager, the legendary political operative Lucy Denney, provided proof of mailing showing the paperwork had been sent to Richmond by registered mail in May.
State officials then acknowledged that they had received the mailing, but contended it contained the wrong forms.
Eventually the tempest must have been resolved, because mention of it disappears from the archival material. Bozman went on to win the 1989 and 1993 races without much trouble.
History of Women on the County Board
The retirement of Board member Libby Garvey in December 2024 brought the end of something that had been very rare in the Board’s 92-year history.
A majority-female body.
The 2024 grouping of Garvey, Susan Cunningham and Maureen Coffey — Democrats all — marked only the second year in which three of five Board members were female.
The only other occurrence came in 1983, when Bozman, fellow Democrat/ABC member Mary Margaret Whipple and Republican Dorothy Grotos simultaneously served on the body.
Grotos that year made an unsuccessful bid for county treasurer against Democrat Frank O’Leary, giving up her Board seat to do so. It would be more than 40 years until three women again occupied the dais.
Elizabeth Magruder was among the first crop of Board members elected in 1932, and served until 1947. Florence Cannon and Leone Buchholz later served on the body, but from 1959 until the election of Bozman in 1973, no women occupied the posts.
Retirement from Politics, But Not Civic Life
Bozman decided in 1997 that she would not seek re-election to a seventh term.
“I just thought it was time to be doing other things,” she told the Roosevelt Society News, a publication of the Arlington County Democratic Committee.
“I want to be remembered for pushing Arlington along the best path to the future,” she told another media outlet.
The Democratic race to succeed her featured Jay Fisette and Barbara Favola.
Fisette won the nomination contest — and general election — but Favola ended up on the Board a few months ahead of him, having won a special election caused by the retirement due to ill health of James Hunter III.
Fisette, who went on to serve 20 years on the Board, said his predecessor’s service is a beacon for 21st-century governance.
“Ellen Bozman’s leadership style offers lessons for today’s elected leaders,” he told ARLnow.
“She cared, she compromised, she collaborated, she listened, and as community icon Carrie Johnson once said, ‘She showed how much someone can get done without raising her voice,'” Fisette said. “She also led, and Arlington is the better for it.”
Among those not part of the Democratic political establishment, the verdict on Bozman’s tenure was somewhat more mixed.
Tom Brooke, a Republican activist, told The Washington Post that he appreciated her personal style and willingness to listen to different points of view.
But, Brooke added: “I think her vision of Arlington is based on some outmoded perceptions of who lives here and what the modern urban community is like. She still thinks about things like a 1960s or 1970s liberal.”
Despite an air of gracious detachment, Bozman could give as good as she got in the realm of political partisanship. Often rather slyly.
In a 1997 interview with the Roosevelt Society News, Bozman had nothing ill to say of the Republicans with whom she had shared the Board dais.
But then, she told the publication (“with a chuckle”): “I never served with a Republican I thought was as good as a Democrat.”
Still Remembered with Affection
Having been out of office for close to 30 years and deceased for 16, fewer and fewer in ever-transient Arlington now have a direct connection to Bozman and her era. But those who do generally have positive memories to share.
“To me, Ellen was a shining example of what a public servant should demonstrate. She was always attentive the concerns of the citizens of Arlington and Northern Virginia,” said Edd Nolen, a veteran community leader.
Nolen recalled an occasion when he and Bill Knull went to Bozman seeking her support of an increase in the county’s commitment to the Arlington Food Assistance Center, then $15,000 a year.
“She was very attentive to our presentation and gave us her commitment to seek $30,000, which she did, and the increase was provided,” Nolen said.
“[It was a] small incident where she showed her concern and care for those who need assistance,” he said. “When I think of Ellen I think of a person of gracious capacities toward Arlington and the citizens she served.”
Retired from Office, But Not Civic Life
After retiring from elected office in December 1997, Bozman stayed busy with organizations such as the Arlington Community Foundation and Alliance for Housing Solutions, an advocacy group she helped found. She also was tapped in 2000 to lead the Arlington Symphony.
Bozman was preparing to move with her husband to Goodwin House in Baileys Crossroads when a recurrence of breast cancer caused her death in on Jan. 8, 2009, at Virginia Hospital Center (now VHC Health).
Shortly after her death, county treasurer O’Leary began a push to name the county-government headquarters at 2100 Clarendon Blvd in honor of Bozman. He said there was no reason to adhere to the typical five-year waiting period after an individual’s death to bestow the honor.
County officials opted to wait, nonetheless. In 2017, the renaming took place.
William Bozman, who died in 2017 at age 93 shortly after that renaming was announced, had become in his later years something of a civic father figure. It was a role not unlike that played by his wife’s 1973 competitor, Hank Lampe, in the years prior to his death in 2012 at age 85.
Research for this story primarily was conducted at the Charlie Clark Center for Local History at Arlington Central Library and via holdings of the Library of Virginia.
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