102-year-old delegate backs Clinton with a ‘Woo!’

PHILADELPHIA — Her brother was born the year Arizona became a state. She was born six years before women in America won the right to vote. And on Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention, 102-year-old Geraldine Emmett delightedly cast the Arizona delegation’s “51 votes for the next president of the United States of America, Hillary Rodham Clinton!”

As the cameras panned away, she added, “Woo!”

“I’m feeling wonderful right now,” Emmett told Yahoo News after her vote, as the states’ roll call continued. The roll call would conclude with Clinton being selected as the first major-party female presidential nominee.

Emmett, familiarly known as “Jerry,” said she didn’t recall whom she first voted for or when. “I’m not real sure, but I think it was [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt,” she said, “because before that there was a war on, and I don’t think I was in a position to vote at the time.” Emmett taught school during the war and waited for her husband, then stationed in the South Pacific, to come home. They were separated for four years by his service and had two children. A 1937 graduate of Northern Arizona University Teacher’s College, she taught for 45 years in small towns and major cities in Arizona, as well as on a Navajo reservation.

A lifelong Democrat, she recalls meeting her state’s first governor when she was 20, though he died before she turned the voting age of 21. At 75, she founded the Democratic Women of Prescott Area in Arizona. In 2015, Arizona Rep. Kyrsten Sinema entered a recognition of Emmett’s 101st birthday into the congressional record.

“She’s an Arizona icon,” said Sue Castner, who sits on the Clinton campaign National Finance Committee and helped arrange for Emmett’s role in the roll call vote. “She’s just been living for this her entire life.”

Being at the convention was a powerful moment for Emmett in a life full of political activity. “It just means that God has been real good to me, and I’m very grateful to be alive to come to this because I love Hillary Clinton, and I think that she’s going to be a marvelous president of the United States,” she said.

After Emmett spoke on the floor, Castner said, “everyone in the delegation was crying.”
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