Name Leanna Brown Role Politician | Party Republican Party | |
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Leanna Brown (May 11, 1935 – December 15, 2016) was a Republican Party politician in the United States of America. Brown served in both houses of the New Jersey Legislature where she represented the 26th Legislative District, and parts of Morris and Passaic Counties. She was the first Republican woman elected to the New Jersey Senate.
Born Leanna Cawley Young in Providence, Rhode Island, she was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Harold H. Young. Her father was a partner at the New York brokerage firm of Eastman Dillon. She attended the Northfield School for Girls (now part of Northfield Mount Hermon School) in Gill, Massachusetts, graduating in 1952. After graduating from Smith College in 1956, she married William Stanley Brown, who had attended the Mount Hermon School and Yale University and would go on to be a scientist at Bell Labs.
Brown and her husband were longtime residents of Chatham Borough, New Jersey. She spent four years writing test questions for Educational Testing Service outside Princeton, New Jersey before the birth of their two sons. She became active in local politics, serving on the Chatham Borough Council from 1969 to 1972. In 1972 she was elected to serve on the Morris County Board of Chosen Freeholders. She was named freeholder director in 1976 and president of the New Jersey Association of Counties in 1978.
In 1980, she won a special election to an unexpired term in the New Jersey General Assembly, and she was re-elected the following year. In 1983, she challenged her former running-mate, James P. Vreeland, for the Republican nomination for State Senate in the 26th Legislative District. She won the primary in what the Philadelphia Daily News described as a "stunning upset" and was elected to the State Senate, becoming the first woman from the Republican Party to serve in the upper house of the State Legislature.
In 1989 she formed an exploratory committee to consider becoming a candidate for Governor of New Jersey. She ultimately decided against running in the Republican primary, which was won by Jim Courter.
In 1993, Brown resigned from the State Senate when she was appointed to the New Jersey Casino Control Commission, initially to serve out the unexpired term of Charles J. Irwin. Assemblymember Robert Martin was chosen to fill Brown's vacancy in the Senate. The following year she was named by Governor Christine Todd Whitman to a full five-year term on the Commission, serving until 1999.
Brown and her husband founded Brown Global Enterprises, a small consulting firm. In 2001 she volunteered to work on the transition team for President George W. Bush. In May 2007 she was appointed by Bush to serve on the President's Commission on White House Fellowships.
Stan died on January 16, 2013. Brown lived in Morristown, New Jersey and had two sons, four grandchildren and one great granddaughter.
She died on December 15, 2016, at her son's home in Lebanon, New Jersey after a short illness.