Gladys Marie Briscoe

Political activist saw need, met it

— When Gladys Briscoe moved to Good Shepherd Ecumenical Retirement Center in Little Rock, she thought her political activist days were over, her daughter said. However, it didn’t take long before she started a resident’s council, got Aldersgate Road widened and a stoplight installed at the end of the street.

“She had this innate ability to look at a situation and say, ‘ How are we going to make this better. Who are we going to get to help us ?’”Mary Ann Campbell said. “She’d work tirelessly to try to accomplish what the group wanted done.”

Gladys Marie Briscoe died Wednesday at Hospice Home Care in Little Rock from a stroke.

She was 89.

Briscoe raised five children and, although she was busy, she made time to better the educational system in Mabelvale by serving in many capacities with the Parent-Teacher Association.

“She set a role model for others to be involved,” Campbell said. “She was always thinking, ‘What does the church need? What does the school need. What do we want?’”

Briscoe cultivated her entrepreneurial spirit by participating in various business ventures, including her gift shop inside the Camelot Hotel, now the Doubletree Hotel, in downtown LittleRock.

“The Camelot was just sort of a center for politics, business conventions,” Campbell said. “She sold all the cigarettes to the judges. ... She paid her rent through her tobacco sales.”

Active in local politics, Briscoe served as president of the Pulaski County Democratic Women’s Club. She got to know former President Bill Clinton when he was a young politician considering a run for attorneygeneral, and she admired his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“She always liked women’s issues. ... She was like a pre-Hillary,” Campbell said. “If Hillary flew in, [we’d] go out to the airport. Hillary would always come over and say, ‘Hey, Gladys.’”

For years, Briscoe was involved in Bill Clinton’s political campaigns and visited the White House in 1994.

“They took us on the behind-the-scenes tour,” Campbell said. “She went to a radio broadcast. She got to hold Socks the cat, pet Buddy the dog.”

At a recent fundraiser, Bill Clinton remembered Briscoe and gave her a hug and a kiss.

“She didn’t wash her face for a week,” Campbell said.

While living at the retirement center, Briscoe persuaded the city in 1997 to widen a mile-long stretch of Aldersgate Road after she heard that people had been running off the road because it was too narrow. She then set her sights on a stoplight.

“You used to just take your life in your hands when you took the turn from Aldersgate onto Kanis [Road],” said Ann Mourning, a board member at the center. “The resident’s council launched the initiative and pushed it through the city board.Gladys is the one who led that charge.”

When the stoplight was installed in 2005, Briscoe got to flip the switch. It became known as “Gladys’ Light,” Campbell said.

“Young women wanted to aspire to be like Gladys Briscoe,” Mourning said. “She was just a take-charge, do-it-the-right-way kind of woman. Everything she did, she did over the top.”

In her free time, Briscoe enjoyed listening to her favorite Don Williams tunes and speaking with her feathered friends.

“She had a balcony where she had birdhouses. ... She’d sit there and talk to her birds. I called her the ‘bird whisperer,’” Campbell said. “If she found an injured bird, she’d pick it up and try to help it.”

Arkansas, Pages 10 on 05/24/2012

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