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Vada Sheid, the first woman elected to both chambers of the Arkansas General Assembly, will be honored twice this month, first in the town where she grew up and then in central Arkansas.
The Calico Rock Museum will host an open house from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Aug. 19, which would have been Sheid’s 110th birthday. Her son, Richard Sheid, said the city is marking the day as Vada Sheid Day.
The museum is dedicating a room to her, he said. The exhibit will include photographs from her early years in Calico Rock and Izard County along with a display of her accomplishments.
Eight days later, Sheid will be inducted into the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame. The ceremony is set for Aug. 27 at the Centennial Bank Ballroom inside the North Little Rock Event Center, with a reception at 5:30 p.m. and the dinner program at 6:30 p.m.
She is one of seven women in the hall’s 10th class, four of whom are being honored posthumously. The others are Cynthia East, Marsha Martin, Cynthia E. Nance, Sharon Allen, Phyllis Dillaha Brandon and Dorothy Reddell Caldwell.
Richard Sheid said he plans to attend. He said the honors matter in part because so many people who have moved to the area in recent years know the name without knowing the woman.
“They see these signs on the bypass and the bridges and stuff, but they really don’t know what she accomplished throughout her life,” he said. “She was a public servant, and that’s pretty much what her life was all about. It’s serving people.”
Vada Webb was born Aug. 19, 1916, in Wideman, the only child of J.W. “Bill” Webb and Gertrude Reynolds Webb. Her father was a cattle buyer who was active in local politics and took her along to campaign events as a girl.
The family moved to Calico Rock in 1926, and she graduated from high school there in 1934. Her son said his father attended school in Calico Rock as well.
She went to work as Izard County welfare director in 1935, before she turned 20. After marrying Carl Sheid in 1940 and moving to Little Rock, she took a job with the state and kept a close eye on politics at the Capitol.
“My grandfather, Bill Webb, had always encouraged her to get into politics,” Richard Sheid said. “She kind of followed in his footsteps.”
Her own campaigns started in Baxter County, where she was elected county treasurer in 1960. She won a seat in the state House in 1966 and a Senate seat covering five north Arkansas counties a decade later, making her the first woman to serve in both chambers.
“She wasn’t in politics for the party label,” her son said in an interview with the Observer last year. “She was in it to help people.”
He described her as unafraid of anyone she needed something from.
“She didn’t care if she had to walk into the governor’s office or call a United States senator,” he said then. “She was going to ask for what Baxter County needed. And she wouldn’t stop until she got it.”
Two things drove her work in the legislature: education and infrastructure.
The infrastructure fight that defined her was the crossing at Norfork Lake, where drivers still depended on ferries. Sheid pushed governors, senators and eventually the White House for bridges.
“She was after them all the time,” her son said. “It didn’t matter if it was McClellan, Pryor, Hammerschmidt, or Bill Clinton. She never stopped. She just kept pushing until they couldn’t tell her no anymore.”
She testified before a congressional committee in Washington, and President Richard Nixon heard the speech. Richard Sheid said Nixon sent word that he wanted to speak with her, and the two talked that evening at a state dinner she attended with Sen. John McClellan.
By his account, Nixon teased her about which of them held the real power.
“I’m a Republican, and you’re a Democrat,” Nixon told her, “but I will have to sign your bill before you get the money. And you can’t get the money until Nixon signs it, and don’t you forget it. When I sign the bill, I will send you the pen.”
Nothing happened for about a year. Then a package arrived from the White House with the pen inside.
The bridges opened in 1983, and Sheid later donated the pen to Arkansas State University-Mountain Home.
The college fight took longer. Sheid had wanted to attend college herself and could not, and she spent years trying to bring one to Baxter County.
Voters here turned the idea down at the ballot box. Her son said her response was to take it somewhere else.
“She said, well, if Baxter County didn’t want it, I’m going to give it to Harrison,” he said.
North Arkansas Community College opened there instead.
Sheid lost her Senate seat in 1984, and rumors circulated about her health. In 1992, at 76, she ran for a House seat that had come open and won it back.
“She knew she had to marshal all her strength,” her son said. “But she wasn’t finished yet. She didn’t know how to quit.”
That term is where she finally got the money for a college in Mountain Home. Her son said she filed the appropriation in Category C, a low-priority tier that rarely got funded, on the advice of the state budget director during a strong revenue year.
Other legislators laughed at her for it.
“They said she’ll never get that money, because it was plugged down in Category C, which hardly ever gets funded,” Richard Sheid said.
Category C got funded. The state bought the land, and ASU-Mountain Home opened in 1995.
The Vada Sheid Community Development Center on that campus was dedicated a few years later. Her son has credited a bipartisan group with securing the money for it.
“Both parties worked together,” he said. “This building would not be here today if Tim and Asa Hutchinson, Blanche Lincoln, and Marion Berry had not joined forces to get the money. My mother believed in working with anyone if it meant getting something done for Baxter County.”
He and his wife recently donated a portrait of his mother that was hung in the building ahead of her birthday.
Sheid died in 2008 at 91 and is buried in Mountain Home, near the bridges she fought for and the campus she helped build. Her son said she never really left the work behind.
“She was always on the phone, always talking to somebody, still trying to help,” he said. “It didn’t matter if she was in office or not. Helping people was who she was.”
