MARGARET CHASE SMITH, DEAD AT 97

The first woman to serve in both the U.S. House (1940 to 1948) and Senate (1948 to 1972), Margaret Chase Smith died Monday of a stroke that had left her comatose eight days earlier. A Republican, and the eldest of six children of a Skowhegan, Me. barber, she was an early critic of the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, and was known for her indefatigable will. After she was partially crippled by hip surgery in 1968, she took to tooling around the Senate corridors in a golf cart. Three years after leaving the Senate, she said what she missed the most was “being able to do for people.”Post to People & Profiles “Margaret Chase Smith.”