Prettner Solon tells women: Prepare to lead

Yvonne Prettner Solon was coming down with something -- a peril in a job where everyone shakes your hand. The lieutenant governor's day had dawned with a legislative breakfast, the ballroom full of people dining on bacon and sausage rising to their feet as she approached the podium.

Now in the governor's reception room, she stifled a cough before a group of somber young women from Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. She expressed concern for the turmoil in their homelands, but the first question revealed that she had inspired some of their gravity.

"Do you find it difficult to be on the same level as a man?" one woman asked. Do you feel any fear? Disrespect?

Prettner Solon began explaining how men and women are equals here, "although women often work harder than men to be in the same position." She urged the women to prepare themselves for leadership, so that they're ready when opportunity arises. She paused, then began again.

"I think that a lot of the respect we get from others depends on how we feel about ourselves: If I expect respect, I'm more likely to get respect," she said. "This morning, I felt like I got more respect. I'm the lieutenant governor."

A daughter of Duluth

It's "ee-VON," although her mother says "ya-VON." Mom is French and Dad is Norwegian, Prettner Solon said, explaining the differing pronunciations. Her maiden name, Camp, was devised at Ellis Island. Prettner was her first husband, since deceased. She became Solon upon marrying Sam Solon, a legendary Duluth legislator, whose own Greek name had been Americanized.

Gov. Mark Dayton says she was the first and only person he asked to be his running mate, noting her "very thoughtful, sensitive and visionary leadership and public service," as well as "life experiences which have forged a woman I deeply respect and admire."

Dayton was close at hand for perhaps the saddest of those: the death of Solon, whom he'd known for years. Prettner Solon said Dayton was especially helpful "when we were going from clinic to clinic to get help for my husband's cancer."

Still, she considered Dayton's offer for more than a week. She'd gained influential seniority in the Senate but was growing frustrated with how legislators were making "very little headway on solving the budget in a way that seemed fair or reasonable."

"I had to ask myself what difference I could make in either job and then told him, 'I'm ready for this.'"

You can, without patronizing, say that this is a stage she's going through.

She has always gravitated to leadership: She was student council president and valedictorian at Stanbrook Hall, a Catholic high school. She still credits the nuns there with having the greatest influence on her life, "telling me I could be anything I wanted to be," she said. "I hadn't heard that a lot."

Her parents had traditional ideas about women's roles. "College was for my brothers." She prevailed and attended the College of St. Scholastica, where classmates printed business cards for her as the first woman president of the United States. Yet, she dropped out of school to marry.

The next stage of her life began in the late 1970s when she enrolled at the University of Minnesota Duluth and helped start a group called SOTA, or Students Older Than Average. With a master's degree in psychology, she began working for various concerns, including developing a treatment program for eating disorders at St. Luke's Hospital.

With the kids grown, she wanted to do more community work and began applying to various boards, without success. Then a seat on the Duluth City Council came open and she decided to run to raise her public profile.

She remembers the day she filed, 10 minutes before the deadline. "I was so nervous when I had to sign the candidate application that they had to give me another one," she said, laughing. You have to understand, she says now, that she'd never aspired to be on a City Council, or in the Legislature, or to be lieutenant governor. "While I worked hard at whatever I did, I also seemed to be in the right place at the right time for these opportunities."

Sam Solon gave money to anyone down on their luck, she said, and one Christmas Eve at the Jolly Fisher, an old Greek restaurant on the waterfront, a peddler came in with a photo of an ore ship rolled up under his arm. "Sam gave him something like $200 for it," she said. This was several years before the great ship sank in the November gale of 1975.

The photo is framed now, and would be almost spooky, except for knowing that the $200 was far more than it was worth at the time and gave someone a better Christmas.

Prettner Solon doesn't go very long without referring to her husband, Sam. "I still talk to him," she told the young women in their hijabs, and they smiled. Solon served in the Legislature for almost 30 years, and she learned many of the political ropes through his experience. Yet, while her initial election to fill his seat after his death could have been chalked up to sentiment, she twice was handily reelected.

As a senator, she championed health care legislation, ranging from a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer to improving care for seniors. Her chief job as lieutenant governor is to coordinate senior services around the state.

You have to be ready

Her parents are in an assisted-living center in Duluth, so she tries to see them most weekends, as well as check on her house on Park Point. But the job, right now, proves all-consuming, save for the 20 minutes she sets aside before bed each night to read something purely for pleasure.

So she was slightly taken aback by the advice she received from a former lieutenant governor, Marlene Johnson, who served with Rudy Perpich from 1983 to 1991.

Johnson asked her whom she would want in her Cabinet and what initiatives she would champion. Johnson said a political veteran had asked her a similar question when she took office and she -- like Prettner Solon -- had to admit that she hadn't given it any thought.

The adviser had continued: "Well, you need to think about that plan right now, so you're ready to respond. Because if the worst should happen, you have to be ready to hit the ground running."

Prettner Solon told this to the women in the reception room by way of stressing the point of preparing themselves for leadership now. Opportunities arise. It's best to be ready.