The Fells Point Festival was in full swing, smiles all around, politicians thrusting their right hands out, trying to shake loose a few votes.

It was 1994, and Ellen R. Sauerbrey, the Republican nominee for governor, was all smiles as well. When a young woman approached her, Sauerbrey presented her hand. The woman ignored it.

"I could never vote for you," she told Sauerbrey. "I know you're a pro-lifer. And what really gets me sick is you could never understand what you're doing -- you don't even have kids."

Sauerbrey's face fell. She mumbled something. She had no good answer. Friends were embarrassed for her.

Later, Sauerbrey -- the hard-nosed, tax-slashing warhorse who upset the the liberal status quo of Maryland politics -- thought about her day. She was angry. She wanted to cry.

She had had no good answer to the woman's comment.

Four years later, with Sauerbrey again the Republican nominee, she'll talk about the severe criticism she took for contesting the outcome of the 1994 general election, which she lost by fewerthan 6,000 votes. She'll endure the critics who paint her as an enemy of the poor, the environment, abortion rights supporters and Maryland's public schools.

Unlike four years ago, she'll talk about her personal life, hoping to alter the pervasive view that she is a cold and insensitive woman. She'll discuss the poverty of her childhood and the painful memories of the father she adored and how doctors twice opened his skull unnecessarily because of a misdiagnosis.

About any of these things, Sauerbrey will not hesitate to talk.

Then she explains how she came to be running a political campaign rather than a household with children. Her eyes redden and begin to fill.

This time, though, she wants to cry because of her answer.

She knows critics will accuse her, the wolf, of packaging herself in political sheep's clothing. Her motives may be debated, but her goal is clear: Ellen Sauerbrey desperately wants to be Maryland's governor.

She is an anti-abortion candidate who never had children. That is not the sum of her life, but it is a fundamental part of it, and her life will in turn shape the decisions she could make as governor. And so she answers.

"It's not easy for me to open the book and let people know more about me," she said during a series of recent interviews with The Sun. "This is not about softening any image. It's about expanding what people know about me.

"It can be difficult, but the fact is, there are a lot of things people don't know about me."

'Poor as church mice'

Many people do not know this about Ellen Elaine Richmond, later to become Ellen Richmond Sauerbrey, wealthy suburbanite and confrontational Republican: She was born poor, in Baltimore, to a father who was a staunch Democrat.

Sauerbrey was born to Ethel and Edgar Richmond in 1937, as they were recovering from long stretches without work during the Depression and living with her father's mother in Northeast ,, Baltimore. Despite her parents' dreams, she would be their only child.

The family moved into a first-floor apartment on 28th Street, then to Erdman Avenue in Clifton Park.

"I know she's been portrayed as coming from a very wealthy background, but that's not true," said her mother, 85 and living in Florida. "We were as poor as church mice. From those earliest days, I think that's where Ellen got her appreciation for the value of money."

Said Sauerbrey: "I can remember my father killing a chicken in the back yard. I remember my father chopping its head off, and it kept fluttering around, and that was very disturbing to me. I remember my mother buying horse meat and making food out of it. Those are things that have stayed with me."

When she was 8, she worked for her grandfather in the Mayfield area, making corsages, wiring stems for Christmas bouquets. She snatched errant golf balls that popped into Clifton Park yards, selling them back to players.

Her father, a union man at Bethlehem Steel, insisted on hard work and good grades. When she returned home from school with a report card, having made all A's and a B, her father wanted an explanation for the single lower grade.

"All of this was loving," Sauerbrey said. "It was not done in a way that said, 'You are a bad person.' It wasn't tyrannical. It was preparing me, I think."

They adored each other. He was a strong, burly man with a tender heart. She was his little girl.

Then, when Ellen was 12, there was a scare. Her father began having trouble with his balance. He became dizzy. He fell. Doctors were puzzled, but after a series of tests they reached a diagnosis: He had multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the central nervous system.

To treat him, doctors would bore two dime-sized holes in the back of his head.

Her father was in constant pain, but determined. He kept after his daughter and her grades, worked to prepare her for adulthood, when she would get married and start her own family, when she would give him grandchildren.

As it turned out, he did not have multiple sclerosis. He had been losing his balance because of cerumen -- an easily treatable blockage in his ear canals.

"It tells you something," she said: Sometimes complex problems can have the simplest of solutions.

Sauerbrey's mother was not as concerned about grades as she was about preparing her only daughter for womanhood.

Her parents scraped together the money to send her to the Walters Modeling Academy and the Arthur Murray Dance School, where she learned the waltz and fox trot, the rumba and tango. She learned to be a seamstress from her mother, who made the family's clothes. It was the start of the 1950s. She learned to cook.

"We thought this modeling was important for her," recalled her mother. "It just teaches you how to handle yourself, how to walk, how to hold yourself straight, how to keep your figure. She came out of it and became a young lady."

Ellen Richmond's mother had something else in mind for her as well: the neighborhood paperboy, a handsome and charmingly cocky 16-year-old named Wil Sauerbrey.

"I said, 'Ellen, this very nice young chap just came and collected for the newspaper, and I think you ought to make yourself available.' She said, 'What do you want me to do?' And I said, 'Sit on the porch or something when he comes by.' "

Ellen was 14. They began dating, and she continued to see him on weekends when he went off to Lehigh and when she attended Western Maryland College. She made time for him even as she worked on the college newspaper, cheered on the pep team, served fellow students in the dining hall -- and as she worked on a double major in biology and math, eventually graduating summa cum laude.

The college's yearbook, another of her pursuits, ran this caption under her picture: "Never does anything halfway." Her nickname was "Winkie," from her habit of punctuating sentences with a broad smile, a subtle nod and a wink.

"She was the bubbliest, most pleasant person," recalls James Lightner, a classmate at Western Maryland who teaches there now. "I'd call her genuine."

Sauerbrey graduated from college in 1959. The former paperboy proposed to her at Loch Raven Reservoir.

"I would tell her, 'I hope you have six kids and they're all just like you. They would be nice and kind and sweet -- just like you are," her mother said. "And Ellen said to me, 'Oh, we'll have 12.' "

Their plan was all set. Sauerbrey -- who could not afford to go to veterinary school as she had hoped -- would teach for a short time and then she and her childhood sweetheart would have their family.

She began teaching in the biology department at the old Towson High School and was, by all accounts, an exceptionally hard worker.

"As a school administrator, I liked her being reliable, dependable, well-prepared, and she was just a good teacher," said Albert Naeny, who was principal and who disagrees with Sauerbrey's policies and will not vote for her.

Naeny detected a "limited flexibility." She could be harsh. But to the students who saw her every day, she was popular.

"If you were giving less than your best, she got on your case," said Kevin McCaughey, 51, a former student. "I know when kids would try to joust with her, to be smart-aleck with her, they always came out second. She just had a sharper wit and a presence about her that people who had been teaching 30 years still didn't have."

Sauerbrey enjoyed teaching but it was a job, not her dream.

She and Wil decided it was time to have a family.

As time passed and no baby came, they both visited doctors and were pronounced healthy. On the premise that relieving stress might help, she quit teaching. Then, after she had undergone a series of tests, doctors discovered a mass -- a dangerous growth, one that could kill her.

Then the cruel dilemma: Leave the mass alone and there is a chance of children, but also a serious risk of cancer, the doctors said. Or, remove the mass and forever lose any chance of bearing children.

Ellen Sauerbrey had no good answer.

"We very much wanted to have children," she recalls. "Anybody who goes through that, well, there's just a great deal of trauma. The turmoil it was an evolutionary process of disappointment on what I thought my life's role would be."

Sauerbrey wanted to adopt, but Wil did not. "It was not a decision I could make unilaterally," she said. "I thought about it and decided, if both aren't comfortable with adoption, it's doomed not to work."

Said her husband: "It was painful, it was personal, and it is still personal."

She does not talk about the surgery. That is too personal. She wants to go back to talking policy.

'More than faded drapes'

In 1964, Ellen Sauerbrey was in her kitchen, making spaghetti sauce, when the phone rang. Wil Sauerbrey answered. He had been asked to help with the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. He said he was too busy.

Politics was not something Ellen Sauerbrey had been contemplating. She had unquestionably been influenced by the politics of her husband, a far-right Republican who believes that, except for disease, "any problems that ever existed in society have either been created by government or made worse by government."

Ellen Sauerbrey was also influenced by the books she had been reading, especially Goldwater's book, "Conscience of a Conservative."

"I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce it in size," he wrote. "I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom."

She had been taken by Goldwater's words. Her family, after all, had been caged by poverty but found a life in hard work.

"Tell them I'll do it," Ellen Sauerbrey told her husband while he was on the phone.

She went door-to-door for Goldwater, worked the phones, became a valued organizer. It was 1964, though, and she was a woman. At one point, she was placed in charge of a picnic.

"I think women have to work a whole lot harder to be taken seriously," she said. So she did that. She worked harder. She served on the state Republican Central Committee. In 1978, party legislators suggested she run for state delegate. She decided that making her own drapes, cooking her own spaghetti sauce and doing her own needlepoint was not enough. Not without children in the house.

She needed something, and politics became the new dream. "At some point," Sauerbrey said, "I just had this feeling that I wanted to leave behind more than some faded old drapes."

Sauerbrey ran for the legislature from her Baltimore County district as a Goldwater conservative on fiscal issues and as a Reagan Republican on social issues.

She became one of 17 Republican delegates among the 141 representatives in the House. Most Republicans had been content to let Democrats run the state, putting up only token opposition. "We were almost invisible when she got here, and a lot of Republicans liked it that way," recalls Robert H. Kittleman of Howard County, now the house minority leader. "She thought we should stand for something. She wasn't into this culture of go-along, get-along."

Her conservative views alienated some in her party. But she ran for minority leader in 1986 and won. She made a decision that campaign funds earmarked for Republican incumbents would be used to help elect challengers from within the party. Forty-one Republicans now sit in the House.

In 1994, after four terms in the legislature, Sauerbrey, the flash point for Maryland's version of the Republican Revolution, was approached by other conservatives in the GOP. The presumed gubernatorial front-runner, Helen Delich Bentley, was too moderate for their liking. Further, Bentley did not seem absolutely commited to running, and the primary was fast approaching.

"My initial reaction was to think that it was a crazy idea," Sauerbrey said. "Had Helen gotten into the race and really decided to run, I wouldn't have challenged her."

Sauerbrey went to visit Bentley on Mother's Day, May 8. "I told her, if I'm going to get in the race, I can't wait," she recalled. "I had to say, get into the race by June 1, or I will."

Bentley did not file until June 30. The two opposed each other in the primary. Despite the waves Sauerbrey had made in Annapolis, she had 3 percent name recognition among Maryland voters. She campaigned for smaller government and against abortion. She won the primary by a margin of 14 percentage points over Bentley, setting up a contest with Parris N. Glendening, the Democratic nominee.

The general election was notable because it was so tight -- a difference of 5,993 votes of 1.4 million cast.

It was even more notable because of its aftermath. "I won that damned election, and all we have to do is prove it!" Sauerbrey exclaimed to Wil. Tens of thousands of votes, she claimed, were illegal.

She challenged the election in court.

State and federal investigations found sloppiness in the election but no conspiracy or significant voter fraud. Even now, while Sauerbrey will admit to regretting the fight, she will not apologize.

What many in Maryland did not recognize, she explains, is that state law had no mechanism for a recount in close general elections. The state had been dominated by one party for so long that there was no need.

When lawyers from the Republican National Committee told Sauerbrey she had a case, she took it on.

"In retrospect, we made some bad mistakes, and I am the first to admit that in some areas I took some bad advice -- and that's my responsibility because I was the one who took it," she said.

"For four years we've been trying to say we've moved on. I can say that to the degree that it created consternation for some people, I regret that. That's as far as I'll go."

'Life takes unexpected turns'

Ellen Sauerbrey never stopped running for governor after the 1994 election.

From the time the last vote was cast and her quest to overturn the results failed, she began meeting with her advisers, talking strategy. Perhaps the most important of those meetings took place in the fall of last year, at a dinner at the house of Kittleman, the minority leader. Financial backers were there as well as elected officials, eating spaghetti, hashing out with her how to make up at least 5,993 votes in 1998.

The topic turned to abortion. A lot of voters just did not understand, it was said, how Sauerbrey could be opposed to abortion and not have children.

"The truth is," one of her closer friends said at the dinner, "Ellen couldn't have children."

Most of those gathered were surprised. There were a few moments of uncomfortable silence. It would be decided that Sauerbrey would have to open up, to let people know more about her -- not as a politician but as a person, even things she was uncomfortable talking about, even her lack of children.

It made sense to her to talk about it. She had the answer all along.

She may have been moving toward talking about it even before that spaghetti dinner. In 1995, addressing the Phi Beta Kappa honor society at her alma mater, Western Maryland, she did not detail her upbringing, her poverty, her father's medical problems or her mother's push to make her a young lady.

She certainly did not say being without children led her to run for governor.

But she may have hinted at it, offering the students a lesson learned.

"Life takes many unexpected turns," she told them, "but I have learned that when God closes one door, another opens. We just have to be prepared to walk through the door."

Pub Date: 10/04/98