Ivy Baker Priest

”The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning.”

- Ivy Baker Priest

Ivy Baker Priest was born into poverty and grew up to be the first female Secretary of the Treasury. Utah’s history newsletter on Priest: “Ivy Baker Priest (1905-1975) was born to a miner who kept getting injured and a mother who ran a boarding house in Bingham Canyon. She jumped into politics early when, as a girl, she ran errands for a mayoral campaign... As assistant chair of Eisenhower’s national election committee, she got the women out to vote for Ike. In return, he appointed her U.S. Treasurer, and for eight years the signature of this girl from a Utah mining town was on every U.S. bill printed.”

A more comprehensive biography appears on the Utah State History site and can be found here. Odd bit of trivia - Priest was the mother of actress Pat Priest who played Marilyn Munster on the 60’s TV show The Munsters.

”Any woman who has a career and a family automatically develops something in the way of two personalities, like two sides of a dollar bill, each different in design. ... Her problem is to keep one from draining the life from the other.”

- Ivy Baker Priest