Los Angeles Times: Toni Atkins prepares to be first woman to have held the top job in both the California state Senate and Assembly
By John Myers
The story that Toni Atkins tells feels less like anecdote than allegory, a glimpse of how as a legislator she confronts the problems of California using life lessons imported from her childhood in the mountains of southwestern Virginia.
During a weekday morning visit to a San Diego seniors center, Atkins praises the volunteers at a vision clinic offering free eye exams and glasses. After all, she knows a little something about being too poor to buy a pair of glasses.
By age 7, she was struggling to read and assigned to summer school after the second grade. It turned out the problem was her eyesight, undiagnosed because her family had no health insurance. The local Lions Club stepped in to give Atkins a pair of glasses.
“When I put on those glasses,” she tells the volunteers, “the first thing I did was I looked at the ground. I looked down and I saw for the first time how green the grass was. I just couldn’t believe it!”
Politicians routinely use their biography as a talking point. Less common is an elected official who uses it as a guiding principle when it comes time to govern.
“She translates it from the heart into policy,” said Paul Downey, chief executive of Serving Seniors, the nonprofit that hosted the vision clinic. “She’s able to relate and translate her experiences into something that is meaningful. And that’s rare.”
Rare, too, is the accomplishment Atkins will achieve on Wednesday: taking the oath as president pro tempore of the California Senate two years after serving as speaker of the Assembly . She’s the first legislator to hold both leadership posts since 1871. Atkins, 55, will make history, too, as the first woman and the first openly gay lawmaker to lead the upper house in Sacramento.