Bea O’Rourke, a social worker and longtime food insecurity activist who served as district office manager for Rep. Andrew Maguire (D-Ridgewood) from 1975 to 1981, has died. She was 85.
President Jimmy Carter appointed O’Rourke to serve on the Presidential Commission on Hunger.
She made her only bid for public office in 1993 as the Democratic candidate for State Senate in the solidly-Republican 40th district against incumbent Hank McNamara (R-Wyckoff). She lost by 25,661 votes, 68%-32%.
O’Rourke spent fifty years as a Democratic county committeewoman in Ridgewood. She was inducted into the Democratic Committee Hall of Fame in 2019.
From 1992 until her retirement in 2006, O’Rourke worked at the Center for Food Action, a non-profit founded by the singer Harry Chapin and radio host Bill Ayres to provide services to some of North Jersey’s poorest and most vulnerable families. At CFA, she paid particular attention to the needs of New Jersey’s Native American families and led fundraising drives to open new food pantries in Bergen County.
She spent a decade on the Bergen County Commission on the Status of Women.
After Maguire left office in 1981, O’Rourke served as statewide field director for Rep. Robert Roe (D-Wayne) in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor. Roe finished second behind Rep. Jim Florio (D-Runnemede).
She served as Bergen County coordinator for Brendan Byrne’s campaign for governor in 1973.
After the Watergate wave that helped Bergen County Democrats pick up four Senate seats and eight Assembly seats, O’Rourke was named to a five-member committee to help recruit Democrats to run for office in 1974 by Barbara Werber, the county chair.
(Photo: Courtesy of Sean Mccooe via Facebook).
O’Rourke played a crucial role in the election of Maguire, who had served in Lyndon Johnson’s administration as political and security affairs advisor at the U.S. Department of State and on the staff of the U.S. Delegation to the United Nations before returning to Bergen County to mount a nearly successful bid for freeholder in 1972.
In early 1974, Maguire announced his intention to challenge Rep. William Widnall (R-Saddle River), who was serving his 25th year as a congressman from Bergen County – he held the seat now represented by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Wyckoff). The 68-year-old Widnall, the ranking Republican on the House Banking Committee, had won 58% in 1972 – he ran eight percentage points behind President Richard Nixon – and with the Watergate scandal blowing up, Democrats viewed him as vulnerable.
Maguire wasn’t the only Democrat in the race: former State Sen. Ned Parsekian (D-Ridgewood), Bergen County Surrogate Gill C. Job, two-term Assemblyman Edward Hynes (D-Maywood) and Marjorie Wyngaarden, the founder of Northern NJ NOW and former chair of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Bergen County chapter.
Werber decided to run an open primary and allowed all five candidates to run in the organization column; all but Wyngaarden accepted the offer. Maguire landed endorsements from the AFL-CIO and the Bergen County Building Trades and landed the top ballot position in the primary.
Parsekian had moved from Flemington to Montvale in 1964 after the Republican state senator from Hunterdon County had blocked his nominations as state Division of Motor Vehicles director and as a Superior Court Judge. His move was made with the plan to run for the Senate, and he became the top vote-getter in the 1965 election. He sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 1969.
Job spent 35 years as the surrogate – he was first elected in 1957 after serving as an Allendale school board member and assemblyman – and had won three times as a Republican and then four times as a Democrat.
Hynes had flipped a Republican Assembly seat in 1971 at age 25 by just 59 votes and held it easily in the 1973 Democratic wave election; he didn’t seek re-election in 1975 and won 38% in his 1994 bid for Bergen County Executive.
Maguire won the primary by 5,786 votes over Parsekian, 52%-25%, with Job receiving 11% in his third-place finish. Hynes came in fourth with 9%, and Wyngaarden received less than 3%.
In the general election, Maguire ousted Widnall by 8,431 votes, 49.7%-44.4%.
Ford carried the 7th by a 58%-42% margin in 1976, but Maguire defeated Republican James Sheehan, a Wyckoff township committeeman, by 13 points to secure a second term.
The Republican challenger against Maguire in 1978 was Marge Roukema, a former Ridgewood school board member.
Roukema won the primary, 39%-32%, against a well-known name in the Republican primary: Joseph Woodcock (R-Cliffside Park), who served 12 years as an assemblyman and state senator, four years as the Bergen County prosecutor and was briefly a candidate for the 1977 Republican gubernatorial nomination.
Maguire won by six points but lost a 1980 rematch to Roukema.
O’Rourke worked on campaigns for U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg, State Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D-Teaneck), and Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle (D-Englewood).
A former teacher, O’Rourke ran the Continuing Education Department at Felician College in the 1980s. A graduate of Fordham University, O’Rourke and her husband of 64 years, Jim, devoted their lives to social justice causes.
In 1988, her son, James, was shot in the neck in front of his Santa Monica apartment during a robbery. He survived the shooting, and his parents began gun control activists.
She is survived by her husband, children, and grandchildren.
