Cathy Nolan, the longtime Democratic assemblywoman from Ridgewood, Queens, has been praised many times in these columns over the decades. Today we write with sorrow that she died on Wednesday, a day before her 68th birthday.
Cathy — and she was always Cathy — had been given six months to live when her cancer was diagnosed five years ago. With help from the world’s best at Memorial Sloan Kettering, she beat the cancer for 4½ years.
But that was typical for Cathy. She beat her opponents and the odds again and again.
In 1984, when Queens Congresswoman Gerry Ferraro was tapped by Fritz Mondale to be his vice presidential running mate, the local assemblyman gave up his seat to run for the House. Cathy went for the Assembly seat, winning at age 26. And she never lost an election, winning 19 terms in a row to represent the people of Ridgewood, Sunnyside, Astoria, Woodside, Long Island City and Maspeth in Albany.
When the disreputable Vito Lopez from Brooklyn tried to knock her off by running a lackey against Cathy, she beat Lopez and his lackey. When the Queens Democratic machine backed a challenger (the brother of the mayor of Baltimore) she beat the mayor’s brother and the machine. When the leftwingers in the Democratic Socialists of America primaried Cathy, she beat the DSA. That last race was in 2020. In 2022, battling cancer, she didn’t run again.
She would always call this paper “the Daily News newspaper” and we chronicled her good fights, like advocating for mayoral control of New York City’s public schools. She was a public school kid herself, a grad of Grover Cleveland High School (who was whip smart enough to pass the entrance test for the then-all girls Hunter College High School) before going to NYU. She and husband Gerry sent their son Nick to public schools as well (Aviation High School).
She was instrumental in helping convince Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver to pass mayoral control in 2002 and to keep it in place.
In the mid-1990s, as chair of the Labor Committee, she discovered that close to 100,000 New York State farm workers were excluded from all workplace protections. She had to pass a law letting them have drinking water while they worked and another law allowing them access to toilets while they worked. When we learned of this dreadful situation, in 1998 field hands had no minimum wage, no overtime pay, no right to an unpaid day off per and no right to organize and bargain collectively.
We championed the cause led by Nolan until her victory in 2019, when the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act was signed. That it was signed into law in the newsroom of “the Daily News newspaper” with Nolan present was vindication of her long commitment.
She wasn’t perfect, wrongly supporting Silver in repealing the commuter tax in 1999, but on issue after issue she was right. including supporting the huge investment by Amazon in Long Island City that her feckless colleagues in Queens torpedoed.
Cathy was discharged from the hospital and went home to her Ridgewood house for hospice on Tuesday. She was there for the joint birthday of Jerry and Nick that day and the end came the next morning.
Visitation will be held today from 2-5 p.m. and 7-9 p.m. at Edward D. Lynch Funeral Home at 43-07 Queens Blvd. in Sunnyside. The funeral Mass will be Monday at St. Aloysius Church, 3-82 Onderdonk Ave. in Ridgewood.