For over three decades Lola Pierotti Aiken presided as the Chief of Staff for Vermont’s revered United States Senator George David Aiken. For the last seven years she worked without pay. The Washington power elite and Vermonters from all walks of life knew her. They would see her with the “Governor,” as those who knew his preference over “Senator,” called him. They saw her as the chauffeur of the signature yellow Jeep Cherokee in which he traveled around the state. They would see her in Washington, or events, meetings, and social gatherings in Vermont.

After the Governor passed away in November 1984, Vermonters continued to see Lola. They saw her at the meetings of several boards she served as an active and committed member. They saw her at the Aiken Lecture series at UVM, at receptions, frequently honoring her service; as well as at political gatherings of candidates from both major parties And they saw her with friends breakfasting at the big table in the corner window of the Coffee Corner restaurant where State and Main streets intersect in Montpelier. Dining in a Vermont restaurant, Lola attracts a steady and polite parade of folks who come by her table to greet her and briefly chat or share a memory. She maintains her husband’s legendary capacity to remember faces and names and to put them together with their Vermont home towns and relatives.

photo courtesy of Lola Aiken.

An instinctive, high energy, take charge administrator; a socially congenial and vivacious woman; and an intelligent, performance-oriented quick study, she accepted her life as she found it and made the most of it. In a span of seven decades, beginning just before the United States entered World War II, with all of her obvious ability Lola has managed her key staff role with a prominent U.S. senator and her high visibility across Vermont without ever eclipsing her boss and, after 1967, her husband. In 1975, when the Lake Champlain Transportation Company christened the Gov. George D. Aiken, the ferry that to Lola’s delight still plies the four miles between Charlotte and Essex, New York, she smashed the celebratory bottle. But the Governor dominated the attention and the press.

Lola’s roots began in the renowned grape-producing soil of Bagni di Lucca, a popular spa on the Lima River in Italy’s Tuscan hills about thirty miles west northwest of Florence. Soon after the turn of a new century, Olinto Pierotti, leaving behind his wife, Fannie, and young daughter Rosina, came to Montpelier to cut stone in the granite sheds. A few years later, Fannie Pierotti gave up her house and left everything behind except “Rosie” and what she could carry. They crossed the Atlantic Ocean, made it through Ellis Island, and somehow boarded a train headed for Vermont. Never taking off her hat and coat during the long ride north, Fannie, with Rosie clinging to her hand, eventually stepped down from the coach onto the station platform in Montpelier. No one came to meet them. Her letter to Olinto had not reached him.

As Lola remembers, “Mother took life squarely. She never cried.”

Speaking only Italian, she communicated sufficiently with a young man at the train station who guided them to Main Street where they found Olinto eating dinner at a boardinghouse. The family rented rooms in the first floor of a house at 180 Barre Street, paralleling the Winooski River and not far from the granite sheds. Lola’s life began there in 1912. A younger sister, Olga or “Ollie,” followed her four and a half years later. The Pierottis, who “loved being Americans,” later moved a short distance into four rooms in a house on Sibley Avenue. This two-block-long street connected Barre Street with South Street that ran steeply uphill toward the seminary and more well-to-do residences. In the 1930s before Lola’s father passed away, the landlord expanded the apartment into the entire first floor.

Fannie Pierotti presided over the warm and lively but disciplined family. Olinto affectionately called Fannie the “Duchess.” She made a determined and successful effort to learn English. She encouraged the three girls to bring books home from the library, and while she cooked, they would gather in the kitchen and read aloud to each other. Olinto liked to play the guitar, whistle, and sing. He exercised firm but gentle discipline. One time, Lola remembers, he placed a glass of wine and a cigarette in front of his three girls. If they chose to drink or smoke, he gently admonished them, they should do it at home.

The sisters walked to grade school and then to Montpelier High School, where Lola excelled. In 1930 she graduated as the valedictorian in a class of a little over forty. The Record, her high school yearbook, noted that “Good things come in small packages.” She left high school “First in marks, first in sport, first in the hearts of her classmates.” She participated in many organized activities, held multiple elected offices, and played varsity basketball.

Despite her strong high school credentials, Lola accepted that her family’s modest means and the beginning of the Great Depression precluded any possibility of college. During her high school years, especially in the summer, she had worked for a local attorney taking care of his children at his Main Street home. After graduation, she became a full-time employee in his law office, taking dictation and performing stenographic duties. A friend encouraged her to apply for a secretarial position with the Vermont secretary of state. She did not think she had the qualifications, but she sent him a letter outlining her skills, and she was granted an interview. A week later she went to work for the Secretary of State’s office where she worked until a twist of fate changed her life forever.

In 1941 her sister Ollie, returning to Montpelier on a train, learned from one of Senator George Aiken’s staff that he had an opening in his Washington office. Lola had sealed envelopes in Aiken’s campaign office, and the staff had some idea of her energy and efficiency. Senator Aiken offered Lola the position. She had never lived away from home. Reluctantly, and after much encouragement from friends, she left Montpelier’s familiar streets and her family for Washington, D.C. She found accommodations in a shared bedroom in a Capitol Hill rooming house occupied by other congressional staffers. Lola eventually moved to a private room so that her mother could visit. Like the Governor, Lola did not draw hard partisan lines, and the young, athletic staffer bowled with a team of Democrats.

Lola began by taking dictation for Senator Aiken’s assistant, who shortly after Pearl Harbor left for the service. His replacement, a lawyer from Burlington, dismissively called her “Toots.” Soon Senator Aiken removed him, and he asked Lola to run his office. The offer surprised Lola, who had interpreted his terse Yankee demeanor, very different from her lively Italian background in Montpelier, as rudeness. She quickly learned that he did not talk when he found it unnecessary. He had observed her work ethic and skill and wanted to promote her. In response she made a statement, couching it politely in the form of a question, “Can I run it the way I want to run it?” He agreed, and she took over the reins of his office and held them firmly for the next third of a century.

Routinely arriving at the office at 7 a.m., Lola would begin the work day. Shortly thereafter, the two young male staffers would arrive, and some time a little before 9 a.m. the rest of the staff, two women, would come to work. She hired staff, and she rewarded good work with pay increases. The Governor would tell them, “Lola has increased your money.” Over time the staff grew, and so did Lola’s responsibilities. She presided over “happy” staffers. She hired them, “but did not use them.”

Almost every morning the Governor had a well-known, quiet, private, and frank breakfast with Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, who later became Senate Majority Leader, Lola would sometimes come to the Senate Dining Room with materials for the day ahead. One time, Mansfield “tapped the Governor,” and invited Lola to join them. After that she often joined the legendary breakfasts.

On any given day staff work for a United States senator traverses the range from matters of state to the mundane routine of mailings, press releases, and office administration, to looking after the needs of the boss, and to the Washington social whirl. She also dealt with Vermont constituents who mostly did not ask for assistance until an issue had become a problem. Lola did it all; she held the keys to the Governor’s office. Senators, Senate staff, and other Washington power brokers came to appreciate her influence, and during speeches and other events they “generally sat next to me. They wanted to tell me stuff to tell the Governor.”

In June 1967, two years after the governor’s first wife, the former Beatrice Howard passed away, he and Lola married. With traditional Vermont rectitude, he immediately removed her from the payroll. No longer a paid staffer, she lost her privileges to the floor of the Senate, and she could not freely walk in and out of the Senate Dining Room. But she lost none of her influence.

The Governor retired and left Washington in 1974. The Aikens settled into a hillside house in Putney, where the Governor returned to his agricultural and gardening roots and grew enough berries, that he did not especially care to eat, to more than supply his friends and neighbors. They traveled the state together attending meetings and events and seeing friends. Every other week they came to UVM to interact with students three or four days. They attended classes and enjoyed hockey games, and they also ate with students in the Living/Learning Center dining room. Lola served on the Champlain College board of rustees when it converted from a junior college to a strong four-year institution. She also helped spearhead the organization and endowment of the ongoing Aiken Lecture series at UVM, and she continues to serve on its board. She raised money for Montpelier’s Kellogg-Hubbard Library where she and her sisters had borrowed books to read aloud with the Duchess decades before. She also worked effectively as a trustee of the Vermont Historical Society and the Rockingham Meeting House. And she enjoyed penny ante poker, especially night baseball, even when the Governor grumbled about his losing twenty-five or thirty cents.

Now, a full quarter of a century after her husband’s passing, she remains a dynamic force in a Vermont that reveres her and regards her in iconic proportions. As her mother did in the first decade of the twentieth century, Lola thrives in the first decade of this new century facing life “squarely,” paying close attention to contemporary events and the current set of players and teasing out the best in people as she had with her Senate staff. For more than three decades, Lola got things done at the highest levels of the state and federal governments. Her family roots in Montpelier had formed her personality and her ability to meet life “squarely,” as she does each day. With many of her contemporaries no longer with us and with her youthful attitude and ability to span generations, she remains a vital force.

Nick Muller has enjoyed the privilege to have Lola Aiken as a good friend for thirty-five years.