![]() ![]() The sale is today and tomorrow at the Spellman home on Golden Pass.įor several days, he and the group of campaign loyalists got together for the somber task of sorting through Spellman's collection of congressional memorabilia, art and foreign artifacts. In an effort to "consolidate" and simplify the house around him-not to raise money-Spellman said he decided to sell off the items she accumulated during years in public office, many of them intended as gifts to friends and constituents. "Here I am rattling around in nine rooms, half of which are closed off in the summer and half of which are closed off in the winter," he said. Their daughter Dana and Gladys Spellman's sister, who live nearby, also visit regularly.Īfter three years, Reuben Spellman admits that his optimistic hopes for recovery have mostly faded and he has begun to face the future, one that might, he said, include moving into a smaller home. Occasionally he or other family members take new photographs or notes from the grandchildren, which are taped to the wall beside his wife's bed. In the beginning she seemed to react physically to the voices, the smells and the noise. For the same reason, the television is on most of the day. He talks to her on those visits, hoping to spark a memory or just keep her company by discussing the family, national events or the new signs renaming the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in her honor. His weekly routine includes several lengthy stops at her private room in the nursing home. It's something you're used to after a while."Īfter three years, their blue house with the huge weeping willow tree in back is almost exactly as it was that Halloween morning. ![]() The coma, which locked his wife between life and death, he said, "just leaves you hanging. It has been a difficult time for Reuben Spellman, 73, who sought unsuccessfully to replace his wife, the former PTA activist and county commissioner, in Congress. Doctors have said that she could continue like that indefinitely, but five years seems to be average for similar cases. Her skin is soft and she looks untroubled, according to family and friends. Her hair is grayer since she can no longer "touch it up" as she used to. She is fed intravenously and is thinner as a result. Her 5th Congressional District seat was assumed by a fellow Prince George's Democrat, Steny H. Since that day, Spellman, 65, has been confined to a $1,850-a-month nursing home where she breathes and her heart continues to beat without any artificial assistance, but she shows no signs of being conscious. The electrical impulses that prod the heart malfunctioned for a few minutes and oxygen crucial to brain activity stopped flowing. Once the matriarch of Prince George's County politics and a fierce Democratic protector of federal workers, Spellman collapsed at a children's Halloween costume party, during an easy campaign for a fourth term. 31, 1980, these things have gathered dust in closets and on shelves of the Spellman home, for since that date the collector of these items, Gladys Noon Spellman, has been in an unchanging coma. In the comfortable suburban Laurel house where Gladys Spellman lived for more than a decade, her husband, and campaign loyalists through three terms in Congress and years of local politics, have been gathering recently for a last hurrah of sorts.Ĭarefully, they have been sorting through dozens of Waterford crystal candlesticks picked up on trips to England, Russian dolls gathered on fact-finding missions to the Soviet Union, cloisonne' vases accumulated in the Orient, preparing to sell them all. ![]()
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