Mary Mead

Mary Elisabeth Hansen Mead (June 21, 1935 – June 21, 1996) was an American rancher, businesswoman, and a Republican politician in the U.S. state of Wyoming. She was the daughter of Governor and U.S. Senator Clifford Hansen and the mother of former Governor Matt Mead. In 1990, Mead was the unsuccessful GOP nominee for governor, having been defeated by the incumbent Democrat Mike Sullivan of Douglas in Converse County in southeastern Wyoming. In the general election, Sullivan prevailed with 104,638 votes (65.4 percent) to Mead's 55,471 ballots (34.6 percent). Mead polled only 4,311 more votes against Sullivan than she had received in her closed primary in August. Biography Mead was born in Jackson, Wyoming to Clifford Peter Hansen (1912–2009), a native of Lincoln County, and the former Martha Close (1914–2011), who was reared in Sheridan. Her brother, Peter Arthur Hansen (born 1936), resides in Cheyenne, Wyoming. In 1957, she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the University of Wyoming in Laramie. She married Peter Bradford Mead (born 1933), who coincidentally partly bears the same name as her father, brother, and grandfather. For more than twenty years, she and Peter managed the family cattle ranch, originally homesteaded by her grandparents, Peter Christofferson Hansen and the former Sylvia Irene Wood. The Meads reared three children. After their divorce, she ran the ranch with her parents and then with her older son, Bradford Scott Mead, and his wife, Katherine L. "Kate" Mead. In 1995, she married Dick Steinhour.