Katherine Eriksson Sasseville was born into a political family in Fergus Falls during the Great Depression and blazed a trail as an attorney, public servant and political activist, embracing civic life in Minnesota and navigating society's shifting gender roles at midcentury to forge a life of leadership.
She died May 16 at her home on Jewett Lake north of Fergus Falls after years of living with Parkinson's disease. She was 78.
Known to friends and family members as Kati, she possessed a rebellious streak and a sure-footed self-confidence that led her to defy convention in many endeavors. Her life was filled with firsts. She was the first woman to serve as president of the University of Minnesota's Law School student council. She was the first woman appointed to the Minnesota Public Service Commission and the first woman to chair it.
"She was a mover and a shaker," said her daughter Melanie Lesh. "She was someone who would take on a mission, and with her determination, her intelligence and her dynamic self, she would get people to follow with her and pursue the challenge. I saw it time after time."
Sasseville graduated from Washburn High School in south Minneapolis in 1952. She dropped out of college to marry and raise children. Eventually the family grew to six children; she and her husband, John Sasseville, an artist, settled in Bloomington, where they built their social life around the Bloomington Civic Theater, of which they were early founders.
As a community activist in the 1960s, she took an interest in local environmental issues as well as civil rights and women's issues.
"She had a belief in … fairness and rightness," Lesh said. "If she saw something being done poorly, she had an inclination to right a wrong."
After her youngest child entered kindergarten, Sasseville went back to college, graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1970 and the Law School three years later. At age 37, she was the first female Law School student president, with campaign signs that read, "Vote for Mama Sass."
She divorced around the time she graduated from law school and moved with four of her children to Washington, D.C., taking a job as a lawyer with the Navy, where she helped prosecute contractors who sold faulty equipment to the government. In 1975, she was the first woman appointed to the Minnesota Public Service Commission (known today as the Public Utilities Commission) and later served as its first female chair, before leaving in 1981.
In 1982, she became general counsel of Otter Tail Power Co. in Fergus Falls and retired from that post in 1997.
Her son David Sasseville, general counsel with the Minneapolis law firm Lindquist and Vennum, said his mother had a strong sense of social justice that was part of her personal and professional lives.
During the 1960s she took in an American Indian mother with three children, allowing them to live in the downstairs level of the family's modest Bloomington rambler, because the woman was in an abusive relationship. "She was one who lived by example and not words," David Sasseville said. "She was a very caring person."
Kati Sasseville's father and grandfather were attorneys, and both served as mayor of Fergus Falls. Kati, who started life as a Republican but switched to the DFL, made unsuccessful bids for the state Senate and House. In 1990, she ran for Congress and lost in the endorsing convention on the 13th ballot to Collin Peterson, who has served the district for nearly a quarter-century.
The family has had ties to Jewett Lake since Kati's great-grandfather bought land there in the 1870s. Her grandfather, who also served in the state Legislature, built a cabin on the lake in 1923, and the family compound has grown over the years. She and several of her siblings retired to homes on the lake property.
She remained friends with her ex-husband until his death in 1984. She is survived by five of her six children, all six of her siblings and eight of her nine grandchildren.
In retirement, she traveled with her grandchildren to Europe and other destinations because she so valued her time with them, her children said.
The family plans a memorial service at the Center for the Arts in Fergus Falls on July 16 at 10:30 a.m.
Brad Schrade • 612-673-4777
