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Rachel Marilyn Laird Lloyd (born January 3, 1929), also briefly known as Marilyn Lloyd Boquard due to a short second marriage, is a Tennessee businesswoman and 10-term former member of the United States House of Representatives, serving from 1975 to 1995. Lloyd was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas. She graduated from high school in Bowling Green, Kentucky from the high school which was formerly associated with what is now Western Kentucky University. She later briefly attended Shorter College in Rome, Georgia. She has owned radio station WTTI in Dalton, Georgia and Executive Aviation in Winchester, Tennessee. Lloyd was married to Mort Lloyd, a Chattanooga, Tennessee news anchor who had entered the 1974 Democratic primary to oppose two-term incumbent Republican Congressman LaMar Baker. Mort Lloyd won the primary, but was killed in an airplane crash on his way to celebrate the victory; the Democratic Party nominated Marilyn Lloyd as his replacement. She went on to defeat Baker that November in an election which saw many Republicans in competitive and marginal districts defeated, in large part due to the Watergate scandal. She became the first woman ever elected to Congress from Tennessee on an ongoing basis in her own right (Howard Baker's stepmother Irene Baker was elected in 1964 to complete the term of his late father, Howard Baker, Sr., but made no effort to compete for any futher term, and was thus regarded as a caretaker). Lloyd's election cannot be solely attributed to Watergate; Mort Lloyd had been popular in his own right, as Marilyn Lloyd became. Also, while Baker had been a fairly conservative Republican, Mrs. Lloyd was a relatively moderate Democrat who often broke with the national leadership of her party; her views often seemed to mirror those of her district. For several terms she faced only fairly minor opposition to her reelection. However, in 1992, following reapportionment of her district, she faced a fairly formidable opponent in fellow Chattanoogan Zach Wamp. While she defeated Wamp, her margin of victory was considerably less than that to which she was accustomed and she did not stand for an 11th term in 1994. (Wamp then won election to the seat fairly easily.) Subsequent to her retirement from Congress she has maintained a fairly low profile other than her advocacy for victims of domestic violence, which she had publicly stated that she was herself during her second marriage. |