POLITICAL SATIRIST | FORMER MAYOR | ZALARIAN ENTHUSIAST
Mickie Winkler is a product of New York City and of the nine cities she has lived in stateside. Post retirement she spent a year each in Russia and China, teaching conversational English, and in Turkey and Thailand as well: “I became integrated into the various societies and learned that there are many different ways to look at the world.”
Although Mickie is now known as an irreverent writer of short humor — often inspired by politics — her post-college life started in a somewhat different direction. “Originally,” she says, “I was in marketing and mostly humor-driven advertising. I spent twenty fun years working for advertising and marketing agencies before retiring to teach abroad.”
In the early 90s Mickie and her husband, Bob, moved to Menlo Park, California. By 2001, Bob’s health kept them grounded and her political career began. Although she had strong opinions that she’s never been shy about sharing, getting involved in politics was not on her radar. So how did that happen?
“A group of friends, desperate (obviously) for a third person to run on the city council ballot, asked me. Because of my oh so brilliant and honest campaign, I got our slate elected.”
“The council has a rotating mayorship. In 2005, it was my turn. I wasn’t going to do the mayor thing because I wasn’t really interested in the ceremonial kind of work involved. But I was going back to New York for my 50th high school reunion that year and going back as a mayor was irresistible.”
Mickie looks back on her time on the council as productive, costly and inspirational. “It was costly because Bob and I got parking tickets every time we parked downtown. And we got ticketed because I voted against a precipitous salary increase for our local police. I even got a ticket on my bicycle for crossing railroad tracks just before the arms came down. A policeman stopped me and said, ‘Usually, Madame Mayor, I just give a lecture. But for you, I’ll make an exception.'" And he did. "When I ran an unsuccessful reelection campaign, my husband said he couldn’t afford to vote for me. My time on the council was also inspirational and productive because serving the public without the goal of re-election is such a delight."
Mickie being Mickie, she had no intention of leaving office quietly. “In my last speech, I talked about my many accomplishments. One was getting a public restroom built in Menlo Park's largest park, Burgess Park, to serve the tennis players, parents and others, who, otherwise had no place ‘to go.'” For my very last official statement I said, ‘I hope when you go to the bathroom at Burgess, you will think of me.’”
Then, in 2021, 16 years after leaving office as mayor of Menlo Park, Mickie “threw her bonnet in the ring” and launched a mock and an extremely unsuccessful third-party run for governor of California. “If I’m elected governor,” she promised in her campaign statement, “I will give our politicians a good verbal spanking. I will instruct them to stop thinking about their reelections and to start thinking about the common good. And if they don’t get with it, I’ll tell their kids what screwups they are.”
Mickie Winkler’s adventures are captured in her book Politics, Police and Other Earthling Antics. “Humor keeps me happy, and politics is a never-ending source of material,” as demonstrated in her book. “It was published by a British Company,” she explains, “because, although it is all true, it was not PC enough to get published here.”
Mickie’s second book, Earthling Antics, a coffee table book, will be published this spring, by an American company.