By Katie Farrell Lovett
NEWBURYPORT — Joe Holaday remembers clearly the moment he first saw his wife.
He was a lunch cook at Ten Center Street and Donna was hired as a bartender.
"I just immediately fell in love with her," Joe Holaday said last week. "The very first day I saw her, I knew. She is one of the most selfless, big-hearted people I've ever known."
The couple had their wedding reception at the same place they met. They've been married 26 years, and Joe Holaday will tell you, whatever his wife opts to do next has his support and backing.
Including being mayor.
It's a position Holaday, 54, has been campaigning for since the summer. And tomorrow, she'll know if voters elect her over opponent James Shanley to take over from Mayor John Moak in January.
She's been down this road before, having run against Moak during his first election in 2005. Moak won that election with 60 percent of the vote.
Two years ago, she easily won her at-large seat on the City Council, a position she first won in 2003.
Much has changed this time in the campaign for mayor, Holaday says. Then, she wasn't planning on running for mayor when Mary Anne Clancy announced her decision not to seek re-election. But her phone started ringing off the hook. "It was more that people picked me," she says.
But, she says, she learned a lot from that campaign. For one, there were "too many chiefs" trying to run the show and everybody wanted to tell her what to do.
Now, it's a smaller team. "It's a grass-roots effort," she says. And all decisions come through her.
"I'm more confident where I stand," Holaday says.
As a councilor, Holaday would work closely with Moak, but says it was never a hard feat. In fact, the two used to share war stories from their campaign days, Holaday says.
"It's all about the city," she says.
Holaday has always closely followed politics — one of her earliest memories is watching the funeral for JFK and witnessing her father cry. She's volunteered for Kennedy campaigns and remembers seeing Bobby Kennedy march in the St. Patrick's Day parade in South Boston just months before he was assassinated.
She was taught, she says, to stand up and take a stand. Like when she was affected by the images she saw coming from the Vietnam War — she was encouraged by her parents to write a letter to the president about it.
But growing up, Holaday says, her interests included theater — she was active in acting and directing, performing in various plays, including at the North Shore Music Theatre. She wanted to become a director, she remembers.
"There's a creative side to her that no one really knows about," Joe Holaday says.
Even now, Holaday says, she enjoys spending time working on her house, painting and doing interior work. With a historic Victorian, she loves to do research on older, historic homes, she says.
"I love to read," she says.
Growing up in the coastal community of Marblehead, Holaday says it's natural she was drawn to Newburyport. She's been active around Newburyport from coaching Little League to running the Christmas pageant each year at Central Congregational Church. She's been involved in the Beacon Coalition and volunteered with the schools in numerous ways from being a band parent to serving on a task force to researching ways to keep the elementary school instrumental program and being on the superintendent search committee.
She and Joe have two sons, who are now 25 and 20.
It was that dedication that led her to first run for the council. She was first elected as an at-large councilor in 2003. She saw it as a way to use her training — particularly when she was appointed as the chair of the budget and finance committee.
Beth Tremblay-Hall first met Holaday when she was elected to the council in 2003. The two served on a task force together created by Clancy.
"She's an amazing lady," Tremblay-Hall says. "She's incredibly generous with her time. I've been a long-time supporter of Donna Holaday."
The director of grant development and management at Middlesex Community College, Holaday has a bachelor's degree in communication disorders from the University of New Hampshire, a master's degree in speech and language pathology from BU and a master's degree in education from UNH. In 2002, she graduated from Mass. School of Law with a JD.
The best part of being a city councilor, Holaday says, is that it allows for a chance to learn and do research, while working with people to find a solution.
If elected as mayor, Holaday said she hopes to finish her first term in office in two years by leaving the city "in a strong financial place."
She hopes to have foreign language back in the schools and a "strong new superintendent" in command of the schools. She hopes to have more regionalized services with other cities and have started an energy department in the city. The city has come a long way from four years ago when she and Moak engaged in the city's first "green debate."
She would leave the Crow Lane landfill capped with a good closure plan in place and a definitive settlement agreement without the threat of 21E hanging over the city's head, Holaday says.
"I want that signed as soon as possible," she says.
