It was a hot Thursday morning in Minnesota. Across the country Democrats were converging on San Francisco to nominate Walter F. Mondale for president. There was little mystery to the proceedings; the former vice president had beaten away a dangerous challenge from Gary Hart and all that remained was to name a running mate. Presidential nominees in those days did that in the convention city itself.

Though history remembers Mondale as the last of the New Deal-era conventional Democrats, there was a strong unconventional streak to him and it stood in vivid relief that day in July 1984. Half a continent from the party leaders, Mondale walked in beneath the marble dome of the state Capitol in St. Paul and told the world he had chosen a 48-year-old daughter of an Italian immigrant to be his running mate. She was the first woman on a national ticket for a major party.

Emotional day

Minnesotans are famously unemotive, but that day the old building rocked with excitement. Geraldine Ferraro, a three-term congresswoman from Queens with a brash attitude, a quick mind and an iron will, understood the burden she was shouldering but, more important, she understood the moment she was creating. “American history,” she said, “is about doors being opened — doors of opportunity for everyone, no matter who you are, as long as you’re willing to earn it.”

At the conclusion of that sentence I saw a Secret Service man wipe away a tear.

“She did the new thing,” Mondale, now 83, said in a telephone conversation hours after she died. “She had a lot of people trying to knock her down, but she was brave and resilient. I’m sure she died feeling good about what she did. She left behind a different country.”

Today, 88 women serve in Congress, including 17 in the Senate — more than five times the rate of women on Capitol Hill when Ferraro was elected. This year, six women are serving as governors of their states, more than 1,700 are in state legislatures. More than 40 percent of the state legislators in Colorado are women. Three women have been secretaries of state, four have been named to the Supreme Court, with three serving now.

Ahead of her time

They are in many respects the legatees of Geraldine Anne Ferraro, who died Saturday at age 75.

“She was a woman ahead of her time,” said Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, the lone Republican freshman woman who entered the House in January 1979 when Ferraro was the lone Democratic woman to enter the House that year. “She was determined to make a difference on issues for women and working families. I remember Geraldine leading an effort on pension reform. Women were discovering on their husband’s death they had no pension benefits, and that outraged her.”

Another remnant of an era long ago: Reps. Snowe and Ferraro attended each other’s fundraisers.

Ferraro never became vice president, of course. The Mondale-Ferraro ticket lost every state but Mondale’s home, but Ferraro stands as a symbol — a pioneer, to be sure, but also an exemplar of grace.

“There was pressure on her from the moment she was selected,” remembered John Sasso, who ran her 1984 campaign. “The hopes that people were putting on her, especially young women and girls, is hard to believe today. But she handled it all with enormous calm and dignity. The thing I remember is how grounded she was, and how much courage she had.”

Grace under fire

She needed that grounding, and that courage. Political professionals remember her press conference when she patiently fielded questions from a hostile press corps about her husband’s business practices. To this day the strategy of standing bravely until every question is answered is called “a Ferraro.” She endured catcalls from critics, one of whom was Barbara Bush, who said her husband’s rival in the vice presidential debate that fall was a pejorative that rhymed with “witch,” a remark Bush always regretted having made. And Ferraro fought cancer for a dozen years.

“She didn’t deserve all the stuff that was thrown at her,” said 1988 Democratic nominee Michael S. Dukakis, one of the party leaders Mondale kept as a backup in the event he didn’t choose a woman or a member of a minority group.

Mondale had conducted his vice-presidential search in public, with several potential running mates walking down the path to his prairie-style home in North Oaks, Minn. The smart money was on Henry Cisneros, then the mayor of San Antonio — so appealing that John R. Reilly, who was conducting the search for Mondale, later said that he looked as if he had been bred by kings. Those close to the campaign thought he might choose a woman. They had the mayor of San Francisco, Dianne Feinstein, in mind. The press corps was convinced Ferraro, a protege of Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., had been too pushy — a term never applied to the male contenders — in her interview with Mondale.

“Here goes,” Mondale said when he picked up the phone to call Ferraro and to ask her to be ferried to Minnesota on a private plane in the black of early morning. She arrived at the Mondale home at 2 a.m. “There was total elation, total excitement in the room,” remembered Maxine Isaacs, then the Mondale press secretary. “We thought we were on the brink of a brand-new world.”

The appearance of Ferraro’s blond head on the pillow on daughter Eleanor Mondale’s bed was the only hint that Mondale’s children had that their father had made his historic selection.

Unfulfilled legacy

She proved to be a tough campaigner. She took on George H.W. Bush and was a remorseless critic of Ronald Reagan. A month before the election she assailed the president for his failure to prevent three explosions at American outposts in Beirut in 17 months. “The first incident was a tragedy,” she said. “The second showed neglect. And the third was a disgrace.”

Ferraro didn’t live to see a woman elected president — “an unfulfilled legacy,” as Isaacs put it. But she deserves to be remembered as a trailblazer.

“I think it was one of the greatest things I ever did, and it was a great thing that Geraldine did,” said Mondale. “I’m very proud of her and I’m very proud of doing it.”