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Colorado delegate has time of her life

Pagosa Springs woman an 'older than dirt' party activist

By Lynn Bartels, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published September 4, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Colorado delegate Mojie Adler, left, of Pagosa Springs, says the Pledge of Allegiance with other delegates at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., on Tuesday. "It's my first convention and it's been great," she said.

Photo by Joe Mahoney / The Rocky

Colorado delegate Mojie Adler, left, of Pagosa Springs, says the Pledge of Allegiance with other delegates at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., on Tuesday. "It's my first convention and it's been great," she said.

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She might be the most senior Colorado delegate at the Republican convention because, in her own words, she's "older than dirt."

But Mojie Adler won't provide a birth date - and she doesn't want any vital statistics looked up in any database and released to the public, either.

But then, age isn't the point. Adler is one of the feistiest delegates at the Republican National Convention.

"Mojie's great," said Dick Wadhams, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party. "She's got more spunk than most people half her age."

Whatever that may be.

Her local newspaper in Pagosa Springs once called her a gadfly, a description Adler gladly embraced. Her e-mail includes the word "gadfly", and the word is stitched on one of her ever- present baseball caps.

"A gadfly is one who annoys others," she said. "I call a spade a spade."

Adler is an officer with the state Republican central committee, and president and secretary of the Archuleta County Federation of Republican Women.

"When the federation meets this fall I'm going to tell them you've got to find someone to be president and secretary because I'm overloaded," she said. "But you just can't get anybody else to take some of these jobs."

She traveled the world with her first husband, who was in the military, and then worked for the Department of Defense in San Antonio as a computer analyst. When she retired, she looked West.

"I had vacationed in Colorado for years when I was in the states. I liked the weather. You weren't held hostage by an air conditioner," she said.

Adler lost her hair in 1993 after a bout with cancer and a round of chemotherapy. She's been wearing baseball caps every since.

"Everybody said, 'It will grow back better than ever.' I'm still waiting," she said. "I can't stand to wear wigs. They're too hot. So I said, 'What the hell? I'll be comfortable.' "

She and her husband, Jim Rain, decided to turn the convention trip into a mini-family vacation. They left home last Wednesday, visited some friends and pulled into their Minnesota hotel parking lot at noon Sunday, just as credentials were handed out to Colorado delegates.

"We were right on time."

Adler said she was disappointed that Monday's RNC activities were scaled back. She was so relieved that Tuesday was business as usual that, to her husband's chagrin, she showed up at the Xcel Center at 1 p.m.

The delegates didn't need to be there until 6.

"It's my first convention, and it's been great," she said. "I ran because I thought everybody ought to do everything once in this life, and I needed to get on it because I'm older than dirt."