Sharon Anderson sometimes took her meals at the Salvation Army on West Seventh Street or passed time with friends and acquaintances at the downtown St. Paul City Passport Senior Center before it closed in 2016. The fact that she had once declared her Summit Avenue home to be her church — and herself its high minister — as a way of voiding back taxes never seemed to bother most of her peers in either setting, where she developed something of a following.
Sharon Anderson on July 17, 2012. (Chris Polydoroff / Pioneer Press)
Anderson, arguably St. Paul’s most colorful Republican gadfly, claimed to have run for public office — from the St. Paul City Council, to St. Paul mayor, to state attorney general and president of the United States — almost every year since 1970, while representing herself in court in so many lawsuits against the city and elected officials that in 1984 a state judge barred her from ever suing the city again.
Her campaigns survived at least two political primaries and made national news for her off-color remarks during a 2013 mayoral debate, but she never won a general election, which to her seemed besides the point.
Her greater goal? Serving as a thorn in the side of institutions she held in contempt, from the state court system to city inspections. “I have to make the city accountable,” said Anderson, during one of many unsuccessful runs for city council in 2019. “I want my home back on Summit Avenue.”
‘A different perspective on politics’
Following months of living in a senior rehabilitation center, Anderson, 86, died at 11 a.m. on Sept. 15 at United Hospital in downtown St. Paul. A cause of death has yet to be determined, said her former sister-in-law, Charlotte Peterson of Sarasota, Fla. Members of Anderson’s family have requested an autopsy.
Charlotte Peterson, who is divorced from Anderson’s brother, Billy Peterson, said she had not heard from Anderson in 30 years but received a plaintive phone call several months ago. Anderson was estranged from most of her siblings and other relatives.
“The last six months of her life she was completely blind, and she suffered a lot because of that,” Charlotte Peterson said. “She really was a good person. She just had her own politics, and they didn’t conform. She spent too much of her time doing that, instead of concentrating on other things she should have concentrated on. But let’s face it. Nobody’s politics conform anymore.”
“I had tried to help her over this past six months,” Peterson added. “She was just a very unique person, and she had a different perspective on politics than a lot of people did. She was constantly fighting the system, so to speak.”
A celebrity of sorts
To the general public, Anderson’s eccentricities as a perennial political candidate may have been hard to fathom, but to peers who struggled to make do from one Social Security check to the next, she became a celebrity of sorts — a constant reminder that not every friend and neighbor would fit neatly into the modern economy.
Arturo Lee recalled thinking to himself “I better get this job done, get the money, and never look back” after Anderson hired him to add new tarp over the failing roof of her Dayton’s Bluff home, despite his protests that the pink stucco structure needed to be re-shingled.
That was a decade ago, and the taciturn Anderson soon hired him again and again, eventually winning him over as a friend by offering life lessons that Lee said he said he came to appreciate.
“We got pretty close,” said Lee on Monday. “I assumed at first she was a little crazy, but she was kind of a brilliant crazy. She was smart financially. She gave me a lot of sound advice over the last 10 years, just talking about real estate and little tidbits here and there. Sometimes it didn’t add up until later on in life and then it was like oh, I can apply this here.”
Declaring home a church
In 1988, Anderson declared her Summit Avenue home to be her church and thus exempt from property taxes, a strategy that did not protect her from eviction. She continued to use the same address across decades of election filings, even after a fellow city council candidate in 2019 challenged her residency status in court.
To the dismay of party insiders, Anderson slipped through the 1994 Republican primary to win the GOP nomination for state attorney general. Even many among her own party were relieved when she lost to DFL incumbent Hubert H. Humphrey III in the general election. Still, she got nearly half a million votes.
In 2013, Anderson drew national attention to St. Paul’s four-way mayoral debate when she likened St. Paul and Minneapolis to Sodom and Gomorrah and compared the city’s new light rail corridor to Nazi train cars carrying Holocaust victims to concentration camps.
“The city of St. Paul, they’ll come, they’ll steal your car, they’ll shut your water off,” said Anderson, who wore bulky sunglasses and a jacket adorned with a large dollar sign on the back.
A political win toward the end
Chris Coleman, who handily won re-election as mayor that year, recalled how Anderson declared before the rolling cameras that she was not “Ciley Myrus” but she was indeed “a wrecking ball” — a reference to Miley Cyrus, who was famous at the time for the pop song “Wrecking Ball.”
“Like I could ever forget that debate,” said Coleman on Monday. “I played that clip when I became president of the National League of Cities. That debate captured Sharon in all of her Sharon-ness because she would just go off on things. She could laugh at herself, and that was the thing I really liked about her. As out there as she was, she really could laugh at herself.”
In August 2024, to her own surprise, Anderson won the Republican primary for the House 67B seat on St. Paul’s East Side by 13 votes, defeating fellow Republican AJ Plehal 52% to 48%. It would take days for news of her primary win to trickle over to Anderson — a self-proclaimed “political prisoner” — who was hospitalized against her will around the same time.
State Rep. Jay Xiong, a DFLer, won re-election to the seat with 75% of the vote that November, which still resulted in more than 3,500 votes for Anderson.
Lee would sometimes visit Anderson at the Highland Chateau health and rehabilitation center in Highland Park, where she had been relocated with some objection after her Surrey Avenue property was deemed unfit for human habitation. He told her the new placement was probably for the best.
She disagreed. “I’m not going to lay here and die,” said Anderson, in a three-minute voicemail left for a reporter on the Pioneer Press news tip line on July 17, one of many lengthy messages over the past year. “I still have purpose. I still have meaning.”
To Lee’s frustration, he discovered last month that she’d been moved to the building’s psychiatric unit and he was not allowed to see her.
“Just by looking at the pod, it was gloomy, very quiet,” said Lee, who was surprised to soon discover that she had been transferred again, this time to United Hospital, where she died last week. “She was upstairs in the pod for maybe 2 1/2 days, and that was it.”
“I just didn’t see her declining that fast,” Lee added. “She would never not want me to see her.”
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