BOISE, Idaho — A female as a mayor. In Boise, that didn't happen until 2019, when Mayor Lauren McLean became the first elected Boise mayor.
But imagine trying to run for that position in the 1930s, when very few women worked, and the fight for women's rights was actively going on.
It's this timeframe and a new discovery that has a Boise man asking who this woman is after finding a card in a book from the thrift store.
You can find thousands of words in just one book, but it's these words that jumped off the page for Jack Puckett.
"This is how it played out, I went to a thrift store, like Youth Ranch, or some such and it was inside there," said Puckett. "I did not know it was inside there. I bought it, brought it home, opened it up, it fell out and I said, 'Oh my goodness, what's this?' So I uh then was intrigued."
There was history on the card he found. It said, "Vote for Esther Marenholtz for Mayor Boise City, April 4th, 1933. The candidate who is honest, competent, and truly the friend of the worker."
Puckett wanted to know who this mayoral candidate was.
When you do a quick Google search, the city of Boise shows J.P. Pope was mayor from 1929 to February 1933.
After that, Ross Cady was appointed for three months and finished the rest of the 1933 term in May.
Which would make sense for Esther Marenholtz to campaign in 1933.
However, the outcome was another male, JJ McCue, who was elected as Boise's mayor from 1933 to 1935.
The City of Boise never saw a woman fill the role until 2003, 70 years after Marenholtz put her name in the running.
Carolyn Terteling-Payne was the first female interim mayor in 2003.
In 2019, Lauren McLean became the first woman ever elected as mayor.
Puckett believes Marenholtz is a trailblazer.
"She obviously had the chutzpah and intelligence to go do this," said Puckett. "I just wanna know more about her. She's so intriguing. This person actually had run in the day when everything was against her. Everything in those days was so anti-woman in politics."
Puckett said there were likely so many other things that stood against her.
"This is very local and it has a very pertinent connection to where I live," said Puckett. "The history of the place, the Boise area. There have to be people who know her."
Despite losing the election, Esther Marenholtz made an impact in other ways.
In 1943, a report on the impact of the war on local food habits said an Esther Marenholtz, was with the division of program surveys for the Department of Agriculture and reported that on the West Coast, many people had no fresh meat for as much as six weeks and they had requested that meat be included in the rationed food.
That aligns with an obituary saved from a local paper.
It said Esther was born in December 1898 in Great Bend, Kansas.
She was married and divorced, had two children, and ran for mayor of Boise in 1933.
Later she moved to Washington D.C. and lobbied for a pension for her mother, was politically active, and got a job in the Department of Agriculture.
It states that she died at 72 years old in Colorado and now rests at the Dry Creek Cemetery in Boise.
Puckett still has questions about who she was, hoping it will bring inspiration to everyone in the Treasure Valley.
"She really does represent what you would want as someone to emulate, somebody to look up to and, and realize that where I feel unworthy or where I feel hesitant, she blew through it," said Puckett.
Puckett wants to know if there is any family in the area that could explain her history.