Kay Bailey Hutchison: From Pom-Poms to Politics

To critics, she was all big hair and bigger ambition, but U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's friends—and they topped 4 million in her last election—always delivered more than 60 percent of the vote in three Senate races.

The state's first woman senator is a Galveston girl with roots deep enough to include a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. She lived a storybook life of easy social status leavened by hard-won achievement: the University of Texas cheerleader earned a law degree well before women were deemed suitable for lawyering, and then made a mark at Houston's KPRC-TV. She wed Dallas lawyer Ray Hutchison, a Texas GOP force in his own right, but it was Kay who hit it big in politics, serving in Austin before making the leap to Washington in 1993.

—Larry Neal