Lacey Davenport

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Lacey Davenport was a character in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury. She is often said to be based on Millicent Fenwick, a Republican member of Congress from New Jersey, though Trudeau often denied this link.

She and Dick Davenport were first introduced as attendees at a Walden College Alumni Reunion in 1974. The two had been living in sin for decades, and finally decided to get married. Lacey later became a major character as she ran as the Republican nominee for a seat in the United States Congress, serving a district comprising the Bay Area in California, in the mid-1970s. Her opponents were Virginia "Ginny" Slade, who ran as an independent, and the incumbent, Congressman Ventura, the Democratic nominee.

For a while the race was close, but with Lacey and Ginny fighting over votes, their competition (whom they both found to be highly immoral) was unifying his support and coming out ahead. Deciding that anything was better than having him win, and that Lacey was more qualified than herself, Ginny dropped out of the race and supported Lacey, who won.

Lacey represented, in many ways, Garry Trudeau's idea of a perfect politician. Although she was a member of the Republican Party, and was fiscally quite conservative, she was nevertheless a very liberal character at heart. Although she was very wealthy and travelled in the highest social circles, Lacey's devotion to her constituents was unbreakable. In some ways, she seemed naive to how dishonest the rest of her friends in Congress could be. In 1990, she announced she was resigning as a protest over the savings and loan scandals, to try and set an example. However, instead of following her lead, most everyone else assumed she was dying (she would be persuaded to accept her seat back). Only after the elections the same year, Lacey went back to Congress after winning the election as a write-in candidate from the voters in her district. Joanie, a die hard Democrat, even went to work for her after graduating, and stayed in her employ for many years.

Lacey was challenged for her seat in Congress in the early 1980s by Clyde, who had been Ginny's boyfriend, and later her husband. Davenport won re-election.

Lacey's husband, Dick, was an avid birdwatcher. He raised some controversy in a 1986 strip when, while dying, he called upon God to let him get a photograph of a Bachman's Warbler before passing on. Since then he has appeared to Lacey in ghost form.

Lacey herself died in 1998, after many years in Congress. By this point she was suffering from Alzheimers, and could scarcely remember anything. She mistook a homeless woman, Alice P. Schwarzman for her late sister Pearl, and ended up leaving all her money to her.

Lacey was collected by her late husband, and he led her to heaven. She too has made sporadic appearances since then as a ghost.