LITTLE ROCK—Vada Sheid said she didn’t know if she would have run for Arkansas’ Legislature in 1966 had it not been for a deathbed request from her father.

“’This is the time,’ he told me. ’You can do it.’...I didn’t know if I could do it, but I knew I had to try. I went down to the courthouse and filed my candidacy to represent District Three,” Sheid wrote in a newly published autobiography.

Sheid, who died in February at the age of 91, went on that year to be elected to the state House and eventually made history, becoming the first woman in Arkansas to be elected to the House and the Senate. Now, the stories of her 20 years in the Legislature are being shared in a memoir released by her family Wednesday.

“Vada: Nothing Personal, Just Politics,” was written using interviews Sheid had in the years leading up to her death. The 244-page book will be sold at the Clinton Library’s museum store in downtown Little Rock and through the family’s Web site.

“Vada Sheid is a great example of what elective service and public service can do,” said Skip Rutherford, dean of the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service. “I think this is a great gift to history and a great gift to the public.”

Sheid, from Mountain Home, was elected to the Arkansas House in 1966 and served four terms there. She was elected to the Senate in 1976 and served there until 1984. Her last stint in the Legislature was when she served one term in the House from 1993 until 1995.

Richard Sheid, her son, said his mother read a draft of the autobiography, which was co-authored by Marideth Sisco. The book is also based on interviews Sheid conducted with veteran journalist Carol Griffee for an unpublished biography, he said.

“It’s pretty much a history lesson on, if you are a female in politics, ... how to get things done, not only in state politics but also in national politics,” said Richard Sheid, who runs the furniture store started by Vada and Carl Sheid in 1941.

Sheid also recounts in the book her work pushing for the construction of two bridges across Lake Norfork in Baxter County. The two federally funded bridges replaced ferries that for decades had hauled people, vehicles and goods across the lake.

She also touches on national politics in the book, defending former President Clinton, who served as governor during part of her tenure in the Senate.

“As people ridiculed him, I always stood up and reminded them — we elected him our President, not our priest or minister,” she wrote. “Without the constant media microscope that political life has become, he would have fared no worse, I dare say, than a great many of our political leaders in ages past.”