Ferraro felt the heat of national stage

From time to time we see a local figure, a product of the neighborhood, enter the biggest of arenas -- and struggle.

Trouble comes fast -- trouble that might never have blossomed if the person's ambition had been more modest, if he or she had held to the home turf.

Geraldine Ferraro from Queens recalled, in her 1985 book, what it was like right after she became the first woman, and the first Italian-American, to run on a national major-party ticket the year before.

Husband John Zaccaro, whose legal entanglements would come later, became an instant lightning rod.

"Bam. Bam. Bam. Suddenly I was getting hit from all sides. And so was John," she wrote in "Ferraro: My Story." "In one ten-day period . . . my ethics in having taken the spousal [disclosure] exemption would be publicly challenged while John's own ethics in handling a court-appointed conservatorship of a widow's affairs were being questioned, and several of his real-estate transactions were being smeared with innuendo.

"The honeymoon following my nomination was over. And I had been the vice-presidential candidate for only two weeks."

Anyway, she'd become a Democratic celebrity from Queens in a way very different from, say, Gov. Mario Cuomo or her Forest Hills neighbor Alan Hevesi.

After Mondale-Ferraro lost to Reagan-Bush, Ferraro worked in TV, consulted, lobbied, sat on bank boards, endorsed candidates, stayed visible.

Ferraro's name instantly sprang to many minds, of course, three years ago when Sarah Palin became the first woman on a national Republican ticket -- also struggling against that new glare of scrutiny, also part of a famous defeat, but also an indelible "first."

As it turned out, Ferraro's six years in Congress -- and importantly, her status as the first chief of the Queens district attorney's special-victims unit -- would mark the limits of her time in public office.

She tried for a comeback. Ferraro competed in a bruising Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in 1992, but the nominee turned out to be state Attorney General Robert Abrams. She tried again in 1998, but was bested that year by Rep. Charles Schumer, who went on to beat incumbent Alfonse D'Amato.

Twenty-six years ago, the city's often-goofy Inner Circle satire show, a staple of sharp-elbowed local politics, treated the Ferraro candidacy of the previous year with a poignant song to the tune of an Anne Murray hit.

"For history," the Ferraro character sang to the Fritz Mondale character, "you needed me."

Back in the neighborhood, that would ring true for some.

Beth McCabe, a Ferraro Forest Hills neighbor, remembers her well. "I was a little girl when she was the vice-presidential candidate," she said.

"She was fierce -- but she was truly inspirational," said McCabe, now the director of government relations for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "I'd see her walking around the neighborhood and she'd always smile and say hello. She made me want to do what I do now."