Judy Martz was born Judith Helen Morstein on July 28, 1943, in Big Timber, Montana, a small ranching community in the southern part of the state. Her father worked as a miner and rancher. Her mother took jobs as a cook, liquor-store clerk, and motel maid. The family later moved to Butte, the hard-edged mining city that would remain Martz’s home for most of her life. She grew up with a brother and several sisters in a household that prized work and self-reliance more than formal privilege.
She graduated from Butte High School in 1961 and later attended Eastern Montana College, now Montana State University Billings. She did not complete a four-year degree. That fact followed her into politics, where critics sometimes used it against her. She answered that her education came from people and from work.
Before politics she was known for two very different kinds of public performance. In 1962 she was named Miss Rodeo Montana. The title fit a young woman who had spent time on ranches and loved horses. At the same time she had taken up speed skating, in part because skiing gear and lift tickets were expensive. She made the 1963 U.S. World Speed Skating Team and competed in Japan. In 1964 she and Sylvia White became the first two Montana women to compete in the Olympics. Martz raced the 1,500 meters at the Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria. She fell during the race and finished fifteenth. She later helped establish the U.S. High Altitude Speed Skating Center in Butte.
In 1965 she married Harry Martz. Together they owned and ran a commercial solid-waste business in Butte for more than three decades. They raised two children, Justin and Stacey. In 1988 Martz donated a kidney to her younger sister Sherrie. That act later shaped her work on organ-donation awareness when she entered statewide office.
Her political path began as a field representative for Republican U.S. Senator Conrad Burns from 1989 to 1995. She also served as president of the Butte Chamber of Commerce and vice-chair of the St. James Hospital board. In 1995 Governor Marc Racicot chose her as lieutenant governor after Denny Rehberg left the post to run for the Senate. In 1996 the Racicot-Martz ticket won. Martz became Montana’s first female lieutenant governor. She chaired the Governor’s Council on Organ Donor Awareness and traveled the state heavily.
Term limits prevented Racicot from seeking a third term. Martz ran for governor in 2000. She won the Republican primary against law professor Rob Natelson. In the general election she defeated Democratic State Auditor Mark O’Keefe, 51 percent to 47 percent, despite being outspent. On January 2, 2001, she became the 22nd governor of Montana and the first woman to hold the office. Karl Ohs served as her lieutenant governor.
She inherited a difficult fiscal picture: a large budget deficit and rising energy costs. Her first legislative session produced a large increase in education funding and tax cuts meant to stimulate a sluggish economy. In 2003 she signed a major personal income-tax reform, the first of its kind in three decades, lowering the top individual rate from 11 percent to 6.9 percent. Bond-rating agencies later gave Montana high marks. By the end of her term the state had moved from deficit to a surplus of roughly $195 million, the first fully balanced budget in many years. She created the Office of Economic Opportunity to recruit employers and develop the workforce. She also emphasized natural-resource development, a stance that put her at odds with environmental groups.
Her term was marked by controversy as well as fiscal results. In August 2001 her chief policy adviser, Shane Hedges, drove drunk and crashed an SUV near Marysville. Passenger Paul Sliter, the Republican House majority leader, was killed. Hedges later pleaded guilty to negligent homicide. Martz washed Hedges’s clothes after the crash, saying it was a mother’s instinct. Critics called it evidence-tampering. Investigators did not charge her, but the episode damaged her standing. An ethics complaint also alleged that she had bought land from Atlantic Richfield in 1999 at a favorable price. Staff use of state phones for political fundraising calls added to the criticism. Her approval rating fell as low as 20 percent. She chose not to seek re-election in 2004.
Martz left office on January 3, 2005. Democrat Brian Schweitzer succeeded her. Afterward she served on boards that included TASER International (later Axon), Maternal Life International, the University of Montana Western, and Big Sky State Games. She spoke often to Christian groups and remained a visible Republican figure in Montana.
In November 2014 she announced that she had stage II pancreatic cancer and was receiving treatment in Arizona. She died on October 30, 2017, in Butte at age 74. In 2017 she was inducted into the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame. Years later a bronze statue of her was unveiled at the state Capitol in Helena.
Martz’s public life combined small-business grit, athletic ambition, and a blunt political style. She broke two statewide glass ceilings in four years. She left office with a stronger state balance sheet than she found and with a record that supporters credit for tax relief and school funding. Opponents remember the scandals and the gaffes more clearly than the surplus. Both parts of the story belong to the same career: a ranch-and-mining-state Republican who moved from the ice rink and the garbage truck to the governor’s office, stuck her neck out, and paid the political price that often follows. She remains the only woman to have served as governor of Montana.