Ann Marie Buerkle adds Congressional campaign to medical, law, business career

By Adele DelSavio

At an age when many of her peers are taking it easy, Ann Marie Buerkle of Syracuse is expanding on her nursing, law, business and political career with a run for U.S. Congress.

Buerkle, 59, has the Republican and Conservative nominations to represent the 25th Congressional district and is pursuing the Independent party nomination.

“I always liked politics. It’s important to be part of the process. The government is really us,” she says.

Buerkle grew up with three brothers and one sister, and first-generation American parents, in Auburn. She attended St. Alphonsus Elementary School and Mount Carmel Catholic High School.

Although she reached young adulthood when the women’s liberation movement was gaining strength and getting vocal, it didn’t influence her early life decisions.

“The revolution passed me by,” she says with a laugh, attributing her unawareness to living in a small town and in a traditional family where gender roles were well-defined. Teaching, nursing and the convent were the three career paths open to young women in that world, she says. She got married two weeks out of nursing school, in 1972.

“I was late coming to some realizations,” she says. One came in 1991, when she was 40 and entered Syracuse University’s School of Law. “It was the first time someone said, ‘You can think.’ Sometimes, as I was going to classes or walking in the halls at law school, I’d feel it was unbelievable I could be doing this.”

All four of her grandparents came to the United States from Italy and became American citizens. “They came from small Italian villages, and they never learned to speak English,” she remembers.

For more than 60 years her father sold insurance for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. While raising his family and selling insurance, he owned and ran Auburn’s Mohican Market and roller skating rinks in Syracuse, North Syracuse and Auburn. One of the rinks—the Rollerdome in Auburn—is still in business.
“He was the quintessential entrepreneur,” Buerkle says of her father, who passed away two years ago at 85. Her 89-year-old mother still lives in Auburn.

Hard work—Buerkle spent her teenage years working in the roller rinks and in Mohican Market, absorbing her parents’ ethic of hard work and commitment. She gives her parents credit for her other personal values: individual responsibility and personal integrity.

Like her father, she is a business owner, running a small commercial real estate business for more than 20 years.

Buerkle earned her RN degree in 1972 from St. Joseph’s Hospital School of Nursing in Syracuse. She worked in medical-surgical nursing at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. At Columbia-Presbyterian, she specialized in trauma treatment.

She calls working at the much larger hospital in the much larger city an educational experience and a life experience. “All of a sudden there was this realization of a whole other world,” she says.

In 1976, she moved with her husband back to Central New York, settling in Syracuse, and they had their first child. She attended Le Moyne College and in 1977 got involved in the pro-life movement, helping establish a Friends for Life chapter in Syracuse.

She approached her speaking and educational role in Friends for Life from a medical perspective. “I talked about fetal development and told the audience, ‘I’m giving you the facts so you will be able to make an informed decision if and when you need to do so,’” she says.

She went on to have six children, and when they were young she worked as a substitute school nurse in Syracuse. “This was from the late ‘80s to early ‘90s. It was a way to keep my hand in nursing as well as be there for my kids,” she says. During the 1980s she also ran for the Onondaga County Legislature.

Her oldest child was 15 and her youngest was 4 when she entered Syracuse University’s School of Law in 1991. She brought her 4-year-old, Caroline, to class. Now 23, Caroline lives in Syracuse and is helping her mother with her campaign. Another daughter, Christine, a graphic design artist, designed logos for the campaign.

Once Buerkle graduated, she worked for a medical malpractice firm for two years and joined the Women’s Bar Association. In 1994 she was elected to the Syracuse Common Council.

Special-needs advocacy—In 2009, she became certified as a member of the Surrogate Decision-making Committee for the New York State Commission on Quality of Care. The committee reviews medical decisions made for legally incompetent patients who have no family members to act as advocates.

She has a personal reason for her interest in those with special needs. Her sister Mary, four years older, struggled with multiple sclerosis for years and then died during Buerkle’s first year of law school. “I watched what she went through in high school, limping and dropping things and feeling awkward. Eventually she became a quadriplegic. She had a spirit that a lot of people with functioning arms and legs don’t have,” Buerkle says.

In addition to her advocacy work with the decision-making committee, she counsels abused women at Syracuse’s Vera House and provides volunteer legal services for the Onondaga County Bar Association’s pro bono program. “So many people don’t have access to resources,” she notes.

To concentrate on her campaign, she is taking a leave from her position as assistant New York state attorney general, a post she has held since 1997. In that role she focuses on health care law and fights for money owed by insurance companies to the State University of New York Upstate University Hospital, money owed as a result of the companies’ rejection of patients’ medical claims.

Buerkle’s marriage ended in 1997. “I wish it had worked,” she says without elaborating. Of her four grown daughters and two grown sons, only one—Caroline—lives in New York. The others—Christine, Amy, Tom, Betsy and Gus—left New York to pursue better career opportunities, three in Austin, Texas. Despite the distance, Buerkle, her children and her 11 grandchildren remain close.

Her friend, Anne Costa of Baldwinsville, says she admires the way Buerkle has lived her life and her courage in defending her beliefs. Costa says, “She has consistently stood for the values and ideals upon which this country was founded. We need someone like that in Washington. I believe that Ann Marie is that someone,” Costa says.