VanderKolk’s Smart, Unafraid--and Green : Politics: The 25-year-old who defeated a tough, seasoned politician for a supervisor’s seat is committed to environmental issues and says she’s a quick study.

On Thursday, Maria VanderKolk was a token woman on a company softball team.

“I’m not capable of a home run,” she said after grounding out weakly to third base, “except in politics.”

On Friday, she hit her home run, defeating Supervisor Madge L. Schaefer in a stunning upset.

Who is this political slugger? That question was asked often last week by shocked county administrators whose interest in her suddenly soared.

And what is this home-grown slow-growth movement that snatched her from obscurity in March when no other candidate stepped forward to challenge Schaefer?

For starters, VanderKolk is Schaefer’s opposite.

Schaefer, 48, is a veteran of 20 years in community, city and county politics--savvy and tough. VanderKolk, 25, has only the political experience that could be gained in a three-month campaign that did not begin to jell until mid-May.

However, like Schaefer, VanderKolk is smart and well-spoken, not as glib or as funny as her predecessor but quick on her feet and a self-proclaimed quick study.

“Some people have said I had better be a quick study, and I can assure you that I am,” she said Friday after her victory was declared. “That’s not a concern of mine.”

VanderKolk is a 1986 honors graduate of the University of Colorado, where she earned degrees in political science, with a concentration on international affairs, and in business, with an emphasis on public relations.

She works as a manager at a firm in Woodland Hills that matches trademarked logos, such as the California Raisins, with products, such as T-shirts and coffee cups.

She is a skilled singer and amateur musician, playing both the piano and the flute, her family said.

Admirers say that VanderKolk’s most valuable attribute may not be her intelligence but her willingness to plunge into new things even when the outcome is uncertain and potentially embarrassing.

Recruited on the eve of the March 9 filing deadline by the environmental group Save Open Space, she consented within hours to run against Schaefer although Thousand Oaks political veterans to whom she was referred agreed that she had virtually no chance of winning.

VanderKolk’s openness to new experiences was also seen Friday when she accepted an invitation from a classic rock station KZTR-FM (95.6) to co-host an hour of music Monday beginning at 6 a.m. The disc jockeys thought the supervisor-elect might be a listener, and she is.

And after her victory was announced, VanderKolk, who at 5-foot-11 has a model’s lean appearance, allowed herself to be photographed by a Ventura newspaper wearing a dress while lying in a bed of yellow flowers, propped on her left elbow and raising her right hand in a V-for-victory gesture.

She also plays softball, a game at which she does not excel, at the behest of her husband, Michael, 26, an electrical engineer at Hughes Aircraft in Canoga Park. The company’s co-ed teams need women on the field or they will be penalized.

Less publicly, she writes romance novels, hoping for profit but also for experience, which she thinks might lead one day to more serious works of fiction.

“She’s working on her fourth romance novel, none of them published,” said VanderKolk’s mother, Louise Lederhos. “She’s really a wonderful writer. The idea is for her to learn by doing. And people will be surprised at all she can do.”

“The best advice I’ve heard,” VanderKolk said during the campaign, “is to be myself.” And she says she is intent on doing just that.

She followed that axiom when questioned by a reporter during the race.

She acknowledged that she had never been to a meeting of the Board of Supervisors and that she did not know much about county government.

“You can bring up a lot of things that I’m not familiar with right now,” she said. “I don’t pretend to be a career politician.”

But she said she would learn local government in the same way as she did Spanish in college, by immersing herself in the topic and quickly becoming fluent.

And she argued that her reason for running against Schaefer--to spotlight the need to protect Ventura County open space from Los Angeles County sprawl--was reason enough for voters to support her.

Indeed, with VanderKolk’s victory, some local officials have virtually declared a new age of local politics in which environmental concerns will weigh more heavily on a broader range of issues and decisions.

“In Ventura County politics, this is the biggest upset I’ve ever seen,” said veteran Public Defender Kenneth Clayman last week. “It sends a message out: No growth, no growth.”

Supervisor John K. Flynn said he received a variation of that message a year ago, when hundreds of environmentalists jammed the supervisors’ chamber at the government center.

They argued forcefully against allowing developers to formulate environmental impact reports on two massive projects planned for the Jordan and Ahmanson ranches in the southeast county. The studies were approved on a 3-2 vote, with Flynn and Susan K. Lacey dissenting.

“I’d never seen so many people from all over the place,” Flynn recalled last week. “They were here from Malibu, Santa Barbara, Ojai, Thousand Oaks and from Los Angeles.”

Five months later, three underdog candidates won seats on the Ventura City Council after running slow-growth campaigns backed by $15,000 in advertisements from Patagonia Inc., a Ventura-based, environmentally conscious outdoor clothing company.

Now, VanderKolk, backed by Patagonia and by 75 environmentalists who knocked on thousands of doors in the 2nd District, has defeated Schaefer by 102 votes out of 23,526 cast to capture the south-county board seat.

“The message is that the environmental movement today is growing, and it’s regional and it’s going to exceed even its strength in the early 1970s,” Flynn said. “This throws a whole bunch of issues up in the air.”

Other political observers said that VanderKolk won in part because a cocky Schaefer hardly campaigned and because the fiery one-term supervisor had made many enemies during her 12 years on the Thousand Oaks City Council and the county board.

However, many Thousand Oaks and county officials agreed that VanderKolk’s win was rooted in voters’ concern for the environment.

She was fortunate, the supervisor-elect acknowledged, that entertainer Bob Hope agreed to a controversial land swap involving his Jordan Ranch during the campaign.

VanderKolk opposed the land swap, which would make possible the subdivision of Jordan Ranch into 750 homes and a golf course. Schaefer favored the deal because it would turn more than 5,700 acres of hills and mountains to state and federal agencies and would leave the ultimate decision on the development with the Board of Supervisors.

The Jordan Ranch issue was not simple, creating a rift even among environmentalists. For example, the six-county Southern California Regional Conservation Committee of the Sierra Club endorsed the swap 18 to 4, but both Ventura County representatives voted against it.

Still, in general, VanderKolk and environmentalist volunteers carried a compelling message to the doorsteps of thousands of homes near the two proposed ranch developments and to communities near the exclusive 650-home Lake Sherwood country club project, which the supervisors approved in 1987.

The histories of some of those volunteers explain why they turned out for a newcomer they had never even met. For example, Ken Bauer, a supporter who VanderKolk said knocked on more than 1,000 doors in Westlake Village and Newbury Park, fled Los Angeles in 1976 to get away from its problems.

“I moved 43 miles from where I work because I want my family to be safe,” said Bauer, of Westlake Village, personnel manager at Arco’s regional headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. “This place has gone downhill ever since. So, about six years ago, I started working on slow-growth campaigns.”

The same inclination drew VanderKolk to Save Open Space, a 144-member environmental group whose members are mostly from Thousand Oaks and Agoura Hills. Already a member of Greenpeace and the National Wildlife Federation, the self-described “left-wing Republican” said she wanted to act on her beliefs.

“There was a sense of frustration,” she said last week. “I could complain and complain, but what was I really doing. Now I feel that I’m making a difference. I’m helping to get our message across, and it’s really a good feeling.”

In the back of her mind, VanderKolk said, she always knew that she was going to become involved in politics. Her mother remembered that VanderKolk worked in Denver-area political campaigns in high school, then confided that she wanted to be the first woman to become U.S. secretary of state.

With that in mind, VanderKolk chose her college courses.

“I studied business to be practical. I studied liberal arts to do what I really wanted to do. That was where my heart and my mind were at,” she said. “I always saw myself working in some kind of political position in 15 or 20 years. It just came quicker than I expected.”

Early Wednesday morning, after late results had pushed her ahead of Schaefer, VanderKolk said she could not sleep. She wasn’t thinking of the “nice raise” she will get when she assumes her $47,844-a-year job in January.

“I just lay there and stared at the ceiling for a while and contemplated the enormity of it all,” she said. “It’s frightening because there’s a lot involved, but I’m not cowed by it. I’m ready to get in there and work.”

The daughter of a housewife and a former aerospace engineer who own a hardware store in suburban Denver, Maria VanderKolk faces a difficult 1991. It will be a year under a magnifying glass.

Her mother thinks Ventura County will be surprised.

“People look at her and she’s very pretty. I’ve always called her my little Tinker Bell. She has a kind of starry-eyed quality about her,” Louise Lederhos said Saturday.

“But I think she’s going to handle it very well because she’s tough in the right ways. When she says she’s going to do something, she does it. She’s incredibly organized, and she gets things done. If she doesn’t succeed, it won’t be because she hasn’t tried.”