PROVO — The horse reared up to jump forward and chase its friend. The rider, 70-something Barbara Sandstrom, tumbled backward over the horse's rump.

Mortified, the other members of the Provo City Council watched their small, fragile-looking matriarch somersault through the air and land on her back.

Ever unflappable and dignified, Sandstrom popped up, brushed off her clothes, straightened her hair and primly said, "I don't think I'm going to ride anymore."

Several years later, at the end of two terms and eight years on the council, Sandstrom is riding off into the political sunset against her will, having lost a strange election in November.

Almost cruelly, the final meeting of 2007 concluded with a vote to establish the council's 2008 meeting schedule.

"I'll be wishing I could be at those meetings," she said. "I know I'll be missing out."

She didn't know she'd feel that way back in 1999 when her son Stephen, then an Orem city councilman and now a state legislator, compelled her to run.

"I said, 'No, I'm not going to do that,"' she recalled. "He said, 'All right, I'm coming to pick you up."'

"We got there five minutes before the deadline," Stephen Sandstrom said. "The sad thing is I think Provo is losing what has been a full-time council member. It almost made me feel bad when I was on the Orem City Council to see her working so much harder than me."

He knew her interest in politics. She used to read newspaper stories to her husband and children at the dinner table, where they hashed out the issues.

The bloodlines were strong, too. Samuel Clark and William Pace were aldermen on the first Provo City Council in 1851. Utah women wouldn't have the right to vote for another 45 years, so it's pretty unlikely Clark and Pace looked ahead 150 years and imagined a shared great-granddaughter following in their footsteps.

They also couldn't have anticipated the mountains of paperwork, but Sandstrom was notorious for reading every document given to the council, Mayor Lewis Billings said Tuesday as he honored her with the rare Mayor's Award of Excellence. During the ceremony, nearly 100 people gave her two standing ovations.

"I know that this ...," she said, stopping to push back tears, "is not given very often."

The Sandstrom legacy may be most felt at the quarterly joint lunch meetings of the Provo and Orem councils. The meetings were the brainchild of mother and son, who wanted to end what was nearly a feud between the two councils.

They succeeded.