Nancy Pelosi and a donkey named Adlai

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's rise to prominence at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., began exactly six decades ago with a cuddly donkey named Adlai.

The California Democrat told reporters Wednesday that, as a 12-year-old attending her first convention in Chicago in 1952, she received the stuffed toy with instructions to name it after the winner of the nomination.

"My parents gave me this stuffed donkey — a very fuzzy, cuddly donkey that was to be named for the nominee of the party," Pelosi said during a breakfast sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor.

"The names they told me my donkey would be [were] Adlai, Estes [and] Averell," she said, referring to Gov. Adlai Stevenson (Ill.), Sen. Estes Kefauver (Tenn.) and New York's Averell Harriman — the leading contenders for the nomination that year.

"We didn't have any names like that in the neighborhood," Pelosi quipped, referring to her Baltimore upbringing. "Of course, it ended up being Adlai."

Stevenson lost the 1952 race to Dwight Eisenhower. Pelosi didn't mention what became of Adlai.

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