Dr. Bob had slipped. He had been putting together stretches of sobriety, but a convention trip to Atlantic City undid him and he returned home to Akron – where he was scheduled to perform a surgery – in the tank.

So a friend who had been working with him to stay sober, a fellow drunk named Bill W., handed the doctor a beer to steady his shaking hand for the procedure. It was an effective, but inauspicious gesture given what the two were trying to achieve: sobriety. That was June 10, 1935. It would be Dr. Bob’s final drink and the day acknowledged as the birth of a global movement that helped change millions of lives, Alcoholics Anonymous.

Bill W. and Dr. Bob were both persisters. They persisted in their drinking, then they persisted in their sobriety. In the beginning, they were two drunks on their own, trying to stay sober through church groups, hospitalizations, Christian philosophies, for themselves and their families.

But none of that worked. Hearing well-intentioned people tell them to simply “drink like gentlemen” meant nothing to a certain type of person who was compelled to get smashed no matter how unreasonable it was, no matter what the consequences were. They couldn’t just stop. And no one seemed to understand that. No one but a fellow drunk.

So when Bill W. and Dr. Bob were introduced to each other by one of the do-gooders who promised it would just be a “15-minute meeting”, they stayed up until 11 p.m. That was the first A.A. meeting, two drunks simply talking to each other. They found the answer in the power of a group, even a group of just two.

Bill Wilson was born on a frigid November night in 1895, in a room behind a bar in Vermont. He discovered the profound power of liquor about 22 years later, during military training, on a night he later wrote about:

“... one night someone handed me a Bronx cocktail. Liquor had killed off a lot of my relatives and I had been repeatedly warned against it. Still I took this first drink, and then another, and another. Ah, what magic! I had found the elixir of life! Down went that strange barrier that had always stood between me and people around me. My new companions drew near to me and I drew near to them. I was part of life at last. I could talk easily, I could communicate. Here was the missing link!”

The awkward young man who had suffered bouts of depression when his parents abandoned him, when his first love died, when he struggled in college, found the courage and swagger he’d been missing.

Over the next 17 years, his drinking nearly destroyed his body and his life. He got married to a dazzling woman who joined him on motorcycle road trips. He soared while working on Wall Street and he drank and drank, day and night. Even as the nation was in the middle of a giant experiment with eradicating the destruction that alcohol had brought to many families — prohibition — he drank. He lost everything, resorted to panhandling and had been admitted to a hospital in New York many times after benders. During one of those hospital stays, he realized that alcohol was actually the “elixir of self-destruction” and he had a spiritual epiphany.

He fought to stay sober in the following months, looking to God and church for help, finding inspiration with the Oxford Group, an evangelical society with principles that would become a foundational blueprint for the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. But he was white-knuckling it, finding that he was strongest after talking to other alcoholics, who weren’t always easy to find and who largely didn’t self identify at the time. All of America had a pretty jacked up relationship with alcohol at the time.

With about five months of sobriety under his belt during the summer of 1935, Bill went on a business trip to Akron, Ohio that quickly went to crap. In the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel, he heard the clink of ice bobbing around in that alluring elixir at the bar and he wanted a drink. He didn’t know anyone in town, so he took a wild chance at calling up a random church to find a local Oxford Group for guidance. Henrietta Seiberling, a member of the group, heard about his call and immediately thought of Dr. Bob, whose struggle with alcoholism was well known around town.

The doctor was a colorectal surgeon who was also born in Vermont and also struggled with booze. He began drinking in medical school and spent time in treatment centers and hospitals, relapsing again and again, according to the biography at his home, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places and a pilgrimage site for hundreds of thousands of visitors. (It has 12 steps leading to the front door.)

Seiberling convinced the two to meet, begging them to give each other just “15 minutes.” They ended up talking for hours. A month later, Bill W. handed Dr. Bob that final beer, and they went back to the kitchen table in that Akron house and began writing what would become the constitution for A.A.

There are an estimated 123,000 Alcoholics Anonymous groups across the world today.

The bedrock principle of following 12 steps, going to meetings, maintaining anonymity and talking to other alcoholics has saved countless lives. It has saved members of my own family.

Bill W. and Dr. Bob persisted against a disease that has killed millions. They both died sober, having changed America – and the world – forever, doing some of the work that prohibition couldn’t.

The introduction to Chapter 2 in the Big Book, the bible of A.A., sums it up well:

“I hope to God I’m right,” Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower confessed to his driver on June 5, 1944, the night before the epic D-Day invasion.

Eisenhower was raised by humble Mennonites, pacifists, who struggled with the economic hardships that devastated many American families in the 1880s.

He persisted, surviving a life-threatening leg infection that nearly ended with amputation while he was in high school. The days missed in recovery made him have to repeat his freshman year. That meant he and his brother Edgar would be heading to college at the same time and the family couldn’t afford two tuitions. The brothers agreed to alternate, with Dwight taking the first turn as the night supervisor at a dairy while his brother went off to campus life.

In the meantime, Dwight applied to the tuition-free military academies and went on the West Point. He played on the varsity football team, but was knocked out after a knee injury. So he turned to gymnastics and fencing and became a football cheerleader, which was a freakin ultimate pivot.

These were the pushes and pivots that lead to that moment on June 5, as Eisenhower prepared for war. He sent his orders to all the troops that night. It was one of the last things that about 10,300 of them would read before the D-Day invasion.

It is a famous order. “The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!” They are reminders of the sacrifices the nation and world made, the unity in what we understood to be a “great and noble undertaking.”

But what I especially love is the mission failure statement that Eisenhower also wrote, by hand the night before, and kept in his wallet:

“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

There is a relatively new memorial in D.C., it’s for Eisenhower. I followed the progress as it made its way through the proper channels, with the approval, tweaks and blessings of Congress as well as architectural and planning boards, the ones that Trump cleared and packed with his lackeys who know nothing about what it takes and means to build meaningful monuments and memorials in the nation’s capital. It took 21 years to complete.

It’s at the foot of the Capitol slope, across from the U.S. Botanical Garden and in front of the Department of Education (that Eisenhower helped create and Trump is eliminating). And it has some of Eisenhower’s powerful quotes. I had a pretty great time watching people react to them when it opened. Here’s one I met when I wrote that column in 2020:

“ ‘We pray that . . . all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love’?” a tourist from Philadelphia said out loud, a little incredulously, as she read a part of Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address etched into that limestone. “Seriously? A Republican said that?”

Yes. A general, a war hero and a Republican.

The tourist, a Black woman who told me she hates President Trump, admitted she became a little smitten with Ike after her visit to his memorial.

Because she was seeing a time in America — still imperfect and divided —when leadership qualities were about bravery, fairness and morality, not winning a tribal contest.

Ike was controversial, but we are now in a time when a wartime general is more compassionate, thoughtful, insightful, humble and reasonable than most of the people elected to office today. He showed a bravery in the face of war that his jelly-spined party members can’t summon on the daily in their plush offices.

In honor of the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion, take a visit to the Eisenhower Memorial if you’re in D.C. this weekend. It’s gorgeous, especially at night, when the light reflects on the carefully crafted mesh tapestry to reveal Frank Gehry’s brilliant design outlining the Normandy coastline.

Or read the column I wrote about the day his memorial and the spontaneous memorial to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg drew crowds who were struck by the similarity of these two leaders.

A quiz:

Can you guess which quotes are Ike’s and which ones are from RBG?

“We have come a long ways in recognizing the equality of women. Unfortunately, in some respects, it is not yet complete. But I firmly believe it will soon be so.”

“I steadfastly favor the principle that women workers should have equal rights with men. I sincerely hope that this equality can be accomplished without unnecessary delay.”

“A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”

“Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

“Don’t be distracted by emotions like anger, envy, resentment. These just zap energy and waste time.”

“You can disagree without being disagreeable.”

Return to my feed for the answers!

And please say a quiet thank you to all those who paid the ultimate price that day for the freedoms enjoyed for 82 years.

It was 70 years ago today that an American city made headlines for banning Rock ‘n’ Roll, earning it the unfortunate motto – “the lair of the square.”
“Was it somewhere in, like Mississippi?” my 19-year-old son asked, when I blurted this out.

Nope.

It was Santa Cruz.

I know.

The place I knew as a kid for its head shops, surfers and sea loins, the hometown of acid tests and epicenter of counter culture in the 1960s when Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters moved in, the home of the super-crunchy university that had once refused to give grades and has the banana slug its mascot was once a pearl-clutching, conservative, bigoty beach town in 1956.

“Authorities have imposed a ban on ‘rock and roll’ and other frenzied forms of terpsichore in Santa Cruz as a result of ‘obscene and highly suggestive dancing’ by teen-agers at an affair held at civic auditorium Saturday night,” the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported that week in June.

The teens were bopping – and the 1956 version of grinding – to Chuck Higgins and his Orchestra, a band from Los Angeles.

When they played their hit, “Pachuko Hop”, it became too much for the cops, who were fresh off a front-page raid that seized two pinball machines.

They shut the place down around midnight and sent about 200 teens home because there were couples engaged in “‘highly suggestive, stimulating and tantalizing motions’ induced by the provocative rhythms of an all-Negro band,” the Sentinel reported.

The music “excited the crowd to passion at times and it was feared the crowd might become uncontrollable,” the triggered cop, Lt. Richard Overton, went on to report.

“It is quite obvious that this type of affair is detrimental to both the health and morals of our youth and community,” Overton said.

The police chief agreed and banned “dances of this type.”

But one teen resisted. And persisted in exposing what was really going on.

Arlene Freitas, who made news earlier that year because she declined to sell one of her award-winning school paintings on display at school, wrote a fiery letter to the paper.

“There was one apparent couple engaged in that sort of suggestive dance and the prejudiced statement which implied that the dance was induced by the all-Negro band was uncalled for and untrue”, Arlene wrote.

It took a 16-year-old to point this out.

She made the connection that “dancing of this sort occurred at the Hallowe’en dance last year where a white band played, but much less was made of then.”

The cops said the other dancers circled the gyrating couple to hide them from the cops’ stares. Arlene called that B.S., too.

The other teens were “merely watching what started out to be a couple of good dancers,” she wrote.

The city elders were so wigged out, Civic Auditorium Ray Judah immediately cancelled another act scheduled to play Santa Cruz – Fats Domino. He said the crooner drew “a certain type of crowd that would not be compatible to this particular community”. What a shame that folks like Judah were too biased to let their fellow coastal Californians find their thrills on blueberry hill.

Arlene continued to let it rip.

“This dance was just a gathering of teenagers and some adults who liked the Rock and Roll beat, but because of a few bad apples, has been made into a group of uncontrollable savages overpowered by the provocative rhythms,” she said.

The students organized and showed up at the district attorney’s office to protest.

“I’m sorry your paper has taken this viewpoint on Rock and Roll, I disagree with you about the destruction of health and morals of our youth, if anything it helps by eliminating prejudice between the two races.”

Arlene spoke the truth. And she ended with a banger:

“One last thing, did the writer of the article use rubber ink, because he sure did stretch the truth!”

The city quickly walked the ban back, realizing that a tourist town didn’t need to be the lair of the square.

But the news — spread quickly across the nation because of an Associated Press story — did inspire similar bans that stuck around a little longer.

Arlene Freitas went on the win art competitions and scholarships, graduated from the California School of the Arts and Crafts in Oakland and went on to illustrate books and design greeting cards and gift wrap for Hallmark, including a series of children’s animal prints that are still traded as kitsch art today.

She was a bold persister who spoke the truth, reminding the adults what they were really afraid of.

They ignored her, circumvented her and muted her on a Zoom meeting. But Rep. Joyce Beatty persisted.

“Silence was not an option,” Beatty said, about the lawsuit she filed to challenge Trump’s illegal tagging of the Kennedy Center.

Trump had an online tantrum targeting U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper (and his wife) over the weekend after the judge gave Trump 14 days to remove his name from the Kennedy Center and all the literature he defiled with his unlawful alteration of the cultural institution’s name.

Cooper was widely praised for his decision. But let’s be real – it was a no-brainer (especially for the Ivy League grad that Cooper is), a softball case that was a clear violation of the law,

It was Beatty who persisted, who got the matter into court, taking on the preposterous move with the legal spanking she filed with her lawsuit:

“Shortly after President Kennedy’s assassination, Congress designated the Kennedy Center as the sole national memorial to the late President within the nation’s capital. Because Congress named the center by statute, changing the Kennedy Center’s name requires an act of Congress,” her Dec. 22nd lawsuit said.

“But on December 18 and 19, 2025—in scenes more reminiscent of authoritarian regimes than the American republic—the sitting President and his handpicked loyalists renamed this storied center after President Trump.”

Boom.

As an ex-officio trustee of the Kennedy Center, Beatty was logged into the remote meeting on Dec. 18 where the illegal decision was made.

That meeting was held at the Palm Beach home of brand new, Trump-appointed Kennedy Center board member Andrea Wynn, wife of casino kaiser Steven Wynn. She is the second Wynn wife on that board. Elaine Wynn was a billionaire arts patron who helped Wynn translate his experience running a Maryland bingo hall into a casino empire and was appointed to serve as a Kennedy Center trustee by President Obama in 2010, the same year she and Wynn divorced a second time. She died at 82 last year.

The Palm Beach meeting held by the latest Mrs. Wynn was “a thinly-veiled sham”, according to Beatty’s lawsuit. It was held against the backdrop of a noisy party, according to New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh, who called Wynn during the meeting.

“‘All the husbands are here,’ he shouted over the din of the meeting. ‘Rob Kraft and Ike Perlmutter, we’re all keeping our wives company’.”

Back in D.C., the meeting left other trustees stunned.

“No notice was provided that a name change was being considered,” Beatty’s lawsuit said. When she tried to speak “in opposition to the name change, she was muted”.

They all played like the renaming was a spontaneous show of affection for their dear leader. (The lettering had already been ordered and was slapped on the building the next day.)

Trump’s spokesblonde declared victory in a tweet that sounded straight outta Pyongyang:

Beatty responded with her own Tweet:

Beatty has long been a persister.

She entered politics in 1999 after being appointed to her husband’s seat in the Ohio state legislature, then rose to the national stage when she won Ohio’s 3rd congressional district in 2012.

Beatty’s resistance is persistent.

Two months after turning 70, she was pepper-sprayed in Columbus while marching with a Black Lives Matter group protesting the killing of George Floyd. A year later, she was one of nine people supporting voting rights legislation who were arrested by U.S. Capitol Police.

The Kennedy Center suffered a dramatic decline after Trump took over the board and hammered his name onto the building. Ticket sales, according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, dropped 70 percent and numerous artists and productions pulled out. The Washington National Opera ended its 55-year residency and moved productions to other venues.

Trump responded to the artists’ and public’s protest with the announcement that he’s shutting it down for two years of renovations. That followed with unhinged screes about how rundown and unsafe it allegedly is, with all the drama of a tween who wants a new bedroom.

Cooper’s Friday ruling on Beatty’s case ordered the Kennedy Center to remove the Trump name within 14 days and halted its closure:

It’s more than a symbolic win. Beyond righting the economic blow of the takeover and potential catastrophe of a two-year shutdown, it’s a testament to systems that still work.

It shows that persistence like Beatty’s and sane jurisprudence like Cooper’s can combat the imperious impulses of a man child. If a Persister steps in.

For full disclosure, I have to mention little protest my son and some of the kids from the local punk scene staged after Trump added his name to the Kennedy Center, a place that was foundational for all those kids.

The group was small, they rushed to make their handmade signs (buh-bye tomato stakes) and got a little lost.

But a photo of them out there was used in foreign publications, reminding the rest of the world that we’re not all okay with this.

And one of the local punk community’s icons, Mark Andersen, showed up and gave the kids a stirring talk about the power of persistence.

Take a listen:

Isabella Baumfree shocked the growing feminist movement in America when she gave a speech on the steps of an Ohio church that most of the women around her did not want to hear.

Confession: This is a cheap device to fit my theme of “250 Americans (You didn’t know) Helped Build America.” Because most of y’all know the Persister I’m talking about.

May 29, 1851 was when Sojourner Truth delivered the electric, “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, in which she never said “Ain’t I a woman?” More on that later, but it’s a cringey example of white women missing the mark.

The woman who later named herself Sojourner Truth was born into slavery as Isabella Baumfree sometime around 1797 in Ulster County, New York, where she grew up speaking only Dutch, like most of the county residents and was “placed on a level with cattle and swine.”

“Born a slave, and held in that brutal condition until the entire abolition of slavery in the state of New York in 1827, she has known what it is to drink to the dregs of the bitterest cup of human degradation,” according to the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave, her memoir dictated to Olive Gilbert and published in 1850.

She began a hard life of work when she was five years old and was sold three times in her early years, the cruelty of each enslaver growing with every sale.

Each chapter of that life was devastating, from the cruel labor and rape by enslavers to the murder of the man from a neighboring farm she had fallen in love with – because his enslaver knew the children she birthed would not belong to him– and the forced breeding she endured after she was partnered with another enslaved man. She watched each of her children ravaged by the horrors of slavery, she was injured and abused her whole life.

It was in 1826, 100 years ago, that she finally escaped, taking her infant daughter with her and hiding with Dutch abolitionists after her final enslaver reneged on the promise to free her that year.

The children who remained enslaved “feared she had left to commit suicide,” according to her biography. But she left to fight, and eventually quieted their fears when she got in touch with them and made seismic waves with her activism.

She became the first Black woman to sue a white man and win when she fought in court for the return of her five-year-old son, Peter, after he had been sold to an enslaver in the South, escaping the protection of New York’s abolition of slavery in 1827.

Then she spent the next two decades working as a housekeeper and building her faith, philosophy and popularity as a speaker on women’s rights, abolition and pacifism.

Her book became popular on the abolitionist circuit and eventually funded the house she was able to buy in Northhampton. Her carte de visit — like trading or business cards at the time — also funded her speaking career.

The popular biography ended with the chapter “Last Interview with her Master”, and a visit to her oldest daughter, Diana, who remained with one of her enslavers. She talked about the way had changed his heart, with a grace that is painful to behold today.

“He said he could then see that ‘slavery was the wickedest thing in the world, the greatest curse the earth had ever felt – that it was then very clear to his mind that it was so, though, while he was a slaveholder himself, he did not see it so...’,” she said.

It was the next year that she arrived at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron on May 28 in 1851, which was heckled and protested by local men.

Reporters filed breathless accounts of the standing-room-only spaces filled with “intelligent” women and the passionate discussions about their rights.

One of the organizers, Emma Coe, made the connection between the position of women in American society and slaves, according to a story by the New York Tribune.

“The master exacts the labor of the slave, so the husband has the right to exact the labor of his wife,” Coe was paraphrased as saying. “The master may chastise the slave, so may the husband chastise his wife…The slave has no right under the law to his own earnings; neither has the wife to her’s.”

The radical, intellectual women making these fiery points had not, however, invited rigorous participation from the women who had lived in actual slavery.

Sojourner Truth was the only Black woman there and was not invited to speak with the others. But she persisted. One newspaper account said she was “an old colored lady from Massachusetts, nearly six feet high” who offered “quaint utterance of good hard sense at intervals during the sittings of the Convention.”

Then, on the second day, she took her place on the steps of the Old Stone Church and let it rip, a powerful, moving and charming speech given in her low-Dutch lilt.

“Sojourner Truth, an emancipated slave, whose color and features attest to the purity of her blood, here rose and delighted her audience with some of the shrewdest remarks made during the session,” the Tribune wrote.

Other newspaper accounts were equally odd.

“The principal (sic) feature of the second day’s proceedings must be considered the amusing and suggestive speech of Mrs. Sojourner Truth,” according to the Richmond Daily Times.

The speech was extemporaneous, so there is no written text.

Marcus Robinson, a friend who housed her during the convention, published the first version of her speech, which was likely approved by her and faithful to her elegance, wit and message.

That’s not the speech you’ve probably read, the one I bought a copy of in the Frederick Douglass Museum for $3.95 in Anacostia. The “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech.

That was the one published in 1863 by Frances Dana Gage, one of the prominent suffragists and abolitionists who housed people escaping slavery. She was a true believer and supporter, but when she published her version of the speech, it was altered dramatically, adding the iconic phrase – and Southern accent – that Sojourner Truth never even said.

“By changing Truth’s words and her dialect to that of a stereotypical southern slave, Frances Gage effectively erased Sojourner’s Dutch heritage and her authentic voice. As well as unintentionally adding to the oversimplification of the American slave culture and furthering the eradication of our nation’s Northern slave history,” according to the Sojourner Truth Project and the work by Nell Irvin Painter, an American History professor at Princeton University who exposed this discrepancy, which was emblematic of the way early white suffragists treated Black women.

In honor of the speech’s anniversary, here is the 1851 report that Robinson published, believed to be the closest to her actual words:

“One of the most unique and interesting speeches of the convention was made by Sojourner Truth. It is impossible to transfer it to paper, or convey any adequate idea of the effect it produced upon the audience. Those only can appreciate it who saw her powerful form, her whole-souled,earnest gesture, and listened to her strong and truthful tones. She came forward to the platform andaddressing the President said with great simplicity: “May I say a few words?” Receiving an affirmative answer, she proceeded:

I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman’s rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?

I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now.

As for intellect, all I can say is, if a woman have a pint, and a man a quart — why can’t she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, — for we can’t take more than our pint’ll hold.

The poor men seems to be all in confusion, and don’t know what to do. Why children, if you have woman’s rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won’t be so much trouble.

I can’t read, but I can hear. I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well, if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again.

The Lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept and Lazarus came forth.

And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and the woman who bore him. Man, where was your part?

But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.”

I was struck by this powerful memorial when we passed through Boothbay Harbor in Maine last week — the faces of fallen veterans looking down on the main streets and parkways of their hometown.

A reminder of how many people one small town sent into war, across generations and around the world. Photos in sepia, black-and-white, Kodachrome colors mark the eras. It’s a point of pride, but also a sadness when you can see the people who grew up but didn’t get to grow old in a closeknit, charming town.

A few other cities across the eastern seaboard have started doing this, families nominate their loved ones, offer photos and banner companies help design them. Here in Maine it was sponsored by the American Legion.

It may have started in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when the town sparked the Hometown Heroes Banner Program in 2006. It’s a gutpunch, more intimate and impactful than screaming eagles, endless red-white-and-blue banners, or crisp, fluttering flags to mark this holiday. It hits way harder than a name carved into stone.

They were people who grew up on these streets, their lives cut short because of egos, conflicts and unchecked, bloodthirsty ambition of men miles and miles away. I hope more towns decide to honor their fallen heroes this way, marking the complexity of this day, the price of their valor.

I’m in that stupid place where I’m traveling and I lost my wallet, so I have no ID, credit cards, debit cards or (expired) CVS coupons on me.

I blame one of the world’s most prominent astronomers, Wendy Freedman, for this predicament.

Dr. Freedman was the commencement speaker at my son’s graduation from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts this week.

I remembered how my friends and I drank our way through the commencement speaker’s soundwall of canned platitudes at our USC graduation a few decades ago – passing a fat-bellied bottle of Krug between us.

And I’ve covered countless speeches like this that sounded AI-generated before there was AI. It’s not like it was a celebrity speaker like those at other universities this month, not Misty Copeland or Conan O’Brien or even Hoda Kotb (with whom I used to wait for hours at crime scenes and press conferences when we both covered crime in New Orleans. Remember me, Hoda?)

So who spoke?

The speaker was an astronomer who is part of the Hubble Tension debate. I have zero capacity for grasping anything about the expanding universe, Cepheid distances, megaparsecs – the lingua franca of these people. So when this scholar bedecked in wizardly regalia took the podium to inspire the graduates entering one of the shittiest job markets in recent history – and I didn’t have to bang out an 18-inch newspaper story about it in 45 minutes – I tuned out. Instead, I reached for my wallet to follow the QR code and pay $21 for parking – the final insult to four punishing years on my bank account.

And Dr. Freedman began:

“It is an honor to be with you today..” blah, blah, I typed the rental car’s license plate number into the parking app…

“My children told me, very confidently, that no one remembers a single word from a commencement speech,” she said.

Ha!

“Apparently, at this point, I might just read my grocery list. Milk. Eggs. Try not to ruin your life,” Freedman said.

Okay. She’s funny. I’m listening.

She began with the story of Clark University’s star alum – Robert H. Goddard.

“His is not a household name,” she went on, explaining that this is the 100th anniversary of his remarkable achievement.

It was about the time that humans were obsessed with flight, but like the New York-to-Los Angeles reliable, commercial kind. Goddard had another idea – launching humans into space.

“He was convinced that it was possible to use liquid fuel to launch rockets,” she said.

Modern rocketry began with many failures

“Working here, at Clark University with limited resources, he pursued an idea that most people thought impractical. He began experimenting, and failing, and trying again.

“In 1926, in a snowy field in Massachusetts, he successfully launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket.

“It flew for all of, (dramatic pause) two and a half seconds.” Freedman said.

“It reached a height of…41 feet.”

“And it landed in a cabbage field.”

“Not exactly a dramatic beginning.”

Oh wait. This is my jam. This commencement speech was about a Persister!

Goddard was ridiculed for his efforts. Scorned by academics. Called “absurd.” The New York Times said he lacked “even a basic understanding of high school physics.” The Daily News treated him like a tabloid joke, mocking one of his 1929 trials with the headline that his new rocket “MISSES THE MOON BY 248,000 MILES”.

“The man who would later be recognized as the father of modern rocketry was publicly dismissed for not understanding science. Not encouragement, but public humiliation,” Freedman said.
Last month, the nation united over the Artemis moon loop. It all started in that cabbage field exactly 100 years ago.

“It is an important reminder of the power of persistence,” Freedman said.

It’s like I asked her to say this!
But wait, it gets better.

She is a Persister, too!

“Many of us encounter our version of Goddard’s experience,” she said.

“Earlier in my career, I had been working on a problem and came to a conclusion that didn’t match the accepted view in my field at the time. Moreover, my results directly contradicted those of a very prominent, very senior figure,” she said.

So she checked her results again and again. She gathered more data. She persisted and believed her challenge to the accepted way of measuring the expansion of the universe would lead to thoughtful and rigorous academic discourse.

“Instead, this individual wrote to my superiors, suggesting I should not be allowed to use our telescopes,” Freedman said.

I researched this clash and it appeared that the guy – her now deceased fellow astronomer at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Allan Sandage – actually menaced Freedman when she was quietly working in an empty library over a Christmas break in the 1990s.

“He was so angry,” Freedman told the journal Science, “that you sort of become aware that you’re the only two people in the building. I took a step back, and that was when I realized, oh boy, this was not the friendliest of fields.”

He smeared her name in the scientific community, telling the organizations she was about to address that she didn’t know what she was doing.

“Not the kind of professional feedback you hope for,” she deadpanned.

She worked around him, got access to telescopes and her findings are now an accepted part of the human exploration of the universe – the “Hubble Tension”. It’s the debate about the way the expansion of the universe is measured (I think), it involves concepts I can’t get my head around. (As I read in on it, I have to say it was pretty cool to see ‘parsecs’ used outside Han Solo’s swagger.) The world of astrophysics and cosmology is now engaged in rigorous debate over the tension, some even call it the “Hubble Crisis,” and Freedman’s name pops up in discussions about Nobel Prizes. She is now at the University of Chicago in Illinois, directs those observatories were she was belittled and she initiated and is helping direct the of the Giant Magellan Telescope project, the monster, 25-meter telescope now under construction in the Chilean Andes. (She’s 68, the telescope won’t be operational until 2034. How’s that for persistence and planting trees whose shade you may never know?)

What those 612 graduates of Clark University heard was a master class in persistence.

“There is a moment in situations like this when you have a choice. You can quit, you can move into another area altogether, or you can continue, carefully, rigorously and persistently. So I continued,” Freedman said.

She reminded the graduates that yes, they are entering a world of uncertainty, but the struggle ahead plays a crucial role in shaping them — and society.

“Most people see only the final stage in achievement. The published paper, the profitable company, the accomplished career, the ‘overnight success’,” she said. “What they rarely see are the setbacks, the rejected manuscripts, the experiments that failed, the applications that were declined, moments of self-doubt.

“We need to recognize that these experiences are not evidence of failure,” she said. “Rather they are evidence that you are attempting something difficult.”

She asked us to remember that Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius defined the value of persistence in this private journal entry:

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

I’m going to listen to Freedman’s speech again and again — when I need help persisting. (She starts at minute 33.)

When she finished, I was in tears (and stayed that way until my kid walked across the stage at, um, 1:24:36), I jumped up to applaud. I forgot about the damn wallet.

Anyone found a little, olive green square of leather with all my stuff in it?

Graduation season is the ultimate celebration of Persistence.

We love to focus on the perseverance of the students who had to slay some dragons to get that tassel, the scholarship kids, the tween prodigies, the young parents, the first-generation college graduates marking history for their families.

But the Persisters who always blow me away are the older graduates, the people who lived full lives, raised children, fought wars, fought racism, sexism, poverty, who finally busted down the ivory tower doors that were slammed in their faces decades ago.

“I wanted to get away from the farm,” Marie Fowler said, pinpointing the motivation that began a nearly seven-decade fight for her PhD.

That’s right, Dr. Fowler graduated from high school in 1959 and was 83 when she walked across the stage at Howard University two years ago and became the nation’s oldest student to earn a PhD.

There are some breathtaking silver graduates who’ve done this before her.

• Nola Ochs, who grew up on a Kansas farm and raised four sons there, held the world record for nearly a decade when she earned her bachelor’s degree from Fort Hays State University in 2007 at 95 years old. (She got a master’s when she turned 98, the great-grandmother of 15.) She was 105 when she died.

• There’s Granville “Leo” Plass, who earned an associate degree from Eastern Oregon University at 99 after quitting college during the depression to go into logging. He graduated in 2011 and lived five more years as a college graduate.

• Twila Boston was a nurse for most of her life, but returned to Utah State University to earn a bachelor’s degree in American Studies in May of 2012, at the age of 98. She died at 100.

• Violet Edwards became the oldest African-American to earn a degrees in 2022 when’s he graduated from Mercy College in Parkland, Florida at 96 years old.

The women’s stories are similar — most of them finally returned to college when their husbands died.

Fowler’s story is similar — ambition with little opportunity.

She was the youngest of 12 children, born in North Carolina to parents who lived under Jim Crow laws and worked in forced labor before they were able to buy a five-acre farm..

“My dad could not read and he would sign his name with an X,” Fowler said. “We taught him how to read and how to sign his name so he wouldn’t have to make an X.”

She graduated from high school, married and moved to New York, where factory jobs were a quick way to escape rural life.

While Fowler was working at a slipper factory in Brooklyn and her husband was grinding away for a carpet cleaning company, they heard that the nation’s capital was hiring transit workers. So they headed to Chocolate City to join the growing, prospering Black middle class.

Fowler briefly worked at Howard University, then moved to the U.S. Postal Service, where she started as a secretary and worked while raising two children, eventually retiring as a manager.

In the back of her mind, she had always wanted to go to college. Seven of her siblings earned college degrees and she felt left behind. Her husband, she said, “wasn’t supportive of that.”

She was in her 60s in a Sunday school class, puzzled by a lesson on a Bible passage, when she heard something.

“Go to school and learn about me,” the voice said.

“And I was like, ‘Okay, well, who said that to me?’ And I’m looking around to see who’s speaking to me, and nobody was speaking to me,” she said. She believes it was God urging her to finally make the leap to college. Her husband was gone, what was holding her back? Nothing.

So she started slowly in 2010, one class at Maple Springs Baptist Bible College and Seminary in Maryland, worried it would be too hard for her to retain information. She loved it, slayed it and added another and then another. She earned a bachelor’s and two master’s degrees there, then took the big leap to pursue a PhD in divinity at Howard University. She worked hard to keep up with the twenty-somethings around her, the technology, the pace.

“I would get up at one and two o’clock in the morning and study to make sure that I was prepared,” she said. “I was always prepared, and I never, never missed an assignment. I didn’t, I didn’t feel as if I could give excuses, because it would be too much for me to try to catch up. So I was always a little bit ahead of everyone else.”

It was about persisting and persisting.

“If someone said to me: ‘Sit down and write a white paper on how you made it through school’, I could not do it. It was just one foot before the next foot, before the next foot, and kept going. I could not tell you how I did it.”

But she did, and her family joined her at Howard University in 2024, surprised her with recognition, thunderous applause and a spotlight as the historic university’s oldest graduate.

She is 85 now and was unseated as the nation’s oldest PhD grad this month when Navy veteran Charles Whitman Dabbs earned his doctorate in education from Tennessee State University at 85.

“I started when I graduated high school in 1958,” Dabbs told WBIR. “There were no jobs for Black boys, so I joined the Navy.”

That’s usually who these older grads are – people whose trajectory was thwarted in an era when diversity, equity and inclusion weren’t the norm, when most doors of opportunity were thrown wide open for white men. Everyone else had to bang-bang-bang on those doors, smash them open, or politely wait outside for their turn.

The super-silver class of 2026

• Veronica Smith, 80, earned her degree in interdisciplinary studies from San Joauquin Delta College in central California, graduating alongside her 55-year-old daughter, Virginia Ordaz.

  

• Sara Poore, 79, earned a bachelor degree in religion from Liberty University after raising three children and spending 30 years as a widow, wondering if she’d ever get back into a classroom.

• Peggy Moore, 75, worked at Temple University in Philadelphia for 44 years while raising two sons as a single mom and chipping away at a bachelor’s degree for decades. She joined the students in caps and gowns this month, collecting her degree in general studies.

  

But why?

Each of these students also represent hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition, a pricey investment for someone in the twilight of their earning years.

Fowler paid for every unit, writing a check for $10,980 dollars every semester.

She’s not going to make that money back as a teacher in the Central Baptist Church of Camp Springs, she knows that.

That’s not what the degree for most of these folks is about. It’s a mountain climbed, it’s the biggest bucket list item checked, a middle finger to the forces that kept them down for decades.

Fowler watched her seven siblings get their degrees. Now she joined them, the baby of the family at the top of the ranking, the only one with a PhD.

But it’s her contribution to society that is her biggest payoff.

“Listen, there are two ladies at my church just this past Saturday who said they’re going back to school because of me,” Fowler said. “One was last Wednesday. She went back to school and finished her undergrad degree. Another one just enrolled in school to get a degree. I have inspired so many people.”

And then there are her son and daughter.

“Both of them started college, both of them dropped out,” she said. She’s hoping she may have inspired them to go back.

It’s not too late, she said. “They still have time.”

It’s my birthday today, so y’all will have to endure a birthday rambling. Hang in there with me, though. Please, persist.

It makes no sense to feel a cosmic kinship to a person or event that shares your birthdate. Yes, we all say “5, 12, xxxx” (the last part quieter) at the pharmacy or write those numbers filling out paperwork. We share the uncomfortable days in school or at work when we don’t want anyone to make a fuss, but are sad when they don’t. We understand that our historically mediocre date will never be on an American History quiz. I mean, The Battle of Todd’s Tavern on May 12, 1864 in Virginia didn’t even have a friggin victor (it was deemed “inconclusive”) and sounds more like the time the SAE bros were kicked out after being overserved.

Another May milestone was the founding of a U.S. Assay Office. I had to look up what it was because one opened in Helena Montana on May 12, 1874 (it’s an office where the purity of metals is officially analyzed. Yawn.) A truck driver found the decomposed body of the kidnapped Lindberg baby on May 12, 1932. Ugh. May 12 is also National Limerick Day and National Hospital Day. And, it’s also National Nurses’ Day, because May 12 is Florence Nightingale’s birthday. But she’s British and Clara Barton had a way bigger impact on the United States and disaster aid thanks to the Red Cross, so that doesn’t count. (Plus Barton’s birthday is December 25, so that’s complicated.)

For decades, the only fellow May 12ers I knew of were Yogi Berra and Katharine Hepburn. I told my kids that cool people like BigXthaPlug, Tony Hawk, Kim Fields and Brett Gurewitz share our day too. They were mildly impressed.

So this year, I thought I might be able to uplift this utterly mediocre day by checking my list of historical Persisters who helped build America to find any fellow May 12ers.

Nope.

But then I found someone I never imagined in the pantheon of historical Persisters who had a huge impact on our nation and I kinda had to eat shit.

I hate pink. I’m not really into makeup and I despise anything even tangential to MLM schemes (Amway? Herbalife? No thank you.) But Mary Kay Ash, born May 12, 1918 in Hot Wells, Texas, is a helluva Taurus worth talking about.

The Pink Persister

Mary Kay (we can’t call her “Ash,” newspaper style, because it just doesn’t work when you’re talking about someone with bouffant hair who made 19-foot pink Cadillacs a coveted icon), was persistence in pink.

She was born in depression-era Texas, married at 16 and a grandmother at 34. She was a persister in school, striving and working hard in a Texas classroom that offered little opportunity or encouragement for girls. She took the wife and mother route, but was restless. This was when the direct sales industry was starting to become popular and she joined Stanley Home Products in 1939, the company that helped launch the home-party-sales model in the 1930s and recently became the new obsession of Hydro-Flask girls who all switched to the Stanley tankard.

Mary Kay was so good at Stanley sales that she was hired away by another company, World Gifts, in 1952. She became a leader and mentor at that company, selling plastic Christmas trees and hand-painted wooden cherubs at a breakneck pace. But she quit after a decade there when yet another man she had trained was promoted over her. She was 45 and her plan was to write a book for women in business. While writing, it became clear that the book was actually a business plan. C.J. Walker (the entrepreneur who sold beauty products to fellow Black women and became America’s first self-made, female millionaire) and the California Perfume Company (which later changed its name to Avon) had been proving since the 1800s that women selling cosmetics to each other is a profitable business model.

She went out on her own

In 1963, after being divorced three times, widowed twice and passed up for more promotions than she could count, Mary Kay got the recipe of a moisturizing substance a local tanner concocted to soften animal hides and planned to make it the foundation for her own cosmetics company, partnering with her third husband. He died of a heart attack that year.

But she persisted, borrowing $5,000 from her oldest son to open up a 500-square-foot shop in Dallas. She was “selling second chance and self-invention for the price of a skin care showcase,” wrote Mary Lisa Gavenas in her biography of Mary Kay, Selling Opportunity, which was just released last month.

Mary Kay Inc. grew into a global phenomenon with 3.5 million reps in 35 countries, Gavenas wrote.

“By 1969, she is remarried and was giving out keys to pink Cadillacs while women around her weep with gratitude,” Gavenas wrote. “She recruits hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands of women. She turns shift workers and stay-at-home moms into millionaires. She becomes the most famous saleswoman in the world.”

She’s the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange and the only woman in Forbes’ Greatest Business Stories of All Time.

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When she died in 2001, she was worth $98 million and her company was generating $1.2 billion in annual sales.

A Pink Pyramid?

The company hasn’t escaped scrutiny that they are a “pink pyramid,” part of the Multi Level Marketing (MLM) schemes that reward people for recruiting other sellers, who often end up stuck with loads of unwanted products they bought to hit quotas, overestimating the demand and digging a debt hole

There’s a blog, Pink Truth, that’s dedicated to Mary Kay horror stories.

“It has always been about getting recruits,” a woman who goes by “Spunsilk” wrote. “I don’t remember one weekly meeting I attended where we were trained on the products and how to sell them. It was always about bringing a guest and then listening to all the ridiculous recognition and the fake excitement!”

The Federal Trade Commission reviewed the company’s financials as recently as 2024 in a list of MLMs that do not fall into the category of illegal pyramid schemes. The company says it buys sellers’ unused inventory back for 90 percent of its value within a year and doesn’t give monetary rewards for recruitment, so it looks good on paper and is ferociously defended by loyalists.

But maybe its contribution to our country is more cultural than monetary. In an era where women wanted empowerment but didn’t consider themselves Betty Friedan feminists, hyper-pink Mary Kay offered women another option.

The Mary Kay program wasn’t easy. The women had to work hard and hustle. The rewards the company dangled were carats, not carrots. There were the pink Cadillacs, of course. Being behind the wheel of that pink landboat cruising down any American road meant something. It wasn’t anything a husband or father could buy. There was only one way for a woman to get that signature ride: she had to earn it.

Why not just give them the cash?

“If we awarded a cash bonus, a woman would probably use it to pay her utility bills, make a house payment, or replace her washing machine,” Mary Kay once said. “Once she spends the money, she doesn’t think about it again. But every time she sees that diamond ring on her finger, she remembers her well‑deserved moment of glory.”

Mary Kay leaned into the persistence the whole enterprise required with one of her other popular “Cinderella gifts” – diamond encrusted, gold bumblebee pins.

“Aerodynamics have proven that the bumblebee cannot fly. The body is too heavy and the wings are too weak. But the bumblebee doesn’t know it,” Mary Kay said. “He goes right on flying . . . I thought this was a wonderful symbol of women who come into our organization and don’t know that they can fly.”

Happy Birthday, Mary Kay. (I still hate your pink, though.)

Sharon Lockwood totally stumped me.

I’ve interviewed thousands of interesting, wonderful and horrid people, but this woman was a little confounding.

I got a tip that I should go meet her, she was having a party with all her “godchildren” at the Cosmos Club.

Eww. The Cosmos Club? I knew it as one of those supercilious atrocities of the Gilded Age, a gold-encrusted space erected in 1878 – the kind Trump is trying to mimic – that itself was a nouveau American dupe of old European splendor. It banned women until a human rights commission ruling in 1987 forced them to admit female members.

But I went. Of course I did – when else would I get to see it?

Lockwood was not hard to miss, a stately woman swirling on the dancefloor in a white, strapless gown. To “Hot! Hot! Hot!”

“I’m hard to explain,” she told me before whirling back into the crowd.

Um, yes.

This was 2014 and it was her 50th wedding anniversary. Her husband, sons and grandchildren were there. And 37 of the guests – all young, Black, D.C. natives – were the godchildren.

“What is this?” I wondered.

I’ve always been skeptical of rich people anointing themselves saints for helping the poor in painless ways. I have some cringey stories. But I was about to learn how Dr. Lockwood treated these “godchildren.”

One of them, Nicole Jones, tried to explain the extraordinary relationship she had with Lockwood, a retired economist, American University professor of International Economics, and author of three books.

“I guess Sharon sees these ‘shining stars,’ finds us in ‘the hood,’ ” said Jones, who was 26 at the time and put air quotes around parts of the story that feel like a cliche.

“But it’s not just like that,” Jones said. “We’re really friends.”

Jones was a college drop-out when she met Lockwood, convinced she was dying of ovarian cancer, the disease that had recently killed one of her relatives. She was living in Langston Terrace Dwellings, one of America’s first, federally funded housing projects and the home of most of Lockwood’s godchildren.

“And Sharon was like: ‘No. Uh-uh. You are not quitting school over this,’ ” Jones told me.

Lockwood took her out to lunch and told her she was going to get back into school. She guided Jones through the résumés and essays. And she paid the tuition bills, out of her own pocket. Jones learned her cancer diagnosis was wrong, with Lockwood’s encouragement to push for better medical care than the kind Black women too often get. And when I met her at the party, she had a good job as an accountant for the U.S. Postal Service.

The stories all went like that.

As I met each of the extraordinary people that night, I began to understand what a singular Persister Lockwood was on their behalf.

Lockwood wasn’t born into poverty. Her mother is “of Cornell University”, her father was a dentist. But she knew early on that she wanted to Persist in using her position of power for good.

Her resume is breathtaking.

In 1961, she traveled to Africa with the 1.0 version of the Peace Corps, Operation Crossroads Africa, according to her 1964 wedding announcement in The New York Times. She joined the March on Washington in 1963, while doing her master’s degree in African Studies.

From there, she worked at the Library of Congress, the Small Business Administration, the White House and the World Bank, earning degrees, writing books and creating important programs that changed lives across the nation.

Her PhD in African studies wasn’t just an intellectual foray into history and culture. She focused on African-American entrepreneurs, looking for the keys to raise their economic status. She did this from lofty places like the White House on a grand scale, but it was her low-key godparenting that did it in a personal, intimate and powerful way.

She focused on kids who were on the cusp of big leaps into success, but didn’t have the rockets (educated family, connections and money) that her Georgetown crowd had. These kids – who worked hard – had anchors that could weigh them down, like poverty, instability or a family that was loving and supportive, but didn’t know the system.

“My heart goes out when I see people who have done such a great job getting there, and then there is more struggle,” she told me back then. “I tell them that there’s no getting around doing the work. They have to do the work. But sometimes, there are obstacles in the way of the work.”

She always acknowledged that parents, grandparents, and teachers laid early foundations for their success. She just used her privilege to help them the rest of the way.

Over 45 years, she found those strivers mostly by word-of-mouth. She took them out to lunch or coffee, called and badgered them to finish, push and persevere. To persist.

They were frustrated with studies? She persisted in pushing and encouraging them. They didn’t know their direction? She persisted in helping them figure it out. They couldn’t pay tuition? She quietly solved that problem too.

When I met her, I had been following an extraordinary young woman who fit that profile, a hard worker whose dad was incarcerated. Yasmine Arrington started a scholarship program for kids like her when she was in high school. I connected Lockwood and Arrington and then watched their friendship and network grow over a decade. It was powerful and genuine.

As of 2026, Lockwood did this with 62 godchildren. It wasn’t an official program or non-profit. There was no baptism or religion. That was just the word they came up with for the relationship, because so many called her a “fairy godmother.”

Among them are a dentist, a medical doctor, a physical therapist, an attorney, an MS in engineering, five MBAs, four MAs in education, two MSWs, a PhD in education, and twelve BAs. They range in age from 8 to 60.

Though a woman with ironclad, serious credentials, she didn’t take herself too seriously. She was the runner up in the 2013 Ms. Senior D.C. Pageant, where she performed a Turkish bellydance to “Hot, Hot, Hot”, thus the reprise at that Cosmos Club party where I met her.

In her spare time, she founded Georgetown Village, a network to help seniors age in their homes. Like others I’ve met in this network (shout-out to the wonderful Capitol Hill Village seniors who hosted me at their ferocious party last month) , she said she wanted to leave her home “feet first.”

And she did. Dr. Sharon Lockwood died in her home of leukemia a week ago on May 1.

She persisted as a mentor, godmother, grandmother, mother, educator, leader and hot, hot, hot dancer until the end. She was 85.

Republicans want us taxpayers to cough up $1 billion for Trump’s McVersailles ballroom, something he originally said would be privately funded.

Remember how it was supposed to be paid for by his billionaire buddies?

It wouldn’t be the first time American voters reached into their own pockets to fund an edifice. No, the first time, at least in Washington DC, actually is a much sweeter story — $5 donated by a woman born into slavery.

The creation of a monument in our nation’s capital is a spectacular, fascinating and sometimes depressing process. I’ve interviewed people who made the crusade for a memorial their life’s work, only to never see it come to fruition; artists who competed for a commission that wasn’t funded; and bamboozlers who never made good on their promises.

I accidentally interviewed Oprah in the middle of this process once – when a sympathetic cop let my 8-months pregnant butt use the VIP gate instead of the peasant entrance half a mile away for a monument event. It was the groundbreaking for the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial on the Tidal Basin:

“On her way to the stage, gingerly stepping around the edges of mud puddles, Winfrey said she came to the event because ‘I’ve lived the dream,’” I wrote. She loaned her name to the event, but never donated her big bucks to the project.

A woman named Charlotte Scott outspent Oprah on that front; she was a woman whose “name at one time was doubtless on the lips of every man and woman in the United States…” according to obituaries that ran in papers across the nation in 1891.

Scott, an elderly mother of 12 who spent most of her life in slavery, is the founding donor of the Lincoln statue on Capitol Hill, one of the first big public works of art in the nation’s capital. (The one that some people, including Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, want to remove).

Scott had been freed and was earning her own money in 1865 when a local minister burst into her home with the news that Lincoln had been assassinated. Scott dashed into her bedroom and returned with $5 (the equivalent of about $100 today), a good chunk of her first earnings as a free woman, and said she wanted it to help build a monument to the fallen president.

She imagined that other “freedmen” would want to donate as well. And she was right.

The minister, Rev. Cornelius Battelle, wrote letters to newspapers about Scott’s idea.

“This noble thought, so far as I know, originated with herself,” he wrote. “She thinks many colored persons would love to contribute for this purpose, in this region. She wishes me to act as their agent and receive contributions, and hand over the same to such agents as the government may hereafter point to rear said monument. I consent, and will keep a faithful record of all such contributions.”

Within weeks, as the nation mourned Lincoln, Scott’s idea spread in newspapers across the country with headlines praising the “Energy of Colored Persons.”

Some repeated the quote that Battelle attributed to her:

“The colored people have lost their best friend on earth,” she allegedly told Battelle at her moment of inspiration. “Mr. Lincoln was our best friend and I will give five dollars of my wages towards erecting a monument to his memory.”

Editorials repeated the call to action, with their own distasteful rendition of Scott’s quote, urging Black soldiers and other freedman to donate money to “build a monument to good Massa Lincoln.”

A regiment of Black soldiers from Vicksburg sent $4,200. Then donations in the thousands arrived from other Black military units. One paper reported Black soldiers in their local unit were so excited, they tried to give up their entire paychecks to the cause, their fervor tempered by a commander who capped their donations at $5 each.

Scott became an instant celebrity. She was styled for a fundraising portrait, engulfed by a billowing dress and holding a donation basket. Copies of the photo were sold as part of the effort and traded like Pokémon cards.

It was a whirlwind. Nothing like the first half of her life.

Charlotte Scott was born enslaved on the Scott Plantation near Lynchburg, Virginia. She birthed twelve children and helped raise many more, then was presented as a wedding gift to one of them, Meg Scott, a white daughter of the plantation owner.

Meg married Dr. William Rucker, a former slaver who granted freedom to most of the people who were considered his property, then was imprisoned for siding with the Union during the Civil War.

While he was behind bars, Meg, their children and Charlotte Scott were escorted by Union soldiers to Marietta, Ohio, to live in safety.

Charlotte Scott was working for the family as a paid, domestic servant when Lincoln was killed.

After her brainstorm and donation, the project moved quickly. A relief organization in St. Louis, the Western Sanitary Commission, stepped in to manage the funds and construct the statue.

There’s plenty to say about the memorial by Thomas Ball, the American artist working in Italy who — moved by the assassination independent of Scott’s campaign — sculpted his own ode to Lincoln.

The commission member who happened to be traveling in Florence and saw Ball’s marble sculpture brought a mini version of it to the committee — all white men. Even then, they thought it was a little condescending and paternalistic. (Their misgivings were echoed in recent protests calling for the removal of confederate statues , but it still stands.)

They asked Ball to redesign it with more strength and urgency, using Archer Alexander — believed to be the last man captured under the Fugitive Slave Act — as a model.

“In the original the kneeling slave is represented as perfectly passive, receiving the boon of freedom from the hand of the great liberator. But the artist justly changed this, to bring the presentation nearer to the historical fact, by making the emancipated slave an agent in his own deliverance,” James Yeatman, president of the Sanitary Commission, said in his speech at the unveiling ceremony on April 14, 1876, the 11th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination.

The dedication was a huge scene, declared a city holiday, even. There were marching bands, military units, President Ulysses S. Grant, Supreme Court Justices and, of course, Scott. She was there, but didn’t address the crowd. The white folks who took over her campaign dominated most of the pageantry.

“A far greater degree of dignity and vigor, as well as of historical accuracy, is thus imparted,” Yeatman said.

Not everyone was buying it.

Frederick Douglass, the keynote speaker that day, gave a stirring oratory after President Grant unveiled the piece. But Douglass didn’t love the memorial.

“The negro here, though rising, is still on his knees and nude,” Douglass wrote after the unveiling. “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.”

Neither Douglass, nor Scott nor any of the thousands of Black Americans who donated to the monument had a say in what it would be.

Its impact on the city was huge, though. Because of its position in the center of Lincoln Park, atop Capitol Hill and facing the future Washington Monument, Scott created what would be the first iteration of a celebrated, shared public space. It was the National Mall 1.0.

This was before the expansion the relied on the 1922 Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool to anchor the beloved stretch, and before the Mary McLeod Bethune memorial was added to Lincoln Park in the 1970s and Scott’s Lincoln memorial was rotated to face her, his back to the Capitol.

Until then, Scott’s statue was a Washington focal point for families, gatherings and parades. Newspaper accounts followed marching bands and processions that made it a point to pay homage to Lincoln, to the tribute created by a humble $5 donation.

It was this five dollars that was the foundation of this beautiful and appropriate memorial which we now see before us.

MY DEAR SIR: A poor negro woman of Marietta, Ohio, one of those made free by President Lincoln’s proclamation, proposes that a monument to their dead friend be erected by the colored people of the United States. She has handed to a person in Marietta five dollars as her contribution for the purpose. Such a monument would have a history more grand and touching than any of which we have account. Would it not be well to take up this suggestion and make it known to the freedmen?

It’s not just the swimming pool treatment of a Washington icon that gets her.

Or the huge-ass “Triumphal Arch” Trump is planning, which she calls a “wake up call”, that moves her to action.

Dr. Judy Scott Feldman has been fighting for the National Mall for decades.

As Americans across the nation awaken to Trump’s Napoleonic thirst for edification – but with roadtrip-motel-meets-dictator vibes – the importance of rational discussion and process when it comes to our nation’s sacred spaces becomes clear.

This is what Dr. Feldman has been Loraxing about, for decades. She speaks for The Mall.

She’s often the only member of the public testifying at long meetings in weird rooms tucked away in federal buildings, on Zoom, at podiums and rickety tables facing bored bureaucrats. She tirelessly persists, submitting public comments, challenging whack plans and fighting for the renovations she may not live long enough to see. The reception she gets is wildly different from the reverence given to the two men who took on the monumental cause years ago. She doesn’t get paid to do this. She carves the time out of a busy, modern life of parenting, lecturing and teaching college classes.

Why?
“I was born in Washington and I still think it’s one of the most beautiful cities I’ve been to,” she said.

I met Dr. Feldman, who was raised in Anacostia, two decades ago when I got a new beat at The Washington Post covering the National Mall. (The local staff was THAT determined to report on all the workings of Washington back then.) She was the one I saw at all those long meetings, the one not getting paid to be there.

This was right after Congress determined that the National Mall “is a completed work of civic art” in 2003, an act to prevent overcrowding and overbuilding in the “reserve,” the cross-shaped land most of us know as “The Mall” bounded by the U.S. Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the White House and the Jefferson Memorial. “Sorry folks, The Mall is closed.”

And yet, they kept building.

So this is what the National Mall Coalition, the non-profit Dr. Feldman founded, is proposing: expansion, vision, growth and, most importantly, a plan. Because she isn’t a typical art history PhD who skews preservationist. No, she’s all for building, changing and growing.

The history of our nation keeps evolving, after all.

Her coalition sees a plan for a National Mall area that connects the Lincoln Memorial to the Kennedy Center, and includes the Potomac waterfront on the D.C. and Virginia sides. Her coalition even supports a “National Mall Underground” that includes flood mitigation, a welcome center and lots of parking, especially for tour buses. It is practical and smart, realistic about what’s happening there today.

How we got here

In the nation’s first century, the White House, Capitol building and the Emancipation statue in Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill (I’m going to tell you more about the woman who is responsible for the way that played out in a future piece – it’s an amazing story) was all the federal splendor we had.

The growth of the nation’s capital was guided by Pierre L’Enfant, a French architect who fought for the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and was appointed by George Washington to envision a capital city. The L’Enfant Plan of 1791 laid out a metropolis of diagonal avenues cutting through a grid of city streets, all planned around the three main events: the “Congress House”, built on Jenkin’s Hill (he described the future Capitol Hill as a “pedestal awaiting a monument”), the “President’s House”, and the American Public, the green space connecting the two.

But as the nation and city grew, the capital city’s grandeur did not.

It tried to brand itself the “City of Magnificent Distances”, but the “City of Magnificent Mud” was what stuck, as L’Enfant’s ambitious plans were subsumed by open sewage canals, roads that became muddy quagmires during rain, livestock that roamed freely and skeleton buildings that were never completed. Charles Dickens was appalled during his 1842 visit, calling D.C. the “City of Magnificent Intentions,” with “spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete.”

The pretty parts were cloistered, winding Victorian parks and gardens, which did little to symbolize a robust and ambitious young democracy.

The city needed a plan.

Sen. James McMillan, a Canadian who moved to Detroit for work, took charge of this problem with the Senate Park Commission. That became known as the McMillan Plan in 1902, an expansion of the National Mall to include sweeping parks, museums, fountains, reflecting pools and monuments.

“The task is indeed a stupendous one; it is much greater than any one generation can hope to accomplish,” the commission wrote in The Washington Post on Jan. 16, 1902. The plan “shall enable future development to proceed along the lines originally planned—namely, the treatment of the city as a work of civic art.”

What now?

Feldman and the other historians, planners, engineers and architects she’s been working with disagree that the Mall is done.

The Mall just needs a new plan, one for the 3rd Century of our history.

“I never intended to be an activist,” she said. But while teaching medieval art and architecture at American University, she was asked to take on the university’s Washington Semester Program in Architecture.

That was when the controversial World War II monument was being discussed, and there were fireworks over the plan to take over the Rainbow Pool, which had been part of the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool.

“The attention of the public is called to the splendid opportunities that will be afforded by these pools for model yacht racing which is now growing to be so popular throughout the United States,” Col. Clarence O. Sherrill, head of public buildings and parks, told the Washington Evening Star in October 1924, when the pool was opened and named because the water jets summoned a rainbow in the sunlight. It was supposed to be a place where children can splash and play, race boats and skate in the winter.

Feldman joined others siding with Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, who wanted to preserve the Rainbow Pool as it was, a place to play and reflect. They argued that bisecting the important stretch of the National Mall — it’s symbolic, honoring the presidents who helped found and then save the nation — with a war memorial was wrong.

“So I got kind of sucked in, and was testifying and would tell history – because I always thought it mattered – during the hearings,” she said. “And you know, during those hearings, I learned they don’t care about history.”

They lost that argument and the World War II Memorial took over the Rainbow Pool in 2004. But Feldman persisted, banding with others who saw the chaos in the planning.

“We knew somebody had to lead the charge,” she said. “So I figured, I was born in Washington, I crazy love it. I know the history. I know the process. So I took it on.”

It’s an onerous task.

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No one agency has authority over the entire mall, there are little fiefdoms.

And even though the Mall was “closed” to new construction in 2003, Congress approved four new memorials and two more museums for the increasingly crowded space. They’re all good ideas, including memorials to victims of the global war on terror, fallen journalists, National Medal of Honor recipients and Women’s Suffrage, plus museums about women’s history and American Latinos. But each one takes up more space, crowding the National Mall, cluttering the open plan and eliminating spaces for play, protest and recreation.

It needs to grow.

And that’s why Feldman is fighting for a 3.0 plan that acknowledges we need for the future, for a nation that will keep growing and changing and evolving.

“The Mall belongs to the American people,” she said, explaining her mission. “Nobody’s in charge and everybody’s in charge and everybody’s got different mandates…this is the people’s place and we need to not just preserve it, but give it a future, a vision for a future.”

“If you don’t have a vision, you end up with what we’ve got now, a painted Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, a destroyed East Wing, a triumphal arch,” she said. “You’ve got the whim of whoever wants to come in, and there’s no plan.”

She is advocating for something she may never live to see. It’s an urban planning version of the old parable about the optimism and generosity of elders planting trees whose shade they will never enjoy.

The National Mall is America’s Acropolis, Feldman believes. And she hears awe in the voices of all the foreign experts and historians who tour it with her.

“What do they love about the Mall? Sometimes they can’t even say, but I’ll tell you what it is. It is both the design, which is an enlightenment layout, the geometry and the vistas,” she said. “But it’s also the symbolism, right? We’ve got the Capitol Building on the tallest spot. You’ve got the White House a mile away on a lower spot. You’ve got that grand vista down to Lincoln and across Arlington to Arlington Cemetery. People can feel it. It is worth preserving, and that is why we keep persisting. Even though, essentially, we’re ignored.”

Americans were obsessed with the journey to Washington, following little newspaper briefs every few days tracking the march – the 1894 version of liveblogging.

The marchers were spotted on trains (“packed like sardines”), building tents, breaking camp and breakfasting across states and cities — Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland — hundreds of unemployed men taking their grievance to their leaders in Washington.

“‘There he comes now,’ said the town oracle, pointing down West Main Street toward a middle-aged man who wore gold-bowed spectacles and a mud-splashed mackintosh over his other clothing. He was followed by half a dozen small boys, and, as he hurried along, every one he met had some inquiry to make regarding the army and its most recent movements,” The New York Times wrote from Massillon, Ohio, on March 25, 1894.

They were following a radical Persister, Jacob S. Coxey, an Ohio native, perpetual political candidate, populist and owner of a silica sand quarry, who forever changed the way America protests and demonstrates with his May 1 rally in Washington D.C.

They were known as “Coxey’s Army,” some of several million men left unemployed and hopeless after the Panic of 1893, when Gilded Age railroad barons over-expanded, gold reserves fell, the McKinley Tariff jacked up consumer prices and whacked farmers, and scores of banks seized up across the nation.

Coxey proposed a $500 million “Good Roads Bill,” a plan to put the unemployed to work building America’s roads. It was a radical idea and the reports that breathlessly followed the army as it wound its way across fields, farms and cities also derided the whole spectacle, calling the marchers “vagrants” and “tramps”.

Eat the Rich

It was a roaring, gut response to the nation’s growing wealth gap during the Gilded Age, when panhandlers appeared, homeless and unemployed folks were regularly jailed and the rich partied. “‘Hard Times Balls’ are the newest kink now coming westward, the invitations being printed on brown paper and everyone wearing his old clothes,” The Madison Courier wrote, reporting on the sweeping trend of partiers battling for the best “hobo costume” award at the otherwise sumptuous galas. The rich ate and ate. The poor starved.

No wonder folks were fed up. Coxey tapped into the feeling of powerlessness so many of the unemployed had with his plan to take their complaints to the mighty center of power, Capitol Hill, and ask for help. Similar armies formed across the nation to head east.

“Peace on Earth, Good Will to Man, But death to interest on Bonds!” one of their popular banners read.

Let’s pause here for a moment to see if any of this sounds familiar.

The Wizard of Oz Theory

There’s a group of scholars who believe The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, was L. Frank Baum’s interpretation of Coxey’s march. It’s plausible. The yellow brick road was the gold standard, the Emerald City the nation’s capital and the Wizard = the president (right down to the levers of power behind the curtain.)

“Hearing that the Witch of the East had put a hex on the Tin Woodman when he had his own wood-chopping business made him a perfect symbol for those workers who feel dehumanized by modern mass industry,” wrote high school teacher Henry Littlefield, in a famous 1964 essay that set the allegory theory into motion. “His being rusted and unable to move we connected metaphorically to the long industrial depression of 1893. Then we saw Coxey’s Army of the unemployed marching on Washington, D.C., in 1894, as a kind of Ozian march on our own Emerald City.”

The scarecrow stood in for American farmers and the cowardly lion was “William Jennings Bryan,” a populist and three-time presidential candidate, who “could be referred to in lionesque terms, with his hair, his aggressive speaking style, and his big voice.” Plus, Bryan rhymed with lion, Littlefield wrote. Dorothy, of course, represented the average American. In the book, her shoes were silver (Hollywood thought ruby slippers would be sexier), and amid the 1893 panic, “silverites” put their faith in silver currency “as the cheapest and most abundant substance for which they could gain support,” according to an article by Robert F. Hoxie in the Journal of Political Economy in 1893.

Pretty interesting, right? Baum never explicitly called it an allegory, but it makes sense. And the theory gives Coxey’s Army double bonus points for an outsized impact on our culture.

Okay, back to the Emerald City.

Not allowed to speak in D.C.

Washington D.C. prepared for Coxey’s Army, mustering the U.S. Army, the D.C. militia and police. Crowds gathered for the spectacle, something never seen before in Washington.

“Not Allowed to Speak”, was the headline on one Washington newspaper dispatch when Coxey’s army, “in no respect an imposing array”, marched down Pennsyvlania Avenue, waving banners and followed by hundreds of curious onlookers who had tracked their journey.

Coxey’s plan was to get to the Capitol steps and read his “Good Roads Bill.”

He never got the chance.

“The police ordered the people back and when they refused to obey, charged,” The Miltonvale Tribune reported on May 2. “The crowd scattered without trouble of any kind. Coxey and Borne were arrested and with their banners taken to the police station, followed by a long line of jostling men and boys.”

Coxey and his entourage members were jailed and released in June after a 20-day sentence. Newspapers snarked, calling the whole affair a “joke” and a “failure.” But it was a pivotal moment in history on a number of levels.

The marches Coxey inspired

• The Women’s Suffrage Procession on March 3, 1913 was a massive, violent and pivitol moment in the fight for women’s voting rights

• The Ku Klux Klan march on Aug. 8, 1925 had tens of thousands of racists displaying the stark divide in our nation

• The Hunger March of Dec. 6, 1931 was another protest by unemployed workers whose lives were decimated by a banking crash

• The Bonus Army arrived in the spring of 1932 with about 20,000 World War I veterans and their families, who marched and camped on the National Mall to demand advance payment of a bonus that was delayed for years after their service

• The Marian Anderson concert on April 9, 1939, brought about 75,000 people to hear her sing at the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of the American Revolution banned her performance.

• The Aug, 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where a quarter million people heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. give what is known as his “I Have a Dream Speech”

The National Mall became the place for Americans to air their grievances, hopes and dreams, a living, thriving platform for democracy that was never envisioned by the grand planners who crated the space to be about elegant parks and marble and bronze monuments.

And Coxey’s arrest sparked a debate and examination of the criminalization of free speech and protest, which the Ohio ACLU said is in danger of being revisited today.

It all began with Coxey’s idea to march on Washington.

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Not only did he see all the important demonstrations that followed his example, but his “Good Roads Bill” became a founding piece of the New Deal. And on the 50 year anniversary of his arrest in 1894, he had his moment:

“‘General Jacob S. Coxey, in good voice despite his 90 years, finished the speech Monday he started to make from the capitol steps 50 years ago,” the Associated Press reported from Washington on May 1, 1944.

About 200 people gathered to hear him finally get to finish reading his “Good Roads Bill” that day. Time hadn’t dulled his outrage. (Though his appearance didn’t spark much media interest, I couldn’t find photos from 1944. This one is from an appearance in 1921.)

He was persistent in his message. “And he hasn’t changed his distaste for the American financial system,” the Daily News wrote, “which he charged runs from ‘rags to rags’ every seven to 10 years because banks collect interest on loans.”

He had at least one true believer in the audience that day, a man who had been there with him 50 years ago. John R. O’Neal, described as “a real Virginian”, returned to hear the speech he’d been waiting 50 years to see.

“Thank God for Gen. Coxey,” he said.

She was on the scene covering the terrifying V bombings in London, filed stories from the Battle of Normandy and was there to tell America all about the liberation of Paris in 1944.

May Craig was a fearless war correspondent and Washington reporter who muscled her way into places where men didn’t want her, telling her there were simply no “facilities” for her.

What she couldn’t get into?

The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.

“For 20 years now I have been applying every year to go to the dinner, to which the President always comes,” Craig wrote, in her Inside Washington column on Feb. 28, 1950.

“And for that long they have been sending my money back, with some silly excuse such as, if I come, then they would have to let wives come too.”

Oh no! Wives? Then they’d have to jump over them in case of an assassination attempt, I guess. The indulgent dinner, in the news this week after a gunman stormed the security lines in an alleged assassination attempt, has always been a spectacle. And especially this year, as reporters welcomed a president who is brazenly trying to trample the First Amendment.

The dinners began in 1921, and even though (some) women were among the Washington press corps back then, the affair always excluded them. The Sheraton, the Willard, the Arlington, the Carlton … surely, all those hotels had “facilities,” no?

“Females who are dues-paying members of the Association are not allowed to come to the annual dinner because the men want it stag,” she wrote, with her trademark frankness.

It was such a joke, members of the Women’s National Press Club snarked at the tradition with this tableaux in 1938 — “Gridiron Widows”. They posed satirizing the U.S. Supreme Court while their husbands attended the Gridiron Club dinner. Elizabeth May Craig is on the far left, as Justice Roberts.

It wasn’t just the dinners. They didn’t allow women into the National Press club for years, and grudgingly gave some space in the dining room to the American News Women’s Club, founded in 1932. But the women were kicked out of it the next year, when prohibition was repealed and the men needed to expand the Press Club bar.

The places to socialize, schmooze and build sources remained, stubbornly, the domain of men.

Oh, except for the entertainment.

Female members of the press corps “are adamantly barred, despite the fact that the boys invariably import such luscious feminine stars as Dinah Shore, Celeste Holm and Ethel Merman to sing for their supper,” New York Daily News columnist Ruth Montgomery wrote during the 1953 event, “one of the most jealously guarded all-male shindigs in the country.”

That glamorous standard was set during the 1928 dinner, where “nothing more clever has ever been done at one of these banquets” than the presentation of “two dainty sisters” from Missouri who sang and danced, Jane and Ginger Rogers, according to The Washington Herald. President Coolidge was so smitten, he invited them to the White House for a visit and a return engagement.

Cabinet secretaries are usually part of the affair. But in 1933, the association snubbed the most popular one of the time, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. “No invitation was sent to her because it was a stag affair,” the Daily Item reported. “The dinner was a great success.”

But then the age of Camelot came. Surely, JFK would put an end to this.

“During the presidential campaign, Mr. Kennedy came out strongly for equal treatment of women in business, labor, and the professions,” wrote Washington correspondent Virginia Kelly, on March 19, 1961. “One word from the President would change the attitude of the men members of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”

Nope.

It went on at the Sheraton Park Hotel (also a place with plenty of “facilities” for all the women). “It was stag,” Kelly deadpanned, in one of her columns that regularly appeared across the nation’s newspapers.

“One of the disillusioning aspects of the discrimination is that men reporters are agonizingly eloquent over racial discrimination,” she wrote. “Nearly all are silent about the discrimination against their women colleagues.”

America’s sexism was so pronounced, it became a Cold War propaganda tool.

When Nikita Khrushchev planned his trip to Washington, he said he would not luncheon with the National Press Club unless some female writers were allowed to attend.

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Perhaps it was the shaming by the Soviets that finally made them give in to Craig’s persistence and allow women in 1962.

“A wall will be broken down in Washington April 27,” Craig wrote in her column announcing that she will “be there to help pull it down.”

It was a journey.

“In my files are letters telling me no, returned checks sent in for tickets, the most ridiculous, angry abashed letters you ever saw,” Craig wrote. “This has been going on since I was eligible in 1926.”

She and other women have asked every president and presidential candidate to push the association to include the female reporters they see at press briefings and events all year long.

“None of them had the courage to do it,” she said. The two candidates who promised her they would, Senator Robert Taft and Adlai Stevenson, never made it to the White House.

Opening the gala to women didn’t sit well with some of guys.

“Washington’s girl reporters, who have at times been accused of spending more time battling for what they consider to be their women’s rights than in working as reporters, are doing some heavy gloating these days,” wrote Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Henry in 1962.

“By their persistent protests, the gal reporters have gradually gained admission to a lot of places from which they were either barred or had only second-class status.”

May Craig went to the dinner, “a gown among the tuxedos.” She also filed stories about the Supreme Court, the relaxing of formal protocol at the Kennedy White House and the progress of the regional airport in Maine that day. Courts, transportation and culture, plenty of work. Surely enough to gloat about.

A mother of two, Craig was a capable and wildly productive journalist. After reporting from the front lines of World War II, Craig continued to break barriers as the first female correspondent to work from a battleship at sea, fly the Berlin airlift, cover the Korean truce talks and fly over the North Pole.

She was the Washington correspondent for newspapers in Maine, but she became a familiar fixture in the nation’s capital and on television, known for her sharp and persistent questions as well as her remarkable hats, which viewers often called to complain about. Or they simply offered money to buy her new ones.

She was on “Meet the Press” 243 times, the second-most frequent panelist on the show, behind David Broder.

In her 1975 obituary, The New York Times called her interviewing technique “peppery” and her questions “nettlesome.”

She had described them as “dodge-proof”.

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America usually gets it wrong when we’re talking about people who risk their safety every day at work.

Sure, police officers, firefighters, loggers and fishers get the most credit for macho bravery. But in a lot of places across our nation, being a nurse is more dangerous than being a cop or a prison guard.

They are regularly assaulted, pummeled, stabbed, bitten, kicked and punched, especially in emergency rooms. I wrote about this after a spate of attacks on nurses, including Elise Wilson, who was slashed by a patient unhappy with his care in Massachusetts.

And because they’re usually working insanely irregular hours, they’re more vulnerable than the average 9-5ers going to and from work.

Which is why it makes total sense that the home security systems we use today were invented not by law enforcement, military intelligence or security experts. It was invented by a nurse, a Black woman in her 40s, with the help of her electrician husband.

Marie Van Brittan Brown worked the night shift at a hospital in Queens, New York, in the 1960s. Crime in New York was no joke back then, with a 148% increase across the decade, according to FBI crime reports.

So Brown was nervous every time a shift ended and she came back to her home at odd hours. Her husband, Albert Brown, also worked unusual hours as an electrician. In her 40s and a mother of two, she started thinking of ways to make their home safer.

She knew that “it takes considerable time to dial the police and get action in an emergency,” according to an interview. And she came up with an idea using a remote system and video camera – all groundbreaking technology at the time.

“The system includes a video scanning device at the entrance door of the house to scan a visitor outside the door, and includes audio intercommunication equipment inside and outside the door for conversing with the visitor outside the door,” the Browns wrote in the patent application they filed on Aug. 1, 1966.

“A lock is provided for the door with releasing means for the lock manually controlled by the occupant of the house.”

Marie was listed as the primary inventor on the application.

Their patent was granted in December of 1969, and was so notable, the couple was featured in The New York Times.

“The equipment is not in production, but the Browns hope to interest manufacturers and home builders,” the Times wrote.

“With the patented system, a woman alone in the house could alarm the neighborhood immediately by pressing a button,” she said.

Her visionary idea is cited in prestigious tech institutions, from MIT to Princeton. But they usually focus on the idea that it was for a home.

Yet in one interview, she revealed a broader application she saw because of her work in medicine, explaining that “...installed in a doctor’s office it might prevent holdups by drug addicts.”

The Browns were ahead of their time and the system was too costly in their day to gain traction, or dollars.

“Complete systems like Marie’s wouldn’t see popular adaptation for more than 3 decades,” Brinks Home Security wrote, in an ode to the invention that has earned them a fortune. “… but her innovations were cited on over 30 subsequent patents as further advancements were made.”

The patent, # 3,482,037, was actually cited in at least 40 other patent applications, both for similar security systems and other technologies. The global home security systems market was worth about $75 billion last year. The Browns didn’t earn any of it.

This story is about a Persister who is a nurse, but it isn’t about nursing.

I did this interview months ago and I couldn’t find the right time to publish the story, for a number of reasons.

Then I finished watching season two of The Pitt, a really intense medical drama set in a fictional Pittsburgh ER. It is a tour de force in human trauma, the heroics medical professionals perform, the threads of social complexities across racial, ethnic and socio-economic lines that coalesce and explode in an ER, and the huge, mental toll it takes on workers.

After watching, I understood the nurse a lot better, even though I didn’t meet the nurse in a hospital. It was at the Pie Shop in 2023, one of D.C.’s coolest music venues and a pretty good place to get dessert.

My kid is a musician (then a drummer) who dreams of making it big someday, so we went to the all–ages show to see a band I was interested in, Teen Mortgage. The drummer was a towering, long-haired, bearded, broad-shouldered man who can also dead lift 505 pounds. And he was selling merch in the back of the venue after the show, and kind enough to indulge talking to a star-struck 16 year old.

The drummer is the nurse in this story.

For years, Edward Barakauskas was a frontline, ER trauma nurse. He’s been in high-traffic emergency rooms, Red Cross disaster sites, trucked into a hospital in all-terrain vehicles during crippling snow storms. It’s a lot.

“I think I kind of came into doing this work because I felt like I was, like, built for it in some way,” he said. His childhood was “chaotic” and included a brother going to juvenile detention and “the spectrum of things you can imagine in a domestic situation, like, people being alcoholics and suicide, and deaths” he said. “When people tell me they had a normal childhood, I think that’s fucking weird, you know?”

Navigating that chaos may have been what steered him toward the kind of intense, medical situations where he thrived after getting degrees at Georgetown University and the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

“I do think it had an effect on my psychology, in how I process really stressful situations,” he said. “When, I came into medicine… I can deduce that things are really bad and fucked up, and I actually feel more of like an emptiness” that he can channel into calm competence.

That’s how he survived the job.

“I went to hurricanes and a lot of fires,” he said. “you would go to these zones where towns were just wiped out, wiped off the face of the planet. I would go out there, I’d live that life for like a month or something, and then I come back and try to tell people…and they wouldn’t even know that happened.”

It’s intense. And isolating.

There are thousands of traumas in this kind of medicine, but some are seared on your brain as turning points. For Barakauskas, one was a work day in the ER where he started drinking a glass of water as a coding baby was rushed in. “It was clearly dead, with the family in the room,” and after trying every dramatic, life-saving procedure, they had to pronounce the baby gone. And then he went back to finish the glass of water.

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It’s disconnecting, unimaginable work.

Barakauskas processed all of it in one particular place — behind a drum kit. Sure, he also had that young musician dream of making it big on stage someday, banging out his frustrations, emotions and traumas on the drums. Away from the surreal daily drama of death.

He formed a band with other professionals in health and corporate America. They named it Tired all the Time (TATT), which is so appropriate. Tired at work, tired of corporate bureaucratization of human lives, tired of it all. They’re a trio now, with Michael Talley, who works in the mental health field, on vocals and synth; Brian Miller, who works in the corporate world, on bass.

When Barakauskas didn’t have his hand inside someone’s gaping wound or wasn’t stitching skin and psyches back together, he and his bandmates wrote music they say derives “language and aesthetics from the corporate medical and pharmaceutical industries alongside the occult”.

Tired all The Time released an LP in January called Somewhere Else, and they have a show coming up in D.C. next month.

But I met Barakauskas when he was playing with his other band, Teen Mortgage, and here’s where the Persister part really comes in.

Teen Mortgage is a duo Barakauskas formed with a super-talented guy from Liverpool, James Guile, who put out a Craig’s List ad for a drummer in 2017, right after he moved here from the UK.

They hit it off, practiced their faces off, and starting making real noise. They’re two guys who create and improbable wall of sound, a punk attack of muscle and swagger that sends every audience into moshing delirium. They were noticed by King Pizza Records in New York in 2019, and songs recorded with the label were quickly picked up for a Vans commercial and an episode of Shameless. They began touring.

All the while, Barakauskas, was still working in medicine. Persisting with insane hours, playing a gig in Norfolk, sleeping on the way back up, pulling an overnight shift in the hospital, then sleeping in the van while Guile powered them up to New Jersey for another show in front of 2,000 people.

Five shifts, three shows. Six shifts, four shows. It was chaos. Barakauskas was steady through it all.

Public life wasn’t all flowers and fans. They got harassed online after a gig at Comet Ping-Pong in D.C., when one of the deranged conspiracy freaks who believed Washington Democrats were running a sex ring out of the basement of that place (which has no basement, I wrote about them after they were raided by a gunman) deduced that the show plus their record label means they must be in on it. (Hello, where are you Pizza Gaters now that there’s an actual pedophile sex ring tied to the White House?)

But they also heard from a combat medic at one of their shows who told them his trauma team played their song “Doctor” every time they had incoming casualties. Without knowing anything about the drummer’s life in trauma ER, the music connected.

I talked to them again in 2023 at the D.C. Libary, (story here) where they played a rooftop summer show and Barakauskas said he was about to work his last shift as a nurse before going on tour. Then they blew up.

They went from the library to big stages to huge-ass concert venues to stadiums across North America and Europe. They’re touring Canada right now.

Teen Mortgage opened for Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, Alkaline Trio, OFF! and (my all-time favorite), the Descendents. On the Descendents tour, Barakauskus had the chance to bond with the frontman we named my first-born after, Milo Aukerman. (Dr. Aukerman is a microbiologist who finally went full-time with his band after DuPont laid him off from his research job a decade ago).

Barakauskas finally made it big in music. He just turned 40.

Persist, baby, persist.

Know any Persisters I should write about? Let me know!

Virtual learning – from Covid Zoom classes to online universities to college extension programs – started with a radical idea by one woman, a nerdy bookworm of the Gilded Age who thought education should not be limited by geography or class.

It became known as the “Silent University”, and it changed American education forever.

Anna Eliot Ticknor grew up in the lofty, intellectual habitat of her father, a Harvard professor famous at the time for his studies in Spanish literature.

That’s how she was usually known, as “George Ticknor’s daughter.”

When she died in 1896, many of the obituaries left it at that, or they included an exhaustive resume of her father’s academia or just dwelled on her spinsterhood: “She was about seventy years old, and had never married,” the New York Tribune reported.

But she was a juggernaut in American education, the mail-order classes she humbly began with a handful of students in 1873 was a thriving, virtual university with more than 7,000 students across the nation, in Canada and even Bermuda, within two decades.

“A more unique and practically helpful plan was never evolved than that of Miss Anna E. Ticknor to ‘encourage study at home’,” the most detailed of her obituaries – this one in The Daily Inter Ocean on Oct. 10 1869, said.

Ticknor grew up ensconced in academia, but she was tutored by her father and appeared to have had no formal education. There was no record of her attendance at a university, and when she began seeing more universities opening up to women, she was thrilled at the change. She watched one of her best friends, Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, co-found Radcliffe College.

But Ticknor was bothered by the exclusivity of it all. She lived in that bubble, a world of leatherbound books, lectures, summer travel and libraries. You could wonder if she was trapped, stunted in her father’s shadow.

His death in 1871 was her moment to finally bust out. She was 50 years old, a mid-life Persister who pivoted with authority when she launched her radical idea – education by mail.

“While colleges and academies for women were springing up all over the country, Miss Ticknor bethought herself of those whose homes were far away from the centres of learning and instruction, and yet who craved education advantages for themselves and their families,” her friend, Agassiz, said in a book she co-wrote with Samuel Eliot, a cousin and colleague, about Ticknor’s distance learning movement: Society to Encourage Studies at Home.

To be fair, the first person to try out the idea of a correspondence course was Caleb Phillips, who put an ad in the Boston Gazette in 1728 looking for students who would like to learn shorthand “by having the several lessons sent weekly to them, be as perfectly instructed as those that live in Boston.”

There seems to be no record of whether that took off. A chap in London, Sir Isaac Pitman, seized on the idea and did a limited version of correspondence school in the 1840s, teaching shorthand by mailing postcards in shorthand to students and receiving their transcriptions.

What Ticknor accomplished was far more elaborate.

She began small, and wanted to keep it very low key. She insisted, Agassiz, recounted, that no newspapers should know about it and she wouldn’t advertise:

“‘If it is really needed,’ she was wont to say, ‘it would make itself known’.”

And did it ever.

She began with a staff of 10, including six teachers who corresponded with 45 students across seven states. The staff quickly swelled to more than 200 volunteer teachers. “By a well-organized system of distribution, she sent books, engravings, photographs, maps all that makes the outfit of thorough instruction, to the doors of families living far from libraries, museums or colleges,” Agassiz wrote.

“She opened new sources of progress and pleasure to mothers and their children within their own homes and without hindering in any way domestic duties and claims. It was touching to read the affectionate and grateful letters of acknowledgement from some of these distant homes, into which she had brought unlooked-for means of happiness and interest.”

[Note they had to keep reminding men their drawers will get washed, even if their wives read books.]

She curated a massive lending library, and the teachers noted that though the books were passed through many homes, they were rarely lost or damaged. Tuition began at $2 a year, then was raised to $3.

In one of her annual reports, she summed up her mission statement:

“Instead of confining our offers of help – as the English society did at the time – to the wealthy class only, we at once endeavored to interest all classes,” she wrote. She wanted a system “to produce intellectual habits and learning” and not just mimic the gold-star, cutthroat ethos of prestigious universities.

It was about the love of learning, no matter who you are. She heard from a mother of four who tended 20 cows and lived for her time with textbooks as well as a once illiterate, impoverished woman working in her husband’s lumber camp who went on to have her essay on Shakespeare published.

The courses began with History, then English literature and German, then art and French, then science. The students wanted more, so she expanded to add anatomy, physiology, chemistry, physics and zoology.

There was a code for the school in correspondence and conversation, it was two simple letters in the corner of every envelope and package, the way they talked and wrote about it: “S.H.”, Studies at Home.

“Did I ever write to you about the S.H. on our letters?” a student once wrote to Ticknor. “You must know that I told our colored postman long ago that S.H. stood for sweetheart, as he seemed to think some one was very constant in letters to me.”

The patriarchy took some shots at the Silent University, worried it was a waste of time and would distract women from their duties at home.

A Boston Globe editorial in 1878 defended the endeavor, calling it a “novel undertaking with grand results” and argued that women can have it all. No one should deny: “a hard-worked wife and mother the satisfaction of sitting down to a favorite volume of science, history, art or standard literature, when once the dishes are all washed, the stocking neatly rolled into balls and the babies tucked into bed.”

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Ticknor, wasn’t scared off. She Persisted and clapped back at the manosphere’s hate with a (passive-aggressive) new section, “Sanitary Science”. It was “to enable women whose cares and troubles are too often increased by ignorance of simple facts and laws, to protect themselves and their households against the consequences of mistakes and carelessness. It aims, not to make women independent of trained specialists, but to enable them to know when and how the services of such specialists are need to secure the healthful condition of a house, and to lead them to take an intelligent view of such matters and ventilation, drainage and heating.”

Oh, okay!

Applications continued to pour in, from Louisiana, where “Creole girls” in St. Mary’s Parish were anxious to learn, and from California, where “people are jealous of their reputation intellectually, and the present generation are reaping the advantage of this new ambition.” Educators in Sweden and Germany asked her to help them open their own mail-order schools.

She thoughtfully answered hundreds of letters from women who felt isolated and marginalized for their intellectual curiosity, afraid to tell their friends about their studies. “You say you do not let your neighbors know of your studies, lest they suspect you of neglecting your duties,” she wrote to Mrs. B.P.D. in 1877. “It seems to me that, by this time, they must have practical demonstration of the performance of your duties; and, by silence about pursuits which they might be induced to share, you are to some extent, great or small, depriving them of an interest and incentive.”

Her classes were a sensation and by the 1880s, universities were catching on and creating extension programs. More libraries were being constructed and educational opportunities were expanding. The Society to Encourage Studies at Home was accomplishing its mission.

Classes ended with Ticknor’s death in 1896. Her collection of books and other materials became the Anna Ticknor Library Association. Soon after, correspondence schools in clerical and mining skills were established and thriving. Scores more followed.

Tens of millions of Americans have taken correspondence courses since Ticknor mailed her first textbook in 1873. In 2024, nearly 54 percent of America’s university students were enrolled in some kind of distance learning program.

“It will be seen that she was a teacher, an inspirer, a comforter and, in the best sense, a friend of many and many a lonely and baffled life.” — Samuel Eliot, 1897

(And I bet no one remembers anything her father wrote.)

“I don’t know if it’s good news,” the Persister said, a little hesitantly.

I called her expecting a victory dance. This is what she’d worked for most of her life, right?

I wanted to talk to someone who’s had a long career in sex education after news just came from the CDC that teen birth rates in America are at a historic low.

“I’ve been working to prevent teen pregnancy since I was 20 years old,” said Rev. Dr. Debra Haffner, one of the grand dames of American sex education, work she began in the 1970s.

The news was a stunning decline of 78% since 1991, when we were all watching the teen pregnancy storyline in Beverly Hills 90210 and more than 6 out of every 100 girls in their late teens had a baby.

Hooray? Not necessarily, Haffner says. There are some dark tidings in the news.

Let’s start with the numbers, which tell us this is a huge victory for young women and families. The common thread in poverty, homelessness, under-education and unemployment is teen parenthood. I saw it over decades of reporting in American cities. And we all know at least one of those stories in our hometowns, the teen mom who never thrived.

This is why we all practiced putting condoms on bananas in class.

But this news got a weirdo reception from the tradwife world.

Katie Miller, the wife of head White House troll (and deputy chief of staff) Stephen Miller clutched her pearls at the teen stat. She called it “an existential threat to humanity.”

Not quite.

Haffner is someone who truly understands what this all means. She was the successor to Mary Steichen Calderone, widely acknowledged as the mother of modern sex ed in the 1960s. (We’ll revisit her as a historic persister soon.)

Calderone founded the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), and Haffner followed her as President and Chief Executive Officer, growing it into a powerful entity. She’s also authored definitive guidelines, manuals and publications about sex education over decades. Her books are part of the American canon of parenting and include: From Diapers to Dating: A Parent’s Guide to Raising Sexually Healthy Children and Beyond the Big Talk: Every Parent’s Guide to Raising Sexually Healthy Teens.

What all that means is that sex ed is about more than preventing teen moms.

“It’s good news that they’re not having babies as teenagers,” Haffner said. “There’s all this sequelae [long-term consequence, I had to look it up too] about what happens when you have a baby as a teenager, both to your education and the baby’s education and your lifetime income.”

But there is a crisis embedded inside these numbers, Haffner said, and it’s not what Miller is talking about.

It’s far more nuanced than weird homeland fertility fears or simply the success of the banana-condom education programs we may remember. Those programs were propelled more by a fear of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s than by pregnancy prevention and included conversations about consent, communication, abstinence and acceptance.

Of course there’s the wider availability of slow-release birth control, like Norplant, that acts as a safeguard against pregnancy if the banana condom training doesn’t kick in. Medical abortions are more widely available, though Republicans are trying to end that. And queer sex is becoming more widely accepted (I mean, Grindr has reported verified crashes because of heavy use during Republican gatherings, which has been called their “Superbowl”).

But the real existential crisis is that teens are simply not getting it on as they used to – at least, not as much as they’re supposed to.

“I don’t think the downward trend in the number of older teens having sex is necessarily a good thing,” she said. The trend may be correlated with “the increase in both depression and social isolation”.

We know that smartphones and computers and virtual friendships are replacing person-to-person contact.

But what does that mean for the teenage urge to bonk? I mean, Gen Xers spent hours isolated in our rooms, at the business end of a super-long swirly phone cord talking to boys. But it was all leading to getting freaky, right?

Today, the substitute is porn. Totally available, 24-hour porn is what’s changing things.

She laughed at the days when she only had to recommend that parents keep the family computer in the living room to police it all. Today, sex is always available on their phones.

“I just spent time with some Gen Zers and these Gen Z women are not dating at all,” she said. “The men are becoming more conservative, more affected by the manosphere, and are masturbating while watching porn on their computers.”

Young men are learning that “real life women are too much work… it takes work and skills and communication and risking being hurt,” she said. And that’s no longer a big part of the male conversation.

Think that’s not true?

Look at the news this week about the Online Rape Academy, a global online network visited by more than 62 million people who watched instructions for men on how to drug and rape their spouses and partners. At all hours, they chatted and exchanged tips and watched videos on the site “Zzz” of unconscious women being raped, according to the CNN investigation.

“I think that the vast availability of sexual material on the internet, particularly pornography, has been a great social experiment on people’s sexuality that we still don’t really understand,” she said. “ I mean, I think it will be decades before we understand what happens when your first exposure to what sex is is when you’re 10 and you get to see any variety of, you know, violent depictions of sex as your introduction.”

One of the Gen Z women Haffner talked to – she’s also a sexologist and Unitarian Universalist minister – told her she’s having a hard time with sex because “I just can’t get used to someone slapping me.”

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What?

“It’s no surprise that young women aren’t having sex,” she said.

It’s the sickest form of birth control.

Haffner is still persisting with groundbreaking work on human sexuality. She is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and is continuing education in healthy ways to address sexuality within religion – from counseling to abuse prevention to understanding what religions actually say about sex and how that’s been twisted by politics and dogma.

I’m going to Persist in talking to her more, especially after she told me her latest project is a deep dive into sexuality within the bible. (Hint, it’s way beyond Leviticus.)

By her count, “there are at least 7 forms of marriage in the Hebrew Bible, most involving more than two people, and there are at least 12 types of adult relationships upheld.”

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And watch for Historic Persisters, where we delve into history to find 250 Persisters (You didn’t know) Helped Build America!

Happy Tax Day?

Let’s take this April 15 to honor the erratic Persister whose fiery, anti-tax speeches (“taxation without representation”) whipped up the colonists itching to start the American Revolution.

All hail John Otis, Jr.

Wait. You haven’t heard of him? Me neither, until recently. That makes sense because we’re not driving down Otis Boulevard, holding rallies at the Otis Monument or sending our kids to Otis University.

He is the forgotten Founding Father. And sadly, he was probably the most relatable among the white-wigged, wealthy men known for establishing the United States.

What would’ve made him prime TMZ material today – his marriage, his mental illness, his alcoholism, his famous coffee house brawl, the bizarre way he died – was seen as an embarrassment among the early elites. He was known as “The Mad Patriot”. He was basically a hot mess. So they ditched him. It’s why he’s not on our currency, statuary or our collective memory.

In his final years, President John Adams, who emulated Otis’s style and rhetoric, campaigned to correct that erasure: “...I Sincerely believe Mr Otis to have been the earliest and the principal Founder of one of the greatest political Revolutions that ever occurred among Men, it Seems to me of Some importance that his Name and Character Should not be forgotten. Young Men Should be taught to honour, Merit, but not to adore it. The greatest Men have the greatest faults,” Adams wrote in a June 1, 1818 letter to Otis’s biographer, William Tudor.

Otis was born in Massachusetts, son of a colonel and lawyer, and went to Harvard at 14 to follow in his father’s legal footsteps.

He married Ruth Cunningham, the daughter of a wealthy merchant. That was his first mistake. She was a loyalist. He wasn’t. They were the George and Kellyanne Conway of the 1760s.

Otis was hired by a group of outraged Boston businessmen in 1761 to challenge the legality of “writs of assistance,“ which allowed the British authorities to enter any home without probable cause, notice or reason.

A significant audience had gathered for the blazing, five-hour argument he gave before the highest court in Massachusetts. They devoured the brio, the audacity, the hubris he showed sticking it to the man. It was the first public pushback against the crown and it was like a flamethrower.

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“American independence was then and there born; the seeds of patriots and heroes were then and there sown,” Adams wrote. “Every man of a crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born. In fifteen years, namely in 1776, he grew up to manhood, and declared himself free.”

Historian John T. Morse called the speech. “the first log of the pile which afterward made the great blaze of the Revolution.”

He didn’t win the case. But it was a pivotal moment.

Otis persisted over the years, winning over other revolutionaries when he spoke about that thing we especially hate every April 15: taxes.

The thrust of his incendiary speeches was a phrase we all know well (especially if you live in D.C. and have it on your car license plates, like I do). “Taxation without Representation.”

He’s credited with that catchy phrase, which would make him America’s first branding expert.

Historians, however, say that while that was his theme, the brief and rhyming slogan actually first appeared on page 89 of London Magazine in August of 1768. The London printer wanted a tight headline to explain what the heck those ratty colonials were kvetching about.

Otis was controversial, ubiquitous and bombastic in the early days of the revolution. He was against slavery, and in 1764 came out strong with the view in his pamphlet, Rights of the British Colonies, where he said, “The colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black.”

His contemporaries said he started drinking too much. And increasingly, he was stressed out by the escalating tensions of the emerging revolution. They didn’t have the word for what experts today may have called his mercurial behavior: bipolar.

What definitively ended his meteoric rise was a bloody brawl with – ironically – a tax collector.

“When James Otis met the customs official John Robinson at the British Coffee House on September 5, 1769, he was already itching for a fight of some kind,” according to the National Museum of Mental Health project. “Ever since the passage of the Townshend Acts two years earlier, he had been quarreling with local tax collectors in court and in the press.”

It played out in the Boston Gazette, where Otis basically trolled Robinson in print, according to Adams.

Accounts of the fight varied, but it ended when Robinson thwacked Otis over the head with his walking stick and Otis stumbled out of the coffee house, bleeding from the slash in his head.

He took Robinson to court and got his medical expenses paid. But it was clear he suffered a traumatic brain injury and Adams remembered his steep decline.

“Otis’ personality changed quickly after his caning. Once a concise, carefully-worded orator, he now spoke ‘like a Ship without an Helm [...] verbose, and rambling, and long winded’,” according the the mental health museum account. “He stretched out short stories to last hours and took up entire nights with his distracted, nonsensical talking. After a particularly long evening with him, John Adams confided in his journal, ‘I fear he is not in his perfect Mind’.”

His messy life didn’t help. His daughter was also a loyalist and eventually married a Brit and moved across the Atlantic. His behavior became erratic and violent.

His story also shows us that the colonists understood that mental illness was real and they developed systems for caring for “distracted persons,” even with housing and care for the poor. Imagine that – their tax dollars at work!

“Colonists accepted a wide range of unusual behavior from their neighbors as long as they continued to contribute to society. However, when someone with mental illness began disturbing the peace or was no longer able to manage their own affairs, the community took action,” the museum project said.

Most were cared for by their families at home. James Otis Jr. stayed with his father in Barnstable. But when a family was struggling and couldn’t afford to dedicate full-time care to one person, they labeled them the ‘pauper insane’ and sent them to the local poor house, at town expense.

Otis eventually went to live with the Osgood family in Andover, the bloody revolutionary war was too much for him to process. The luminaries of the revolution tried to reach out to Otis occasionally, bringing him into town for dinners and honors. But he usually broke down and wanted to quickly return to the countryside. He was carried out in bindings on one occasion.

On the afternoon of May 23rd in 1783, a late spring thunderstorm rolled through Andover.

“The Osgoods clustered in one room, waiting for the rain to pass,” according to Tudor’s biography of Otis.

Otis stood in a doorway and marvelled at the ferocity of the storm. Then, that storm reached out and touched him with a bolt of lightning.

“He was in the act of telling the assembled group a story, when an explosion took place which seemed to shake the solid earth, and he fell without a struggle, or a word, instantaneously dead,” Tudor wrote. The lighting split the door casing and tore nails out of the wood with its force. “This flash of lightning was the first that came from the cloud, and was not followed by any others that were remarkable.”

He died just a few months before the United States secured its independence from Great Britain.

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Roman candles rocketed across the night sky, the crowds continued to surge in the streets. At 2 a.m., exhausted from it all – the tension and the exhilaration – she could still hear the crowds outside her window, raucous and unrelenting. It was an extraordinary night for a native of Washington D.C. to be a new voter.

In Hungary.

“I’ve never seen Hungarians this happy”, said Carolyn Bánfalvi, who has spent years wondering whether it was finally time to reconsider her life as an expat in Budapest, raising her family and growing a business under Viktor Orbán’s increasingly authoritarian rule.

She persisted for decades building that life, learning the language, navigating the culture, the business, the regulations, the money. Her three children are perfectly bilingual, the family finally bottled a small batch of Furmint and Hárslevelű wine from their own vineyard in the countryside.

And then they watched some of their close friends – Hungarians and expats – abandon the country as Orbán flexed more power and eroded Hungary’s democracy.

“We always talk about it, should we stay or leave,” she said. “But it wouldn’t feel right, if we would have to leave because of him. Like, just give up the country because of him?”

Carolyn is a well-regarded envoy of Hungarian food and wine in America. Her tributes to the complexities of paprika, heritage wines, the expanse of cuisine beyond goulash and back-channel gems to visit in Budapest have appeared in National Geographic, Saveur and The Atlantic, among others, and she wrote two guidebooks, The Food and Wine Lover’s Guide to Hungary and Food Wine Budapest (The Terroir Guides).

She and her husband, Gábor Bánfalvi, run Taste Hungary, a tour and wine tasting business that sounds mainstream today, but was totally baffling when they launched the gonzo idea 15 years ago.

“This was before food tours became the popular tour category they are today. Back then, people didn’t quite get what we were doing when we explained that our tours focused on food and wine as a lens to experience Hungary,” Carolyn wrote. “Now, they are offered everywhere and are well understood as a fun and educational way to experience a new place.”

She knew she didn’t want to spend her whole life living in D.C, but never imagined living in Hungary. “I know I wanted to travel,” she said. “I maybe imagined myself living in New York. “ She’d hardly heard of Hungary when she was Carolyn Chapman, a child of D.C. taking a break from college to work on a Carnival Cruise ship touring the Caribbean. She was one of the brave souls toiling in the kiddie fun zone, caring for the kids on board while their parents partied.

The ship was filled with workers from Eastern and Central Europe in the late 1990s, when the children raised under communism had the freedom to travel and make more money than they could at home.

She met a charming guy from Hungary named Gábor Banfalvi who was working as a busboy. “I didn’t know anything about Hungary. He was probably the first Hungarian person I ever met,” she said. They clicked, but then her cruise ship contract was up and she returned to New York to finish college. They did the long-distance relationship thing and Gábor joined her in New York. After earning her degree at NYU, she moved to Budapest with Gábor in 1999.

Hungary was not on the mainstream tourist trail back then and she was an oddity everywhere she went, navigating the city with paper maps, struggling with the language. “There were no smartphones, no Google translate back then,” she said. Her attempts were appreciated by locals, but perplexing. This is one of her first acts as a Persister expat, she was undeterred.

“It was a regular question,” she said, “for example I’d be in a restaurant or taxi or whatever and people were always surprised, asking me: ‘Why Hungary?’”

She briefly returned to the U.S. to earn a culinary degree. But then she finally answered the ‘Why Hungary?’ question. This wasn’t a political or social statement, not a rejection of her homeland. This was about a human condition much more powerful than all that. It was about love. She and Gábor married in 2004.

They began building their business, which has included the tours and wine exporting (the paperwork was monumental). During Covid, when travel halted, they pivoted and adjusted, opening a little wine shop that could operate under a grocery type of license. Eventually, they opened a gorgeous tasting room across the street from the shop in the historic Palace District in Budapest, around the corner from the Hungarian National Museum.

In between all that, they spent some time in D.C., including a couple years in 2016, when they wanted their kids to have a more robust experience as Americans. (This is when I met Carolyn and her family. Her extraordinary mother was my son’s beloved kindergarten teacher, I wrote about her years ago.)

But she came back to a divided nation, as Trump took office for the first time and the rancor was impossible to escape in America and particularly in her childhood neighborhood on Capitol Hill.

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When the Bánfalvis returned to Budapest, Orbán’s strongman vibes were expanding and his reputation abroad, especially his close ties to Vladimir Putin, were beginning to sour the world’s view of Hungary. It began to hurt the Bánfalvis’ business.

On travel forums, Caroyln would cringe at the dismissal of Hungary, “like people saying, ‘I would love to come to Hungary, but not while Orbán is there.’ Or ‘I’m not buying Hungarian wine because you guys are a dictatorship’.”

It was painful. Their family, their business and livelihood were caught between two nations flirting with the ghosts of Europe’s darkest iterations of nationalism.

“With Orbán, he’s been in power for 16 years, plus another four with his first term,” she said. “So it just feels like Orbán was a permanent fixture, like he’d be here forever.”

When Péter Magyar came along about two years ago, (his name translates to Peter the Hungarian), Carolyn saw a possibility for change, but having watched her own nation elect Trump twice, she didn’t dare to hope. “Hungarians and I, we’ve just become accustomed to Orbán always winning,” she said.

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Her oldest daughter began studies at one of Budapest’s major universities, her middle child is preparing to graduate from high school and follow her sister and her son is about to enter high school.

She wanted to be part of a better future for her children.

“I could’ve applied for citizenship a long time ago, but I just kept putting it off,” she said. “I had to do the whole process, go in and do an interview, speak the language. But I really wanted to vote in this election.”

So she did, casting her ballot with her family and holding her breath.

“It doesn’t even seem real,” she said, right after Orbán conceded.

“People were a little bit slow to allow themselves to hope,” she said, because for years, Orbán “just talked about all the stuff that Hungarians should be afraid of.”

Perhaps, more Americans may be drawn to visit Hungary now — let’s call it a new wave of democracy tourism — to learn to love wine and paprika as Hungarians do. But more urgently, perhaps we will be inspired to vote as they have.