It was 50 years ago this week that the world finally got a look at Mars.

So let’s look at some of the hidden persisters who helped get us there.

The world heard “Touchdown. We have touchdown!” on July 20, 1976 when a mission controller at JPL in Pasadena reported that Viking 1 landed on the red planet and a room full of guys in peak ‘70s hair – or Viking helmets covering that hair – cheered and hugged. It was like a nerdy football game.

(The videos showed some women in the room. But you heard little about them. We’re going to try and fix that.)

Viking was supposed to land on July 4 for an extraordinary celebration of the nation’s bicentennial, but mission control took its time to find the best landing site – thanks to technology one of our persisters helped enable – and pushed it to July 20, which was possibly a more auspicious date for NASA.

President Gerald Ford pointed that out coincidence when he called Mission Control and had a totally normal, presidential phone call with them:

“Today's landing, like that one, represents the realization of a dream that is many, many centuries old. In a sense it is even more significant, for today we are touching another planet, one that has long excited mankind's imagination. And this mission offers the possibility of a momentous discovery in the history of mankind--the existence of life elsewhere in the universe.”

Just seven years earlier “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” launched America’s dominance in space exploration on the same date – July 20, in 1969, when we landed on the moon.

But it wasn’t until 2016 that the nation learned about the remarkable Black women who overcame jaw-dropping racism and sexism to work behind the scenes and do the math that helped get those men into space.

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Margot Lee Shetterly’s groundbreaking book that became a movie, Hidden Figures, detailed the persistence and quiet triumph of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, “computers who wore skirts,” Johnson often said.

When the Mars mission touched down seven years later, “computer” went from being a job description to an inventory item and the pool of mathematicians who did the computing – a surprising amount of whom were Black women – were not longer the driving force behind the rocket launches.

Well, not really. One of them literally fueled in the launch.

Annie Easley

Born in deeply segregated Birmingham, Alabama and raised by a single mother, Annie Easley nevertheless forged her path to college, studying pharmacy at Xavier University in New Orleans, but leaving after two years to follow her husband to Cleveland.

She had a hard time getting the funding to finish her degree, but turned that roadblock into a benefit for human space exploration, applying for a job as one of those computers at NASA (then called NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) in 1955. But her interdisciplinary skills and problem-solving acumen made her quickly stand out. She became fluent in FORTRAN and other coding languages and her calculations became integral to energy-conversion systems for the earliest hybrid vehicles and rockets, according to NASA

She was one of the main forces behind one of NASA’s most powerful tools in the space program – the Centaur rocket. It exploded in a 1962 launch, and Easley was key in the team that figured out how to safely harness the rocket’s volatile and unique fuel mix of liquid hydrogen and oxygen (yay pharmacy classes!) Since then, Centaur has been the foundational force behind the launches, including the Mars mission.

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Throughout her 34-year career, Easley was fighting and persisting – for her the correct pay grade, promotions and respect. When NASA made a promotional poster of her pioneering six-member team, her face had been intentionally cut out of it, she said in a 2021 interview.

“There are people who have authority, and I think sometimes they abuse it. It makes them think, ‘I’m in charge if I say no,’” she said. “...you live with that kind of thing, but you don’t let it stop you.”

Outside of the lab, she played tennis and started a ski club. She retired in 1989 and was active and influential for young women in STEM in the years after. She died in 2011 at 78.

Dr. Valerie L. Thomas and Virginia Norwood

Landing on Mars was going to be tricky — they had to read terrain that’s 249 million miles away. But Thomas and Norwood did some of the groundbreaking work that helped make that possible

Thomas was born in Baltimore in 1943, she was one of only two women to major in physics at Morgan State University.

Norwood, a military kid, moved all over the world and the United States. In one of her five high schools, a guidance counselor told her she should be a librarian. She went to MIT and graduated In 1947 with a degree in mathematical physics instead.

Norwood became the first woman on the technical staff at Hughes Aircraft in California and joined the NASA project to map the earth – and eventually the moon and then Mars – from space. The men on the team were going to use television-like cameras to take the images. Norwood said it should be a multispectral scanner. And that’s what it became, a series of Earth-observing satellite missions launched in 1972 called Landsat. And NASA calls Norwood the “Mother of Landsat.”

Meanwhile, back on the East Coast, Thomas began working at NASA as a data analyst in 1964.

At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, “she managed the development of early Landsat image processing software systems and became the resident expert on the Computer Compatible Tapes, or CCTs, that were used to store early Landsat imagery,” according to a NASA profile that called her a “Face Behind the Images.”

Thomas went on to become one of the image processing specialists creating the ambitious project to monitor global crops, the Large Area Crop Inventory Experiment, known as LACIE.

The combined work of Thomas and Norwood was foundational in the monitoring systems used to get the lay of the land on Mars for Viking 1 to land 50 years ago. They have three patents between them.

Dr. Patricia Ann Straat

Let’s be real – what’s the thing we all really want to ask first when it comes to Mars?

Is there life? Can we meet Marvin?

Once all the engineers and mathematicians got us to Mars, all eyes were on Pat Straat’s team. She was the astrobiologist who would try to answer that question.

Straat was born in Rochester and went to school in Oberlin College, where she specialized in biochemistry. She worked at Johns Hopkins University in molecular biology and enzymes, but the moon landing in 1969 lit a fire under her, reminding her how much she loved the night sky and dreaming about outer space as a kid, according to Scientific American.

She persisted in chasing that childhood dream and joined NASA’s Viking mission with Gil Levin’s company, Biospherics, becoming the co-researcher America tasked with finding an answer to the all-important question.

They created a nine-foot arm that extended scooped Martian soil into a container and did the experiment right there, mixing the soil sample with drops of water tainted with radioactive carbon nutrients. Monitors in a chamber would be able to detect whether the reaction released radioactive gas, which would be proof of microorganisms with metabolism.

“Gil, that’s life,” she said, as soon as that gas was detected.

Other experiments with Viking 1 and Viking 2 in different parts of the planet used different testing methods and couldn’t replicate the findings. Which gives us no real answer.

Their experiment caused an uproar in the scientific world. Straat and Levin stood behind the research. Straat went on to work at NIH in National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the Molecular and Cellular Biophysics Study Section. After retiring, she settled down with her partner of 40 years in Maryland, where they raised horses and King Charles Spaniels.

Straat died from lung cancer in 2020. The Washington Post wrote an obituary for Levin when he died a year later, but never wrote one for her.

A tyrant put up a gold monument to himself and persisters who were sick of his shit and the way he used their taxes tore it down. That’s what happened right after the Declaration of Independence was written 250 years ago.

There were “loud huzzas,” the “utmost demonstrations of joy,” and then a mob toppled a massive statue of King George on his horse.

This was July 9, 1776, five days after the Declaration of Independence was written and news of it reached the troops in New York.

“The same evening the equestrian statue of George III, which Tory pride and folly raised in the year 1770, was, by the sons of freedom, laid prostrate in the dirt, the just des[s]ert of an ungrateful tyrant!”, according to breaking news in a local paper, The Virginia Gazette, on July 26, 1776.

The continental army shipped the pieces to Connecticut, where “patriotic women and children” on the Wolcott farm melted the damned thing into 42,088 musket balls, according to the kind of historical research that is now being attacked by this administration for the full telling of America’s story.

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High-tech science techniques showed that some of King George’s “melted majesty” balls were fired at the Battle of Monmouth, according to the Museum of the American Revolution and the work of battlefield historian Daniel Sivilich. The rest of the statue’s remains amount to a horse’s tail, on display at New York Historical Society.

This all happened in Manhattan’s oldest park, Bowling Green, which is right by a statue that America seems to love a whole lot more: the Charging Bull of Wall Street.

The first garish, looming monument in that space came about because King George needed an ego boost in the colonies, where folks were figuring out how much he’d been screwing them over. The massive statue — lead covered in gold, on a horse and dressed like Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius — was dedicated on one of the prince’s birthdays. KG’s lackeys in New York attended the ceremony, where they drank, heard the fire of “32 pieces of Cannon from the Battery, accompanied with a Band of Musick,” the Maryland Gazette reported on Aug. 20, 1770.

King George had to keep showing the colonists how great he was. And as the revolution began to simmer, gold George in New York kept getting trashed by patriotic vandals. The next year, officials put a fancy fence that cost almost as much as the statue, 800 pounds sterling (about $225,000 today), to stop the damage. That fence is still there today. But it didn’t do much to stop the patriotic persisters from throwing tar on the gold king. So in 1773, they passed an “Act of prevent the defacing [of] statues”.

Six years later, New Yorkers headed straight for that hated statue the moment they heard the guttural screed that was the Declaration of Independence read aloud. It was all the things they’d been saying about King George in their taverns and at their tables. (Too mild, even, some of them said.)

Sure, the Declaration we all celebrated last weekend has some catchy lines that make cool posters and tattoos:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident”

“All men are created equal”

“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

But most of that document is a scathing takedown outlining how fed up the colonists were with the narcissistic and cruel King:

• He was “A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

• “He has dissolved the Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasion on the rights of people.”

• “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”

• “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.”

• “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”

• “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.”

• His pals suspended “our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.”

• “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States”

• “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither…”

In other words — No Kings.

It’s no secret why the cowards who decided to parade around Capitol Hill in the khaki-polo uniforms of retail floor salesmen on this Fourth of July hid behind white face masks and sunglasses.

Because “any organization that hides its members behind masks or disguises is a dangerous and un-American organization,” said the mayor of New York. In 1922.

We’ve been here before, with the racist fools.

And throughout history, there were members of congress, mayors and even a president who were persistent in unmasking them.

Congress took a swipe at gutless maskers back in 1870 with legislation to neuter the bloodthirsty Ku Klux Klan members who wouldn’t show their faces when they terrorized innocent Americans.

“There can be no doubt of the existence of numerous insurrectionary organizations known as Kuklux Klans, who, shielded by their disguise, by the secrecy of their movements and by the terror which they inspire, perpetrate crimes with impunity,” Rep. William Loughridge from Iowa said on the House floor in 1870, reading from an Aug. 14, 1869, report from a police officer in charge of a Georgia district.

The result of that was The Enforcement Act of 1870, created at the suggestion of President Ulysses S. Grant. It specifically banned individuals from banding together or “going in disguise upon the public highways or upon the premises of another” with the aim to violate Americans’ rights.

This was morality and decency and justice waaaay before facial recognition technology was there to fuck with a bigot’s secret life.

Today’s Temu version of Nazis or the Klan (or whoever the white supremacists think they’re emulating) are taking advantage of our nation’s mask confusion during Covid, when they all whined about protecting themselves and their community with face masks and we grappled with masking laws that have stood for more than a century.

Now that the newest crop of racists are too cowardly to risk their family, friends, freedom or jobs in the name of their bigotry, the masks are back on.

America knows how to do this.

It began with the 1870 act, then two more, when masked racists murdered and intimidated Black Americans – in their homes and at polls – under their hoods during Reconstruction.

When they rose again in the 1920s, persisters who spoke up launched a series of unmaskings to kick their butts.

New York Mayor John Francis Hyland told the police commissioner to “treat the Ku Kluxers as active enemies to society” when they wanted to come to town, according to a Nov. 27, 1922, story in the Washington Herald.

They weren’t fooling anyone.

“The mask and that alone, is the instrumentality that enables the klan to perpetrate its diabolisms and get away with it. The remedy is to compel them, by law, to discard their masks in public on all occasions, at all times,” wrote D.H. Hardy, a D.C. attorney, in an editorial in Washington’s Evening Star on Monday, Jan 1, 1923.

“There is no value in the mask,” Hardy wrote.

“And if they want to parade and ride and exist under the protection of American freedom, let them,” Hardy said, “so long as their faces are in the open, their countenances exposed to public view and their identities unconcealed.

“There is no novelty in the idea. Many towns and villages all over the country have for years had ordinances prohibiting citizens from appearing on the public streets in disguise.”

Exactly.

Later that year, the Klan had their largest rally ever in Kokoma, Indiana. About 10,000 klansmen hit the streets, empowered by their ability to cover their faces completely.

In 1925, the KKK made more vile noise with a HUGE parade in D.C., right down Pennsylvania Avenue.

But the only way it could happen was if they did it unmasked.

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Their attempt to take over the nation’s capital began that May, when the Klan announced its headquarters are moving to a building near the White House in D.C.

“From this suite of offices, presided over by Imperial Wizard H.W. Evans and his royal retinue of dragons, goblins and kleagles, is daily pouring into Uncle Sam’s mails thousands of pieces of literature, preaching ‘100 per cent Americanism,’” according to the May 11, 1925 Times Herald.

When they began planning their march in August, they applied for a permit for up to 200,000 marchers. And in his application, the Klan’s Imperial Representative said he understood D.C.’s law on masks. Police chief Charles Evans said it was a no-go unless “the entire head of every person parading be wholly uncovered except such portion of the head as is covered by an ordinary hat”.

“Visors up,” he said, according to the June 17 Times-Herald.

President Calvin Coolidge was cold to the Klan’s overtures, telling The Washington Daily News that he won’t accept their invitation to review the parade.

They paraded without their masks, though the hoods made Pennsylvania Avenue look like a Washington Monument-look-alike contest.

Following the examples of D.C. and New York, cities across America that year demanded that the Klan take their masks off for every public demonstration.

Headlines announced the stances of mayors, city councils and county aldermen who persisted in keeping disguised Klan members from parading down their Main Streets. From Elmira and Buffalo in New York to Dunklin County, Missouri, and Knoxville, Tennessee, the KKK was unmasked.

Exposed, their numbers and actions dwindled.

When they paraded again in D.C. in 1926, the Klan delegation was only about 12,000. That’s half the numbers who showed up the year before, according to police estimates.

By 1927, New York banned them, masked or not.

“The Ku Klux Klan, the Fascisti, or any other organization having ‘a basis of religions or racial prejudices’ will not be permitted hensforth to parade in New York City,” The Washington Post wrote on Jun 5, 1927.

Same happened in Detroit.

In Grand Prairie, Texas, where a parade was allowed, klansmen were attacked by spectators throwing bricks and bottles at them, according to The Evening Star on July 24, 1927.

Voters in Newport News, Virginia defeated an ordinance that would’ve allowed a masked KKK parade.

After all that pushback. didn’t even try to come back to D.C.’s streets that year.

When the United States hit 100, the party in D.C. must’ve been massive, right? Hardly.

The vibe in the city was pretty glum in 1876. I’ll let you fill in the blanks for the parallels to 2026.

Official Washington was digesting the fresh news that Custer and his men had been absolutely creamed at Little Bighorn the week before. It was a mortifying loss that dampened America’s wartime hubris and foregone conclusions about expansionist takeovers.

The nation was still recovering from the Civil War and some newspapers even marveled that the South “cordially” joined in the centennial celebration.

Meanwhile, D.C. had been nursing a grudge that the massive Centennial Exhibition — where Bell was demonstrating his magical phone, ice cream and sodas were flowing, the 50-foot Corliss steam engine stole the show, Lady Liberty’s hand and torch were on display and Europeans were flocking to visit the bold new world — wasn’t in the nation’s capital.

It was all in Philly.

A local columnist in D.C. didn’t hold back the city’s resentment over the “stinginess of the present House of Representatives in refusing our city an appropriation for the same”.

The result? A “consequent apathy on the part of our citizens”, according to the Washington Chronicle’s column.

It didn’t help that D.C. was already irked that Congress appropriated $1.5 million (nearly $50 million in today dollars) to help construct the exhibit halls for the Centennial fair, essentially hijacking a national milestone for a commercial venture.

The “United States cannot lawfully become a partner in a private joint-stock company,” the New York World wrote on Jan. 8, 1876.

But it did.

Papers called the deal “crooked and deceitful” and declared such a partnership the “beginnings of evil…disguised with all the colors of enthusiastic Centennial patriotism.”

It was an ongoing scandal all year.

“Congress has no right to subsidize the Centennial Finance private joint-stock company, and that company has no need of the subsidy which it has spent $20,000 in dining and wining Congressmen to seduce their votes for it,” the Washington Chronicle wrote on Jan. 8, 1876.

The “patriotic co-operation” was acknowledged when the exhibition was opened and president of the Board of Finance, John Welsh thanked Congress, as recorded in the ultimate book about the event, The Centennial Exhibition. (I think I included him just so I could show you his absolutely stunning facial hair:)

President Ulysses S. Grant was also there to kick off the exhibition in May. And though he was invited by a number of churches and groups in D.C. to celebrate the Fourth of July, Grant opted to return to the expo in Philly.

Oh well.

Newspaper columns noted the events that did not have Grant in D.C. that day, but also gave big props the businesses that decorated valiantly in a city struggling to conjure joy.

Patriotic persisters worked hard, and “the city is already gay with bunting, which floats from staff and windows, and lines of streamers. The juveniles are ready with their combustibles; and on the whole we of Washington bid fair to pass a pleasant and somewhat convivial centennial Fourth.”

Galt’s Jewelry, Schwartz’s restaurant, Ellis’s music store, A.S. Solomon’s bookstore and the Fifth and Sixth Police precincts got special mention for their extravagant decor, including fresh flowers and evergreen branches encircling portraits of George Washington.

The commander of the District of Columbia artillery corps announced they would fire 100 guns at sunrise, one hundred at noon, and one hundred at sunset.

There were picnics across the city, multiple readings of the Declaration of Independence by the (few) politicians who weren’t up in Philly and steamships offered cruises along the Potomac, to Mount Vernon, Alexandria or even as far as Quantico ($2 roundtrip fare).

The biggest impact that the landmark Fourth of July had on D.C. was the wave of patriotism on July 5 that fueled the passage of a Congressional Act to complete the sad chode of a shaft in the center of D.C. that was struggling to become the Washington Monument.

It was introduced by Ohio Sen. John Sherman and sailed through both houses, with $2 million to finish the construction by the end of the year.

At the time, D.C. was run by three commissioners, and they helped push the monument to completion. (The newest commissioner, Capt. Seth Ledyard Phelps, was a decorated Civil War veteran and pal of Grant. I couldn’t figure out what he did on the Fourth of July, but want to mention him for his participation in the facial hair trend of the year:)

Phelps did flex his authority to secure the artillery guys all the ammo for their rounds of 100. So that was cool.

As the city marched toward a flaccid Fourth knowing there would be no massive public display in the nation’s capital, the Washington Chronicle said Washingtonians will persist. “The patriotism of the capital city will not be found wanting,” the paper said.

At least they didn’t have a green reflecting pool yet.

On election day, it’s hard to look at a D.C. ballot without Faith.

Yes, Faith – with a capital F.

I’m talking about the inimitable, bugle-playing, Broadway and burlesque dancer who was Marlon Brando’s confidante, ran for political office on a Caribbean island, has a standard clause in entertainment contracts named after her and ran for Mayor of D.C. nine times.

Nine times. And yes, in the nation’s capital.

Her name was on D.C. ballots starting in 1990, it appeared again and again until her final run in 2014, when she earned 1,520 votes as the Green Party candidate in D.C., according to Ballotpedia.

I remember her bugle, horse and inescapable voice at campaign events, a sideshow I sorta brushed off because I was young and trying to fit into Washington and focused on real issues and serious candidates.

I didn’t understand the beauty of her mission then. Faith – who used to be Faith Dane, but legally changed her name in 1983, a self-minted, one-named icon – said she was all about the arts. She wanted something like a local New Deal for D.C. that focused on nothing but art, free classes and shows 24/7.

She sang her platform:

“We are D.C., we’re getting shafted

With no respect from Congress, no votes

Our children are getting drafted.”

And

“We are D.C.

We lead the nation

In homelessness, HIV and elitist gentrification”

Wait, she was serious.

Every story about her is a gem. Born in New York in 1923, she snuck out of her Flatbush home to Coney Island as a kid. Not to just play, but to play Neptuna the Mermaid when the real Neptuna was too drunk to perform.

She made her way to small theater roles and minor comedy shows on TV and finally hit it (pretty) big with a 1959 role in Gypsy on Broadway.

Her unhinged audition became legend. She wore a flesh suit under the gown she peeled off, shook and shimmied and as a finale, bent over and played her bugle at the producers through the opening between her legs.

“It was one of the most spectacular auditions ever in the history of Broadway theater,” John Wallowitch, who played piano accompaniment at the audition, told The Washington Post.

He said Gypsy Rose Lee, who was among the judges of women vying for the chance to play her on Broadway, laughed so hard she had to peel off her false eyelashes.

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They added a role for her — “Miss Mazeppa” — on stage and later in a movie. She embroidered the character with her own bombast and bugle playing. Then she sued producer David Merrick for credit and some cash, insisting that she was Mazeppa’s midwife. That changed the way actors are hired now. Broadway producers add a clause to contracts “that any stage business created by the actor in the course of production became the sole property of the production. This is known as the ‘Faith Dane clause’ and to this day is generally included in all actors’ contracts for Broadway shows,” according to IMBd.

After the weird time in St. Croix when she was married to the island’s attorney general and unsuccessfully ran for office in 1964 (she said she lost by four votes), she made her way D.C.

She married artist Jude Crannitch and began her quarter-century-long run for office with an idea. She would blend her Broadway schtick with politics and mess with voters in the nation’s capital, burlesquing and bugling her stump speech in a way that mocked and called out the political process.

A 1996 Washington Post review of her political show called it “a mind-boggling mix of song-and-dance, film, recitation and trumpet solos. . . . Is it brilliant? Is it terrible? Are you rooting for her? Embarrassed for her? Just happy to be seeing something different?

“All of the above.”

She was A LOT for the city of navy blazers and sensible heels.

Washington “makes Vegas look like the Vatican!”, she told The Washington Post in 2014, during her final run for office.

Let’s get to the Marlon Brando part. She mentioned him often, folks were skeptical. So in a 2002 piece, Post reporter David Montgomery (beloved magazine writer also laid off by The Post when they stupidly killed that weekend magazine) ran Brando down to truth squad this. Here’s how it went:

“I’ve known her since I was 22,” he says in that deliberate, faintly menacing, Brando way.

“She’s always stood up for what is right and stood up for principles,” Brando says. Many years ago “she was at a party and somebody made some untoward remarks about me . . . and she grabbed this guy and broke his nose.”

“I don’t really know much about politics,” Brando says, “but I feel that anybody who votes for her could have their vote entrusted in her character. . . . She’s one of the people I would trust with my life.”

She was 96 when she died in a D.C. nursing home during Covid.

In a celebration of her life a year later at Lamont Plaza, D.C. (shadow) Sen. Michael Brown remembered a political forum where each candidate presented the usual numbers and data and talking points before Faith blew it up.

“Faith stood up and blew her trumpet and said ‘You’ve gotta take care of the babies, baby’. And everybody laughed,” Brown remembered.

“But, as I left, I thought about what she said. And that really was what it was all about, right?” he said. “She was always right on message.”

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.

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.”

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.)

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?

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.

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.)

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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“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump wrote in one of his latest, bonkers posts about his attack on Iran.

The founding fathers of the United States, who looked to that very civilization for inspiration, would be among the millions horrified by this.

Because the relationship between the United States and Iran started way before Operation Ajax, the 1953 overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and the 1979 revolution and hostage crisis.

All the way back to the 1770s.

“When America’s Founding Fathers, keen to know models of government that had worked in the past, avid readers of the classics, found Cyrus the Great, they knew they had reached what they were looking for,” wrote Harvard historian Richard N. Frye, in a synopsis of a book he was writing in 2013 with scholar Afshin Zand.

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Cyrus the Great, the man considered the father of Iran and the tolerant creator of the Persian empire, was a Persister who captured the fancy of the American revolutionaries, especially Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson had at least four copies of the Cyropaedia, the fourth-century B.C. biography written in Greek by Xenophon that was the story of Cyrus and his blueprint for governing a diverse empire of different ethnicities and religions with morality and virtue.

One of Jefferson’s copies showed heavy use, with edits and notations throughout the text. He made his grandson read it.

“It is an exposition of timeless qualities of leadership,” Frye and Zand wrote, after they visited Jefferson’s Monticello and saw his copies of Cyropaedia. “Though twenty-three centuries apart in time, continents apart in space, their systems of republican and monarchical government ostensibly the diametric opposites of each other, the Founding Fathers of America and the founders of the Iranian state were close in spirit and in ideas that underlie systems of governance vying to institute liberty and justice among mankind. Their systems of government were different implementations of the fundamentally the same underlying principles.”

More than Jefferson

As Frye and Zand delved deeper into the influence of Cyrus on America (Frye died in 2014 at 94, before he could finish the book) they found evidence that the manual for running the Persian empire went a bit viral among colonial elites.

Benjamin Franklin and John Adams also had the book in their libraries, according to Caroline Winterer of Stanford University.

“It was required reading for anyone who wanted to get into college in eighteenth-century America,” Winterer wrote. “ Hopeful students had to plow through the Latin and sometimes even Greek edition of Xenophon just to get into the door of the university.”

Adams swooned over Xenophon, the author of the Cyropaedia, saying he was “my favourite author, that ancient and immortal husbandman, philosopher, politician and general,” according to his papers.

The liberator of Babylon who freed the Jews, according to the Old Testament, the framers of the constitution cited Cyrus as a model for an American experiment of diversity and personal liberty.

“When Jefferson drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (precursor to the Bill of Rights), he wasn’t just drawing on 18th-century philosophy; he was channeling an ancient Iranian ideal: that good governance is rooted in tolerance”, wrote Afshin Marashi, a professor of Modern Iranian History at the University of Oklahoma.

Then, Iran looked to us

The relationship came full circle in the 1800s, when Persian influencers made a splash visiting America to study the success of a bold, new nation.

Bishop Mar Yohanan made all the papers during his 1842 tour of New England with missionary Justin Perkins, who established schools and a church in Iran.

“The Bishop rose in the pulpit with great dignity, and presented a truly venerable and interesting appearance, dressed as he was in native costume, and wearing a heavy beard”, the Vermont Chronicle wrote on Jan. 26, 1842.

“My brethren, our nation send much love to you”, the Bishop said to the crowd, distancing his nation from European imperialism.

About that time, new words entered the Persian language inspired by American democracy; like “liberty (azadi), constitution (qanun-e asasi) and parliament (majles)”, Marashi wrote.

The two nations entered a friendship treaty in 1850.

“In a striking historical irony, Iranians even proposed that American-made warships, manned by American sailors, should patrol the Persian Gulf to ward off European naval incursions,” he wrote.

Americans were fascinated by all things Persia.

Even years after Mar Yohanan’s memorable visit, which included stops in taverns to speak about the evils of alcohol, newspapers prominently announced news of his marriage in 1860.

After the Civil War, a Persian author and activist arrived in the United States after touring Europe and fell in love — with the USA.

Hajj Sayyad joined intellectual circles in America and even met several times with President Ulysses S. Grant during his decade here.

Like American kids on spring break, he went to the Smithsonian, the U.S. Mint and the Capitol, according to The Wonder of the World: Travel Journals of Hajj Sayyah in the U.S., a book of some of Sayyad’s recently discovered journals, edited by Ali Ferdowski.

He traveled across the nation and became the first Iranian to get U.S. citizenship when a San Francisco court recorded his naturalization on May 26, 1875.

He returned to Iran in 1877 and toured his homeland lecturing about life in America, becoming active in his nation’s constitutional revolution. He was arrested and tried to claim his American citizenship as a get-out-of-jail card. It didn’t work.

“He became aware of what was possible in the world. He came to the conclusion that modern human beings are supposed to live in reasonably humane societies based on human rights”, Ferdowski wrote. “He was basically stumbling upon the concept of citizenship, as opposed to simply being the subject of a monarch”.

“The masters of the aeroplane, those two clever and intrepid Americans who have moved about Europe under the spotlight of an extraordinary publicity, have had a silent partner. She is Katherine [sic] Wright, sister of Orville and Wilbur Wright.” -The World Magazine, April 11, 1909

We all know the Wright Brothers, but a century ago, folks briefly knew it was the Wright Siblings who made history.

The matriarch, business manager, publicist, caregiver, cheerleader, social secretary and “persistent worker” of America’s historic, aviation enterprise was the indomitable Katharine Wright, whose name was often misspelled, but who never let her brothers stop persisting on their quest for flight.

“Few know what she has done,” The World Magazine wrote in a full-page spread about her with the headline: “The American Girl Whom All Europe Is Watching.”

Katharine Wright became the matriarch of the family at 15, when her mother died of tuberculosis. She was the only surviving female in the family and her father announced that he was thankful he’d have someone to care for him and his four sons.

She raised her brothers, ran the Wright household in Dayton, Ohio, and organized all the hosting that her father required as an itinerant preacher. That may have all been enough to occupy any woman, but Katharine was a Persister. And she wanted an education and a stable income for her family. So she went off to Oberlin College, becoming the only one of the Wrights to hold a college degree.

Caretaker and visionary

She took a job as a high school Latin teacher and continued to be there for her brothers. “When the boys – for they were just boys then – fell sick or were wholly tired with their labors, it was Katharine who read to them books on aerial navigation,” the Piqua Leader-Dispatch wrote in June of 1909. As her brothers began tinkering with the idea of flight, she knew they were on to something. So she gave them little shoves along the way, never letting them quit when they were frustrated, insisting they attend conferences and lectures on aeronautics (even helping them dress for the occasion) and eventually ran their bicycle shop while they were running experiments on the sand dunes of the Outer Banks.

When Orville and Wilbur stunned the world with their first flight in 1903, they flailed a bit on what to do next. They were awkward, shy and not very savvy. Orville nearly died in a crash during a test flight in Florida and he called for his sister. She nursed him back to health, then took the brothers up on the offer to manage their entire flight enterprise (including helping them navigate the patent process).

It was a time when women had few career choices beyond teaching, and weren’t allowed to vote (she became a vocal suffragist in later years.) So her leadership in their business was understated and unacknowledged, an inevitable extension of a woman’s role:

“She is typical of the American womanhood that, with its combination of courage, intelligence and loyalty, inspires and supports in their commanding position the men of the nation which has so splendidly led the world in its progress,” the Leader-Dispatch wrote.

The headline of that full-page feature was “The American Girl Who is Queen of the Air”.

What prompted this acknowledgement of Katharine’s larger role in the story of American aviation?

Take a look at the subhead of that article.

“HOW SHE IS SEEN AWAY FROM HOME”

Because Europeans GOT it.

She was a sensation on the Wright’s tour of the continent, a charismatic and astute businesswoman who taught herself French so she could hold meetings in the official language of Europe. She was the spokesperson for American flight and was celebrated by monarchs and ministers.

“For her the most attentive politeness of King Edward [of England]; for her the most gallant deference of young Alfonso [of Spain];...for her the unassuming friendliness of Victor Emmanuel [of Italy] and the most solicitous honors on the part of Queen Helena [of Italy],” the Leader-Dispatch wrote.

They were superstars, mobbed everywhere they went in Europe. “So frightening was the crush that they had to be escorted by a posse of bodyguards,” wrote Ian Mackersey, in The Wright Brothers: The Remarkable Story of the Aviation Pioneers Who Changed the World. In Germany, a “troop of soldiers in spiked helmets permanently guarded the Flyer’s shed. And every time they tried to enter their hotel, a squad of police on horseback had to force the passage for them.”

Katharine was so impressive as the face of American innovation, a conspiracy theory bloomed during that European tour that she was the actual brains behind the engineering miracle of flight, rather than the ungainly Orville and Wilbur.

“Miss Wright made the calculations, and her brothers made the experiments,” the Elmira Star-Gazette wrote on July 16, 1909, parroting the French newspapers.

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Katharine did not indulge the rumors, even when France awarded all three siblings the Legion of Honor, their highest order of merit.

Her status as Queen of the Air was confirmed with a 7-minute flight on February 15, 1909, a publicity stunt to affirm confidence in the Wright contraption.

King Edward of England traveled to Pau, France, where warmer weather allowed for a series of flight demonstrations, according to the New Idea Women’s Magazine account of the day in 1909.

To onlookers’ surprise, as Orville and Wilbur prepared for the flight, Katharine climbed into the seat next to Wilbur. She tied down a flight hat with a long, white chiffon veil, secured her skirts with a clothesline and gave the nod to take off.

“They passed close to the King and his party, and as they sped along the spectators could look them closely in the face,” the magazine wrote.

When the flight came to a gentle landing, Katharine was swarmed. “She was warmly congratulated by the King,” the magazine said, “he realized that there was a Queen present around whom every one was crowding.”

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Today is the 50th anniversary of the D.C. metro.

It’s always fun to watch tourists from driving towns jerk-and-surf it from the cherry blossoms to the zoo.

It was a whiz-bang wonder when it opened in 1975. But then eastward progress stalled.

The Green Line was supposed to cross the Anacostia River and “serve low-income communities where residents depend heavily on public transportation,” according to a 1983 story in The Washington Post.

Then, a Persister came along and made it happen.

Carmen Turner was the first African-American woman (and possibly the first woman) to lead a major metropolitan transit agency when she was appointed the head of WMATA, the multi-regional transit agency that runs Metro trains and buses, in 1983.

Not only did she help break that impasse and get the Green Line construction going, she presided over one of railway’s biggest growth spurts. And she did it under the Reagan administration.

Metrorail expanded 40 percent under Turner, growing from 42 miles of track with 47 stations to 73 miles of track with 63 stations and annual ridership grew to 70 million passengers, according to a Department of Transportation report on her tenure.

“The highlight of Turner’s Metro career came in 1990, when Congress authorized $1.3 billion to complete the (103-mile) Metrorail system,” the report said.

She was so beloved by her department, it was known as the “Carmen Cult.”

“She’s a warm and gracious individual who engenders a warmth that diffuses confrontation”, gushed Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), an unabashed member of the “Carmen Cult,” who has watched Turner win millions of dollars every year from Congress despite the Reagan administration’s vigorous resistance. “Her objective is not to beat people, it’s to convince people,” he told The Post’s Nell Henderson, in her 1989 profile of Turner.

But hold on. This isn’t all that made Turner a Persister.

Get this – she was a college drop-out who started out as a secretary.

Carmen E. Pawley was born in Teaneck New Jersey in 1931, she and her sister were the only black children in their elementary school in Englewood, according to The Washington Post’s Bart Barnes.

When they moved to D.C. in the late 1930s, “they found themselves in rigidly segregated schools and where black people could not sit at lunch counters or eat at restaurants downtown.”

After graduating from Dunbar High School, she went to Howard University, but made a decision on a hot, September night during the sophomore year that changed her life.

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“She sneaked out of the house in her best blue gown and raced off to Rockville to marry classmate [and taxi cab driver] Frederick B. Turner Jr.,” Henderson wrote.

“It was not accepted very warmly,” Turner said. “ My mother just cried. My father said, ‘You can finish college on your own.’ “

She dropped out of school after eloping, had two sons, and went to work as a government clerk-typist.

She raised those two while working, returned to Howard, finished her bachelor’s degree, then got a Master’s in public administration at American University.

During all that, she was slowly climbing the ranks at the Department of Transportation and the Department of the Army.

Eventually, she made it to WMATA and was appointed to head the agency in 1983.

In her tailored suits with sharp shoulder pads, she commanded respect and admiration. She learned how to drive a bus, took the rail maintenance course, studied underground construction and perfected her money pitch to Congress.

“I wouldn’t want you to think I’m insensitive in any way to the struggle of minority people, or that I’m anything but proud of the fact I’m a black woman,” she said. “But if you dwell on that, you place your emphasis in the wrong place. The challenge was to get up to speed and hit the ground running on this new job.”

The American Public Transit Association named her the Transit Manager of the Year in 1989.

She was recruited by officials all over the region and finally left WMATA, having secured landmark funding for its completion, in 1990 to become Undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

There, she started a major reorganization and was equally loved by staff. But she died in 1992 after a sudden case of breast cancer. She was just 61.

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I imagine Jane Davis Doggett would be horrified if she saw the chaos in American airports today.

So far, the deployment of ICE agents has done little to help with historic security delays at the peak of Spring Break travel season. (The 50,000 TSA Agents who continue to work without regular pay – while the lawmakers who created this mess head to Spring Break with no lapse in their paychecks – are the true Persisters of the Week!)

But man-made security chaos aside, have you ever noticed how efficiently we move through some airports thanks to smart signage and crowd flow: the little plane images going up or down, the clear signs, arrows, lettering and colors showing terminals and gates?

Probably not. And that’s a hallmark of good design. It just works. And it doesn’t just happen. Moving thousands of people through large spaces requires a knowledge of crowd dynamics, human nature, vision and design. It’s an entire field called “wayfinding” and it never existed until a woman, Jane Davis Doggett, invented it. Her methods are still used in dozens of airports around the world.

“Wayfinding is more than just putting a sign up, it’s a series, a sequencing of information in continuity,” Doggett said in an interview with the Society for Experiential Graphic Design in 2018.

“You’re working with sequencing of signs or lighting or whatever means in the environment to persuade the movement of traffic. That thread of continuity, which can be created with signs put in the right place for viewing by car or by foot, that to me is what ‘wayfinding’ says. As a term, I really like it.”

Doggett’s persistence wasn’t mainly about fighting for a place in the 1950s and ‘60s as a woman in a male-dominated field or as a female student at Yale University, she said.

“I don’t feel that I was ever blocked in my career,” she said, recalling that her talent and preparation seemed to stifle most sexist bias. She said that, in her experience, if women “are prepared, they’ll be respected.”

She also told The Hartford Courant in 1975 that asking her about encountering sexism in her field is “sort of like asking Henry Kissinger, ‘Did you encounter obstacles working for détente?’”

For Doggett, persistence paid off in the creation of a discipline that had never before existed. Air travel became a regular part of American life pretty quickly after that first flight in Kittyhawk and most airports didn’t begin as giant transportation hubs.

“The jet age grew so quickly, that’s why I think there was a disorder from the public point of view,” she said. One of the biggest airports she tackled was one that grew piecemeal and needed “major surgery” and not “an aspirin.”

That was the Miami International Airport job in 1972, and it was a place where everyone – including Doggett herself – got lost.

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“‘It’s just terrible’,” she told the Miami Herald’s air travel columnist, Don Bedwell, in an Oct. 23, 1973, column.

Doggett “decided while in college to launch a new profession devoted to graphics and architecture,” Bedwell wrote. “Where engineers and architects work with concrete, glass and steel, Miss Doggett’s emphasis is on the people who must use their structures.”

By then, Doggett’s company, Architectural Graphics Associates, had already planned graphics systems for 11 airports, including Puerto Rico International, Newark, Houston Intercontinental and Tampa International.

She also unraveled and simplified the way crowds moved in Madison Square Garden, Niagara Falls Convention Center and the Philadelphia subway system, a project she took on “to show that we have the courage.”

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Though she invented a field that is arguably a science, Doggett began as a child in Nashville who loved to draw, whose mom gave her a pad and crayons to keep quiet at church.

“I call it ‘my Crayola period.’ And even now, my heart skips a beat whenever I see a package of crayons,” she said in that 2018 interview.

“We ate them too, you know? I guess the wax didn’t hurt us. One day, I discovered that the backs of hymnals had blank pages, so I began to fill those. When it was discovered I was drawing in the hymnals, my mother had to purchase them and so I think it cost quite a lot for me to become an artist.”

She graduated from what is now Tulane University in 1952 and Yale University School of Art and Architecture in 1956.

At Yale, she was seeing “a future of really large complicated spaces.”

“I could see the need for being able to manage those from a human level—I was thinking about experiences in the built environment and human scale.”

Her first airport job was in Memphis in 1959 and she was usually the only woman at every meeting.

In less than two decades, she was had become a national authority on architectural design and the world began understanding and implementing her method. But in creating unified signage systems, she warned that cities shouldn’t be “strip mining architecture” and blanching their character in the name of uniformity. Elements of airport art and design should reflect the region.

“Cities are losing their identity,” she told Associated Press reporter Vivian Brown in 1976. “This country’s biggest asset is diversity, an incredible panorama as you travel from coast to mountains to desert. What comes out in architecture and landscape is very important.”

She also challenged something that may be familiar to many of us (and one of my pet peeves) – signs created by engineers that tell people to go north or south.

“But I said at night, who knows what’s north and south? And even in the daytime,” she told Lennie Bennett in the Tampa Bay Times in 2016.

So she created proposed directions should be “blue” or “red”, which are also readable by those with colorblindness. That revelation was during the Tampa airport project in 1971. She said it was her favorite project.

And it was fitting that it was near this airport, in Sun City Center Florida, where she died in 2023. She was 93 years old.