THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Rev. Dr. Patricia Novick
“Being a feminist was really important to me and was a significant part of my life. It wasn’t something I did on the side. It was a consciousness.”
Interviewed by Mary Jean Collins, VFA Historian, April 2023
PN: I was born in Chicago. I was born in University Hospital on the South Side. I went to nursery school at the Lab School, and I graduated from U-Hyde in Hyde Park, and really had a very provincial life. I lived in a small town, essentially. Chicago is a mosaic of communities that touch, but don’t quite interpenetrate and I lived in a small town.
MJC: Were you in Hyde Park or South Shore?
PN: Hyde Park.
MJC: What was the exact date of your birth?
PN: June 21, 1947. Although I lived in a big city, I really lived in a small town where everybody knew my name, and knew the butcher, and the fish guys, so I had that kind of life.
MJC: What about your parents, siblings?
PN: My sister was nine years older and she was a Quiz Kid on the Quiz Kid program. She got her first Master’s at 17. I don’t remember what it was called at the U of C, but she was one of those people, and she was reading. Instead of saying, “Oh, cute little girl,” they’d say, “Noreen, have you read any good books lately?” So, that was my older sister.
I, on the other hand, was just a very good baby and my parents didn’t have a lot of expectations of me. I happened to see my sister yesterday, and she said I was a very sweet baby and that there was nothing particularly remarkable about me. I was just a very sort of sweet, good, friendly, happy little girl, as a child.
My mother studied journalism. She ended up at Medill at Northwestern, at the School of Journalism. My father was an educator and a teacher, and he also went to the University of Chicago. I don’t know what years he was there. So, my household, there were a lot of reading materials, but there wasn’t much music at this point in my life; I mean, there was the radio.
I went to art school at the Art Institute, learning about art appreciation. And my sister, very early, wrote a book on the paintings in the Art Institute coming to life. The neighborhood, and the sense of neighborhood, was very important to me, and has continued to be so. A commitment to sense of place, has been an ongoing theme in my own work and my own life for all of these years.
MJC: So, you still live in the neighborhood?
PN: No, I live in the South Loop, but close enough.
MJC: Just you and Noreen were the two siblings?
PN: Yes.
MJC: So, you’re growing up, you have a smart sister, and you go to the Lab School. Where do you go from there?
PN: 7th and 8th grade was one year at the Lab School, and then you could take classes in the college. I was 16 when I was ready to go to college as a sophomore. My parents did not want me to go very far, so I spent a year at the University of Wisconsin, but I got in trouble. I had a boyfriend who was a football star, and I stayed out too late with a friend. I stayed in an empty apartment, and you had to be back in your dorm by a certain amount of time.
My mother called me at school, and so, I was put on social probation. Which turned out to be a wonderful thing, because I spent a lot of time with the Dean of Women, twice a week, who was an extraordinary woman. I was in Integrated Liberal Studies, which was an advanced program at Wisconsin. So, I got to spend a lot of time thinking about issues of justice. It was a gift.
I then got money to do junior year abroad, which was the following year, and I got more money to go to Israel than Paris, although we had relatives in Paris. I went to Israel, interesting enough, because obviously later on, being able to read the Bible in Aramaic and Hebrew, again, another gift in my life. I came back after a year and a half, and I had enough credits to graduate.
I went on something that was called, traveling scholar, I think it was called. I came to the University of Chicago and studied sociology. That was kind of a blossoming. And with Eleanor McCabe of McCabe, Heartland and something, I started Academic Women. I had read a 1955 article on women, and was so engaged, that I started this organization at the U of C, called Academic Women.
MJC: So, your feminism blossomed early.
PN: Yes. We were reading and thinking and talking about Academic Women, I’m not sure of the years around then, but I then had the opportunity to teach at Roosevelt University. That was 1968. I taught the first course on women’s studies in the city called, Interdisciplinary Approach to the Woman Field. And Judy Wittner, the following quarter, taught a course on women at Northwestern.
MJC: According to what you gave us in advance, it was 1964 when you started Academic Women. So now, Roosevelt is ’68. So, this is all women’s movement activity?
PN: Right. So, I was teaching. Joe Freeman; do you remember Joe? Joe came and taught in the class, and I had various people who were involved in the movement, teaching various classes during that year. I think that’s the year that Martin came to Chicago with SELC. My brother-in-law is a labor attorney, and the labor movement and civil rights movement were together.
MJC: Do you want to mention his name for history?
PN: Yes. His name is Gilbert Cornfield. And Charlie Hayes, who was active in the labor movement. I don’t know if you know this, but he was Al’s cousin. Charlie and Al were cousins.
MJC: You need to introduce Al to our audience.
PN: I will in a second. But before I forget, Al’s mother would see Al on television on the Kupcinet show and she would say, “I saw you on TV and I was so embarrassed about how you were dressed. You don’t look like your cousin Charles Arthur, who always dresses so beautifully.” Anyway, I was looking for a job and I’m not sure how I got hired, but it was connected to the labor movement and the civil rights people. I got a job on the Northern staff of SELC, Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
I think I was just barely driving at that point and I saw these images of civil rights workers on television. They were wearing coveralls and red bandanas. So, I had my dad drive me to Sears and I got coveralls and I got a red bandana. He had to go to work, so he dropped me off early, at the West Side Christian Parish. I go in, I’m sitting in the front, and Martin comes in, Dr. King. And he’s talking about how in the north we’re going to be in people’s churches and we need to look like them to fit in, and if our clothes are so important to us, we can’t do that. I’m there in the front row, in these gigantic coveralls and this red bandana, and that was the beginning.
My brother-in-law asked me to go on this picket line. It was a housing picket line. It was across the street where the Picasso was; it was a Rublev building. I’d never been on a picket line, and somebody gave me a sign, but it was big. Like the cross of Jesus carrying this big heavy sign. We’re on one side of the street and I’m carrying it, and at the corner we have to turn. It’s a small turn, and the person in front of me knocks me over and I’m knocked out on the street, and that’s Al. I wake up and I look at him and I say, “This is the man I’m going to marry.”
Now, I had no intention of getting married. I knew I’d be going to graduate school. In my family, everybody goes. I went to a phone booth and I called my dad and I told my dad I met the man I was going to marry. And because Al knocked me over, he had to call me, right? I mean, he had to apologize. He had to do that. And so, six months later, we were married.
MJC: Just give us a little snapshot of Al Raby, if you would.
PN: Al grew up in Woodlawn. I grew up in Hyde Park. Woodlawn is the next neighborhood over. He was a teacher. He was involved with teachers for integrated schools and taught himself to read. He had been in the military as a young person and rose up, because he did well, and came back and taught himself to read. When we were married, he went to the University of Chicago with John Hope Franklin and studied history.
He was a remarkable human being, in that he cared about justice even when he was brushing his teeth. So, our life was very involved. We were involved with the Black bus driver strike, for example, and our daily lives were involved in issues of social justice.
Dr. King had said that, “The white folks had to go work in white communities.” I went to the lifesaver factory; they had no jobs. I went to Bogan College, which is now Daily College, and got a job teaching. So, I was teaching at Daily College at this time. Again, I was young. The day we got married, we went to Rockford to escape the newspapers.
I didn’t know about stringers, but it became the middle headline of the Sun Times. “Al Raby takes 19-Year-Old White Bride or White Teacher.” We got 500 pieces of hate mail, which I have somewhere. At some point, we should do something with those; I have not. I’ll give them to Chicago Historical; I think.
MJC: So, you’re 19. And what age is Al at this point? When you’re married, do you remember?
PN: I think he was 32. My parents were not so much upset that he was Black, but that he was so old. They were really troubled I was marrying this old man. So, we lived in Hyde Park and our lives were just meshed in the neighborhood. When we’d go to the fish store, the guy remembered that I fell and have a scar here, or we went to the butcher shop, so he really was part of my life and my history, which did not change very much.
I continued this very provincial life in many ways. I organized the Southwest Side Policeman’s Wives Association during that time. The point is, that it was always grounded in my neighborhood, in my community, in my sense of what it meant to care about, place.
I went to see Mickey Leaner yesterday, she just lived around the corner. And Alison Davis lived across the street. And my friend Steve Perkins, he and I organized at the University of Chicago, Students Against the Political Rank, because if you got lesser grades, you’d be drafted. We went from professor to professor organizing that. I had been studying in school, propinquity, the issues of when you are close to someone, what happens. And so, I decided Al needed a best friend. And so, we moved in next door to Steve, on Dorchester and they became best friends.
Al, at that time, went to the Constitutional Convention and there he became very close with Wayne Whalen and Paula Wolff. And Paula Wolff and Wayne were another couple that were close to us. We had moved into the apartment of Don Rose. Upstairs, the Chicago Journalism Review and NOW was down the street with you.
So, again, this very small geography is really significant. Heather and Paul Booth moved in with us. So, the Booths lived with the Raby’s on Dorchester during that time. Again, the coordinated activities that we were involved in as families. Do you remember any of this?
MJC: I do. I mean, you’re bringing back memories to me because I was in that same physical location. I had forgotten that Heather and Paul lived there.
PN: Yes, they lived with us. And Jody Parsons was a little farther away, but Bill Barry, who was head of the NAACP, I think, he and his wife lived in the same building with Jody, and when Al and I first got married, we stayed with the Barry’s. So again, all I’m saying is, very small, tight knit, community relationships, connection.
In ’68 was the Democratic Convention, as you remember. I was an SDS, Students for Democratic Society, and I was one of the organizers in the park. During that time, I was also teaching at Bogan and brought my students. I got trained in how to fall down before they put you in the paddy wagon, and so I got arrested a lot, but consciously. And then subsequently, my brother-in-law arranged to have my police record expunged. It was a whole understanding of a way of life.
Heather and I talked about recently, the difference in Jane. That there were some of us, like Heather and I, for whom it was a political, social movement. I was one of the original readers on Our Bodies, Ourselves, out of the Boston collective, because I had a friend. And then I gave a copy to Ruth Sergel.
Ruth made sure that all the women, it cost $0.35, for all the women who came to Jane to get a copy. Our whole orientation to being organizers for Jane was about people’s choice and options, and that was part of how we talked to people. Now Ruth was a social worker, and Ruth’s perspective was really about supporting people. Heather had a lot of both. I must say, I was really most interested in the movement.
MJC: I just watched the Jane’s movie and I did an interview with Martha Scott and Judith Arcana. So, it’s fresh in my memory.
PN: Great. I did part of the voiceover. I don’t know if you heard my voice. On the 23rd, I’ve arranged for the film to be shown at DePaul. It’s very important to me because it was really difficult to get the upper-level priests to agree. I organized from the bottom up, and so, we’re going to show it. I’m now working on Loyola. I think it’s going to work. It will be the first Catholic university to have shown the Jane film, so I’m very proud of that.
MJC: Talk a little more about your role in the Janes, just so that people get a full idea of that.
PN: Sure. There were stages of the Janes. I was an early Jane. Martha and I did not have much contact. Eleanor Oliver, who really sort of managed the phone and was wonderful. Susie Schwarin, who I don’t know if you remember, Susie recruited Meek. She wanted help with a lot of the paperwork and putting the files together.
MJC: Is Susie still on the planet?
PN: No, Susie died. But her daughter, Ellen Schwarin, she’s a lawyer in San Francisco, remembers her mother dressing her up to go to the bank because they’d have all this cash. Susie did not want the bank to think she was a criminal, so she’d go in, in this very bougie way with her mother to the bank. That’s a relevant story for the Janes, an important one for me.
There were four or five of us who were pregnant during this particular time, and Susie decided we should have a shower for Heather before Danny was born, and it should be a surprise. There’s a photograph in the film of several of us, and Heather came in because she was told there was some crisis with Jane, and she shows up, and she was very pregnant.
It was probably not a good idea to surprise her. But what we were very aware of, was how committed we were to having our own children and at the same time, committed to the rights of others. And that awareness was sort of crystallized at that shower. There’s a photograph, if you see it, I’m in the corner wearing this checkered dress. You can’t tell, but it’s a maternity dress.
Anyway, in the early days there was a woman named Penny. I don’t know her last name, who is in Jane. We had abortions in our house at that point. My house was one of the places where abortions were. We were on Blackstone. 54th and Blackstone.
MJC: Was Al a public official at that point? Do you remember?
PN: I don’t remember. I know that we did not smoke marijuana, but we did have abortions in our living room. What was important to me, and I think it comes across in the film, was how much the husbands, and men, were involved in Jane. So, Al would go into the bars on 53rd street, and the pool halls where he was, and he had a shopping bag, and he’d collect money.
Jean Hunt was my best friend. I worked on the vest-pocket park on Blackstone. She worked on the vest-pocket park down the street. Anyway, she would take the bag into the park, and we would ask people for money. We didn’t say abortion, for women’s rights, but our husbands and Eleanor Oliver’s husband, not initially, but then got very involved.
Wayne Parsons; the engagement of men in this process, and I guess I thought about your husband at that early time, he ran the mimeograph machine and was part of NOW. I think the question about our relationships to men is important to talk about in this context, certainly in the context of Jane.
MJC: Agreed.
PN: I talked to Martha because Martha and I often are in panels together around Jane, and she said, “Patty, there were some of the young women who were in Jane,” not in the early Jane, “They had some difficulty with their men.” Now, I didn’t experience that, but we did talk about it.
One of the conflicts that I think is relevant, the Women’s Liberation Union had objections to Jane because they saw it as not political. It was a debate within the Women’s Liberation Union and an important one, a significant one. I mean, not terrible, but I think that was important.
I think also, in terms of Jane, we had the index cards. You saw it in the film. And so, you got to choose. I chose people like me, women with babies or children. I never had a young woman who I’d consult. Not that that wasn’t part of Jane, but who I saw, and who I talked to, were women who were like me in the world, with families. Not always, I mean, you get a variety, but we had different filters by which we chose who we were counseling. Does that make any sense?
MJC: Yes, it does, because it tells us about how much the personality of the individuals who were working Jane, were a significant factor in how the work got done. Did it happen that you counseled women who already had children?
PN: Yes, mostly. That’s what I’m saying. I mostly counseled people who had children.
MJC: It’s important that that fact, of women who approach Jane be known. That it’s not just the 19-year-olds.
PN: Right. Before the pandemic, because the church shut down for the pandemic, I had just been preaching. I went to the back of the church where you greet people, Good Shepherds African American population, and a person came up to me, and I said, “Thank you for coming.” And she said, “You don’t remember me.” She said, “You were my counselor, Jane.” And she said, “I’m a lawyer now.”
MJC: Oh, my goodness.
PN: Other members of us have had experiences where we run into people that we’ve counseled during Jane.
MJC: And that’s a good thing.
PN: Yes. My life was very involved in the women’s movement. As you know, with Jody, I was in WITCH, Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. We would hex institutions with guerrilla theater. We would sit down in restaurants. Berghoff’s, and others. I drove, and we would drive downtown and pick up the secretaries who were being harassed.
Being a feminist was really important to me and was a significant part of my life. It wasn’t something I did on the side. It was a consciousness. In the same way I think that I thought about neighborhood and place as significant, somehow my identity as a woman, was in that understanding. There was a connection. Does that make any sense to you?
MJC: Makes total sense to me. I hope it does to some of the people who hear this in the future – it does to me.
PN: Being a woman is part of my sense of place in the world.
MJC: That’s right. Beautiful.
PN: And Mary Jean, interestingly enough, this next year, I’m joining something called the Golden Institute Global Fellows Program. I will be connected to people all over the world who are involved in social change work. I just spoke to a woman in Uganda who’s working with entrepreneurship and women. I’m speaking to someone else in Mogadishu who’s working on sustainability and women, and building collaborations.
A few years ago, with Lourdes Torres who’s a professor in Latino studies at DePaul, we created this curriculum on intersectionality for two groups of women. One, who are executive directors of nonprofits, and two, who are senior program officers and foundations. African American and Latina women.
We met with them separately, reading, talking. And in that experience, this may surprise you, I made for the first time, the connection between Ferguson and Lebanon. And now, as a result, I’m thinking more globally. But that has not been part of my history and this next phase of my life, I’m making connections with people around the world in terms of this work and how we can collaborate.
MJC: Very good work. Very good.
PN: But new for me.
MJC: Well, interesting that you’re finding a new angle on an old subject. That’s beautiful. So, you were in Jane in the early days, and then what was your work following the Jane experience? Talk to us about the BA and MA in Holistic Health at DePaul.
PN: I created a bachelor’s and master’s program in Holistic Health for DePaul. It was the first in the country.
MJC: Could you describe for our people exactly what Holistic Health meant?
PN: Sure. Understanding both the content, but also the political and social context of this. So, how does it relate to housing and how does it relate to health? Mind centered therapies, body centered therapies, spirit centered therapies, connected to social change. Historical and sociological view of health, and then people creating projects of how they would carry it into the world as part of their degree program at both the bachelor’s and master’s levels.
MJC: Did that idea spread to other institutions?
PN: Yes. Georgetown, and then NYU also.
MJC: And so, the programs continue.
PN: Yes. Well, not in Chicago, because the Department of Professional Studies really changed, and people in the leadership left or passed away. Catherine Moreno, who does the Women Over 70 project, we’re talking about revitalizing it.
MJC: Talk a little bit more about Al Raby and your experience together, and the work you did together.
PN: I don’t know if for people who are not involved in the social movement, that they understand that that permeates every aspect of your life. And for Al and for me, the distinction between personal troubles and public issues. I mean, C. Wright Mills wrote about it. If you don’t have a job and everybody doesn’t have a job, it is a social issue. So, we translated our personal experience into public issues.
Alison, our daughter, got sick with fevers of undiagnosed origin. I remember seeing you on the street and you asking me about it in a very nice way. Anyway, the doctor had said that, “Mr. Raby, we don’t think your child is going to live.” And I said, “Oh, yes, she is.”
And then I went about going to every kind of therapy around the country, and learning, and taking her with me, and sitting in the doctor’s office and just saying, “Heal my child.” So that my understanding and connection to healthcare, was very much connected to the life of my child. Allison is alive and well and lives in Mill Valley, California. She’s fine.
MJC: I’ve seen her website, so I know she’s around.
PN: Yes. Thank you. So that’s Allison. It was a very difficult time. I didn’t understand how that learning would later serve me in my work and communicating with others, and helping them through that. That was a very hard time for us because we didn’t have a way to really talk about or understand personal troubles.
If we could translate it into something else, for example, during the redlining. Where I would go with a Black couple, go to a door and they’d get refused, and then we would go in and we would get approved. That I could understand and knew what to do and had ways of dealing with it. Or when we marched in Marquette Park, understanding that. But to deal with a dying child, I didn’t have the wherewithal.
MJC: Did you ever get diagnosis?
PN: We didn’t. No, we never got a diagnosis. She’d get these very high fevers. We moved, and at that point, we lived on Blackstone with a park in the center. Our neighbors, Rob and Sherry Russell; Rob was a physician, and Sherry had been one of the organizers of Washington Opportunities for Women, in DC and when they moved here, created the Midwest Women’s Center. We couldn’t call it Chicago Opportunity Center, it would have been COW, so we didn’t call it that.
The creation of the Midwest Women’s Center, I got Susie Schwarin involved in a major role. We would sit in our park, in the central place, and have women’s meetings. When I had been teaching at Bogan, early on, I went into my classroom and there were these three women who had these scarves, which were sort of poked out flowers with little rhinestones.
And my parents brought me up, not to be racist, but my mother certainly had issues about class. And so, my mother would have said, “Look at that.” Something terrible, right? So, on a break, I went and called Al. And Al said to me, “Any prejudice is a disease. You have to go back.” Well, two of them became friends. One of them went on to get a PhD. One of them, her child and mine are still friends. And so, in some ways, that was crossing community boundaries for me to the southwest side, which was not a world that I knew or understood, but the beginning of that.
During the Democratic Convention, I talk about it in the film, Al and I both had permanent police tails. I’d forgotten my keys, and I had my tail call his tail and they came and got me the keys. And we continue to know those guys. We were invited for Christenings and baptisms. Again, a sort of crossing in terms of communities and relationships.
I don’t remember dates, but a big part of my life, which is still important, was my relationship to Erie House which is a community-based organization. It was originally a settlement house, and it is a Latino CBO. I went there and created the Holistic Health Department. The project for which I am most well-known is something called the 200 to 2000. Where we worked with 200 Latinas, training them in self-care skills, and created a pass it on model in Cuba.
They have people on every block who are sort of responsible for the health of the neighborhood. This was a pass it on model of Holistic health out of Erie House. So, my connection to the Latino community, and also the meeting and development with people who are now significant leaders in the Latino community, and the mentoring of them.
Al would say to me always, he would say, “Patty, talk to this person.” “I don’t want to Al.” “Patty, talk to them.” I was in the hospital for something minor, and people had given me books, and Al would come and leaf through them and then take my books, and he would pass them. And so, the development of new leadership is very important to me and came out of that relationship and that commitment, and that time.
Al, my husband, he’d have integrity when he was brushing his teeth. And for me, as a way of being in the world, and I think at some other than conscious level, my movement into seminary and my work as a clergy person, I think came from two sources.
At the West Side Christian Parish where SCLC was, I was standing outside, kicking the dirt because of the riots. I didn’t realize that Martin had come out. I was standing there, and he said, “You will make this bloom again. You’re a woman warrior.” And he blessed me. And so, I am the Reverend Dr. Patricia Novick.
So that connection to space, and vest-pocket parks and neighborhoods. And my husband; the values around, you do right action. That’s how we live our lives from the minute we get up in the morning. And at the end of the day, he would say, “Patricia, where have your feet been today?”
And where I live, it’s not very far from Roosevelt and Michigan, and there are these sculptures of feet. And so, in the morning, I walk over there. That’s my walk, to the feet. And, you know, where have my feet been today? So, from those two significant influences in my life, Martin King and Al Raby, a lot of how I think about what I do today, I believe, maybe I’m making that up, but I believe that’s how I got here, to where I am now.
MJC: It seems to me that that makes a lot of sense. Yes, absolutely. And what a wonderful way to get here. And what life we’ve had because of those influences.
PN: Yes.
MJC: The work you’re doing now, is that primarily the international work or there’s other work?
PN: Well, yes. I have a project with Meredith Ruja, who’s a professor of Latino studies at Northwestern. We’re working with older adult women in Austin and in Humboldt Park. African American women and Latinas who are in housing projects. And we’re interviewing them about their lives now, not about their histories, but about who they are. One of my themes of my work is microaggression, and as women, we’re invisible. As older women, as African American, as Latinas. So Amerita and I are doing that.
And then, we are creating with young women artists, these chairs. Each one of these women will have a chair. We’re calling them Chair Women; an Upholstered Chair, which is really who they are. We’re going to put them in storefronts in Austin and in Humboldt Park, not in some gallery. So that they’re visible and they’re seen. It’s elder women. I need money for it. We’re doing it on a shoestring.
MJC: Beautiful.
PN: That work is important to me in terms of raising the awareness of who these people are. And we’re going to write a couple of academic articles about it. But for me, creating this visibility, raising up, so that people can see who they are. That’s what I’m working on right now in the moment. Today.
MJC: Wonderful. Yes, today. Tomorrow is another day. Is there anything more that you would like to share today?
PN: Could we talk a little bit about us? I remember coming over, you may not, but I remember vividly coming over to your house and you’re talking to me about NOW, and talking to me about what was important. The reason I said yes to this, I tend not to because I’m so chronologically challenged, but because it was you. And what I remembered about being with you was important to me.
Being in your house and how your house felt. And you, and your at that point husband, created a way of being that was modeling what I wanted to do. Mary Jean Collins-Robson at the time, was someone who represented something to me. And that’s why when Heather asked, I said, “Oh, it’s her. Yes, I will.” And so, I wanted to talk about that.
MJC: Everything you’ve said today, and especially this, brings me back to that time and what an amazing, energetic, fulfilling, loving period that was. Our energy was so endless, and things that you wouldn’t think you would be able to do, you just believed that you were able to do. I got married on June 8, 1968, and arrived right after that in Chicago just in time for the Democratic Convention. We were involved in the civil rights movement in Milwaukee, which is how Jim and I met. With Father Gruppy, if you remember? So, that’s how we got to know each other. And then we got married and moved to Chicago.
We decided to move to Hyde Park because it was the only integrated neighborhood that we knew for sure existed. That’s why we moved there. And the promise of that time was fulfilled for me, in that community. Everything you said about the neighborhood, the community, the neighbors, the working together. I remember Al so well, and his leadership, and the promise; in contrast to right now, what right now feels like. It was such a hopeful period, even though there were terrible problems to deal with. It was very hopeful.
PN: Yes.
MJC: We had leaders, and we became leaders. The future was ahead of us, and we weren’t afraid of anybody. We weren’t afraid to get arrested or to challenge the system. So, I remember it fondly, and I remember you fondly, definitely.
PN: Well, what I’m saying is, you were a model for me. I really saw you that way, and I wanted to acknowledge that and thank you for what you gave me, and so that’s why we’re here today.
MJC: Well, that’s wonderful. That is wonderful. I appreciate that so much. As we get older, I’m sure you do this too, you wonder. You go over what your life’s been about, and that’s what I want my life to have been about. The interaction with people who are trying to change the world the way we want to. And we’re still doing it.
PN: Yes. And again, I want to just be clear that you were inspiring to me and made a difference for me, specifically. And so, I told Heather, “Ah, that’s who she is. Yes, I will do this.”