Wilma Mankiller and My Grandmother

Today (Sat. April 10) thousands of people will gather at an outdoor memorial service for former Cherokee tribal Chief Wilma Mankiller,(above) who died last week at the age of 64 from pancreatic cancer. The service will be held at the Cherokee Nation Cultural Grounds in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, about 70 miles east of Tulsa.

If anyone deserves to be in the Crone Hall of Fame it’s Wilma Mankiller, who was the first woman to lead a major tribe and the most famous activist on behalf of American Indians. According to her New York Times obituary, she revitalized the Cherokee nation’s tribal government and improved its education, health and housing. She was the Cherokee chief from 1985 to 1995 and during her tenure, the nation’s membership more than doubled, to 170,00 from about 68,000

Wilma Mankiller battled lymphoma and myasthenia gravis, received a kidney transplant from an older brother and survived a head-on automobile collision in 1979 that required 17 operations and years of physical therapy.

She first became famous when Native Americans took over Alcatraz Island and occupied it for 19 months to call attention to the government’s treatment of Indians.

She had two daughters, and after her marriage ended in divorce, she returned with them to live on her grandfather’s land in Oklahoma where she was born—a tract of 160 acres known as Mankiller Flats, where she grew up. During her childhood, her family had no electricity or indoor plumbing.

As the Cherokee nation’s elected leader, Wilma was chief executive of a tribe with a budget that reached $159 million a year. She put her energy and the tribe’s income into health care, job-training and the local schools.

Now about my grandmother – her name was Anna Truan Dobson. She is the young woman in the vintage photo above in the upper row on the right. She grew up in Tennessee with French-speaking Swiss-immigrant parents who had colorful tales of the Civil War. Anna had two college degrees before the turn of the century—a rarity for a Southern woman back then. She was courted by my grandfather, Frederick Fee Dobson, a Presbyterian minister who wanted her to join him in his ministry in Indian Territory Oklahoma, where he was expected to convert the Indians to Christianity and establish churches and schools.

At first Anna Truan turned him down, but eventually she relented and joined him at Tahlequah Institute, Indian Territory, Oklahoma where she is in the photograph above (and where Wilma Mankiller was born and died.) . The information written on the back of the photo says that at the time of her marriage on Jan. 1, 1896, Anna Truan was teaching on the faculty of Tahlequah Institute. She is posing on the “porch of the dormitory” with the other faculty members—the women were her bridesmaids and the man with the mustache was Reverend Hamilton, the minister who married them. (Don’t you love the ladies’ stylish leg ‘o mutton sleeves?)

After Anna was married and began having her nine children (two boys and seven girls!) she continued to teach the Native Americans piano and French, sewing and quilting. We have inherited a large beaded pincushion that the Cherokee women gave my grandmother in appreciation. (I also have a Dresden Plate pattern quilt she made for my mother’s wedding – as she did for each child—and my grandfather, Rev. Frederick Fee Dobson, reportedly sewed one of the quilt squares himself.)

I believe my grandfather was also responsible for producing the first written dictionary of the Cherokee language, but that may just be family legend.

I always admired my grandmother for her beauty and her intellectual curiosity. After her husband died, she traveled and lectured about birds, wild flowers and biblical subjects. Just raising nine children to adulthood back in those days was a phenomenal achievement, but she also found time to keep on researching and learning until she suffered a stroke in her eighties.

Not until my children were in school studying subjects like the Trail of Tears (when Native Americans were forcibly driven from the Southeast U. S. by federal troops during the winter of 1838-39) did I start to suspect that my grandparents may also have been part of the oppression of the native Americans in Oklahoma (although I’m sure their motives were benevolent.)

Looking back with today’s perspective, knowing what we have learned from activists and educators like Wilma Mankiller, I can see that my grandparents, who undoubtedly meant well by carrying their Christian religion and western educational system to the Indian Territory, were also part of the bureaucracy that forced the Native Americans to give up their ancient culture and traditions

I know very well how badly the American Indians were treated by our government. In a future post I’m going to write about a woman called “Lost Bird of Wounded Knee”, an infant found alive under the frozen body of her dead mother four days after the massacre in December 1890. This girl was adopted by the Brigadier General who found her, and then exploited and mistreated by him and others until she died at age 29.

But that’s a story for another day. Today we remember Wilma Mankiller and also my grandmother, Anna Truan Dobson, who died in 1965 at the age of 93. I think they were both brave and resourceful women worthy of the Owl of Athena award for courageous, wise and exemplary cronehood. They both deserve the title of Crone of the Week.

Why is “American Idol” Better than “Dancing with the Stars”?

I have never seen a single episode of “Dancing with the Stars”, while I have been a faithful viewer of “American Idol” for years, so I’m certainly not qualified to discuss which is the better show. But a fascinating article in today’s New York Times business section explained why, even though DWTS was crowing last week about having more viewers (23 million!) than American Idol (21.8 million), advertisers still have to pay three times as much ($642,000) for a 30- second commercial on “Idol” compared to $209,000 for a commercial on “DWTS”

Why? Because “Dancing” appeals to women viewers over 50 years old (that’s us crones) and “Idol” appeals to young women.

According to the NYTimes, “When a show has a disproportionate number of women over 50 in its audience, it simply cannot charge as much for commercials. That is not because advertisers do not like older women, but because they are so easy to find all over the rest of television.”

One media seller noted that “it might seem odd that advertisers tend to devalue the audience that has the most money—that is older viewers, but the scarcity argument tends to rule: advertisers pay more to reach people who do not watch much television. Thus the most prized viewers of all watch the least amount of television: men under 35. The younger women who watch ‘Idol’ are also highly valuable to certain advertisers”…like sellers of soft drinks, beer and gadgets like computers and phones.

Right now I can hear my friends saying, “Why on earth would a person like yourself, a pseudo-intellectual with a master’s degree in journalism, BA in English literature, Phi Beta Kappa key, watch a show like “American Idol”? And why don’t you watch “Dancing with the Stars”?

It’s hard to explain, but I try to find some TV show every night for one or two hours from eight to ten that I can watch while pedaling my stationary bike for exercise – a show that will distract me from how much I hate exercising and it won’t matter if I miss some of the dialogue due to the noise of the bike. So “Idol” fits the bill, and so do re-runs of “Bones”, “House” and “Medium”. (I can’t make myself watch “ER” any more.)

Aside from the nightly hours on the bike, I don’t watch TV unless I turn it on for “The Good Wife”, “Medium” “Big Love”, “Madmen” or “Glee” (my current fave—can’t wait for next week when it starts again.) I used to watch “Lost” but became hopelessly out of the loop long ago.

I have no desire to watch “Dancing with the Stars” because it seems to me that it features has-been celebrities and people who are famous just for being famous –like Kate Gosselin—doing something they’re not very good at.

“Idol” on the other hand, features real people (most of them) with real background stories who are hoping to relive the Cinderella fairy tale and catch the brass ring. (Okay, I don’t like the way they hype the sob stories in the contestants’ past or the way, in the auditions, they exploit troubled, often mentally fragile bad singers. But I think they’re soft-pedaling that because so many felt the way I do. Uncomfortable.)

I also like the way the producers of “Idol” pretend that the contestants , backstage, are all a multi-colored, loving family supporting each other. I believe that other reality shows, in contrast, encourage in-fighting and bad behavior to drive up viewer numbers. And those “reality” shows only are encouraging rudeness, confrontation and horrible behavior in all the impressionable young people (and old people) who watch things like “Jersey Shore” (not that I’ve ever seen that one either.)

I believe I read somewhere that the Obamas watch “American Idol” with their girls – it’s a good family show – but that conflicts with what I read somewhere else – that the Obamas don’t let the girls watch ANY television on weekdays.

My own kids—all three in their thirties, run for the door when I try to bring up my favorites on American Idol. Over Easter weekend one daughter said, while begging me to drop the subject, “They say Idol is for everyone from nine to ninety, but I think the only people who watch it are either nine or ninety.”

So who are you rooting for – Crystal Bowersox? Siobhan is my favorite at the moment, and I’m predicting that Andrew Garcia gets sent home tonight. But I never guess that right. My husband always does, and he’s predicting Garcia too.

Crone of the Week, An Early Aviatrix, (And a Geezer)

The first time she rode in a rickety open-cockpit biplane at the age of 8 in 1919, Elinor Smith (then called Elinor Patricia Ward) knew that “my future in airplanes and flying was as inevitable as the freckles on my nose.”

Ten days after she turned 16, she received her pilot’s license, becoming one of the youngest pioneers of aviation. She soon made headlines as the “Flying Flapper of Freeport”.

She made her first solo flight at the age of 15, and when she was 17, on a dare from boys at her high school, she took off from Roosevelt Field in Long Island and flew under the four East River bridges in Manhattan. For that stunt the Department of Commerce grounded her for 10 days, as was reported in The New York Times.

She was only 5 foot three inches tall, with curly blonde hair, but Elinor ranked high among the pioneering women of aviation, like Amelia Earhart. In January 1929 she set the women’s solo endurance record twice—flying 26 1/2 hours. In 1930 she set the women’s altitude record and then broke it a year later, almost losing her life when she passed our at about 30,000 feet as the motor sputtered and ran out of gas, then recovering a miles lower and guiding the plane down.

In 1934 she became the first woman on a Wheaties cereal box—a true Crone milestone.

She died on March 19 of this year, leaving a son and three daughters, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

She was 98 years old.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Also in the New York Times obituaries, I met a gentleman whom I believe deserves a Geezer of the Week award. (The blog “A Rolling Crone” is not sexist.)

Alberto Arroyo, born in 1916 in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, claimed to be the first person to jog around the Central Park Reservoir, back in 1937. At first he was using the bridle path below the reservoir to train for fights as a bantamweight boxer, but a police officer told him he was bothering the horses, so he started jogging on what was then a maintenance footpath around the reservoir.

He regularly ran ten times a day around the 1.6 mile circuit, making a total of more than 200,000 trips. He became known as the Mayor of Central Park and the founder of the modern fitness movement. Every day he held court on a bench at the reservoir’s South Gate House, where he greeted runners, provided free foot massages, stood on his head and gave psychological advice until he was 90, according to his New York Times obituary. He raised $100,000 from passing runners for Achilles International, which helps disabled runners. As he aged, he switched from running to walking, using a cane, then a walker. After a stroke in 2008, volunteers pushed him around the reservoir in a wheelchair, with a balloon attached to it.

Mr. Arroyo was said to have a daughter whom he had not seen since she was a child. He lived in a cheap hotel room and ate one meal a day at a senior center. He lived on Social Security and a small pension. But he was admired by famous people, film stars, tycoons and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who came by to thank him for a get-well card six days before she died. A short film about him was made last year.

Arroyo scorned material possessions and said he did not fear death. “You just go from one apartment to another.” He was 94 when he died on March 25th. Joggers created a memorial to him at the South Gate House, and more than a thousand came to his funeral.

Easter in Four Languages

(Please click on the photos to enlarge them)


Today is Good Friday and in a Greek household that means we can’t eat dairy or meat (that’s been going on for 40 days) and also today we can’t eat oil, so on Good Fridays we usually end up surviving on things like plain baked potatoes and peanut butter on crackers.

But today the Big Eleni, who lives with us and is the best cook in the world, has all sorts of “fasting” Good Friday food ready – Halvah, stuffed grape leaves, rice-stuffed tomatoes, taramasalata (made from fish roe) and some sort of artichoke/spinach/ hummus concoction. And boiled shrimp.

Today was also the annual dramatic journey into Worcester to collect the lamb which we had ordered far ahead from Bahnan’s Market on 344 Pleasant Street. As you can see from the first sign above, the people at Bahnan’s are ready to sell you your Easter needs in four languages: English, Greek, Turkish and Arabic.

(And they now have a café where, according to local Greeks, you can get the only authentic gyros for miles around.)

Shopping at Bahnan’s is like a visit to the United Nations, but on Easter week it’s like several festivals rolled into one.

There was a considerable line of people waiting to get into the refrigerated back room to receive the lamb they had ordered and have it cut up to their specifications. And this was in the morning, before church let out. I imagine by afternoon the line was out the door.

I didn’t last long in the refrigerated room, because of the cold and the proximity of all those lamb corpses, some of which looked the size of a small horse. (Our lamb was very small—I believe 27 pounds.)

I had to escape before the butcher started sawing, I couldn't take it, but this process is still easier than some early Easters in Nick’s Northern Greek village when the adorable baby goats were tied to each house’s front door knob and my offspring loved petting them. Then I had to drag the children, (all three under ten) out of town on Holy Saturday to prevent them seeing the general bloodshed as the baby goats were slaughtered and the blood ran in the street.

In the village on Easter Sunday you see spits outside every house, each one tended by the patriarch who is drinking homemade moonshine called Raki and having a good time. We sometimes do the lamb on the spit outside in Grafton, but not when Easter comes this early.

(By the way, this is a rare year when Orthodox Easter and everyone else’s Easter are on the same day. Usually we Greeks are later because Orthodox Easter has to be after Passover. It’s complicated.)

In the photos above you see the Big Eleni shopping for Greek cheese at Bahnan’s. We already have our large round Tsoureki bread with the red egg in the middle. And on Holy Thursday, as always, we dyed dozens of eggs red for the Saturday-night egg-cracking duel when you challenge everyone – saying “Christ is risen” “Indeed he is risen”. Crack! And whoever’s egg comes out the winner gets the other guy’s egg.

Tomorrow—Holy Saturday—we will all go to church very early and without consuming as much as a drop of water beforehand. We line up to take communion and then are free for the first time in seven weeks to eat dairy (not meat. Not yet. But we are free to rush to the Pancake House where we traditionally stuff ourselves with high-calorie breakfast treats that have been forbidden for weeks.)

Then it’s back to church again at midnight.—for the dramatic Midnight Mass on Saturday night when the church is plunged into darkness and the priest comes out at the exact stroke of midnight with a single candle and announces ‘Christ is risen!” Then the flame passes from his candle to everyone else’s and the church fills with light as we sing the Resurrection hymn: “Christos anesti!” We try to keep our candles lit as we drive home to break the Lenten fast by cracking eggs and eating the delicate dill-and-egg-lemon soup made by the Big Eleni out of the lambs intestines.

(Actually, she doesn’t put in the intestines because she knows that our kids would never eat it. In fact one is a vegetarian. And after my visit to the market today, I understand perfectly.)

I hope wherever you are celebrating Easter or Passover -- in any language – you are enjoying warm spring weather. Here in Massachusetts it has finally stopped raining and will be a beautiful weekend. Kalo Pascha!

When a Pet Dies

I saw this poem two days ago on the blog of Nicole Tadgell who is a really excellent artist and illustrator of children's books who lives in the Worcester area. I don't know who wrote the poem and I apologize for taking it from her blog and posting it on mine, but I thought it was a good poem to share, because it might be comforting to those who have to cope with the very painfulexperience of losing a beloved pet.

I am also posting a photo of our cat, P.S. who had to be euthanized after 18 years of life on May 3, 2007. She now rests in our garden under an azalea bush and a metal figure of a cat just about her size.


"If it should be....

If it should be that I grow frail and weak,
and pain should keep me from my sleep,
then you must do what must be done,
for we know this last battle can't be won.
You will be sad, I understand,
but don't let grief then stay your hand,
for this day, more than the rest,
your love and friendship must stand the test.
We've had so many happy years,
what is to come can hold no fears.
Would you want me to suffer? So,
when the time comes, please let me go.
Take me where my needs they'll tend,
only stay with me until the end,
and hold me firm and speak to me,
until my eyes no longer see.
It is a kindness that you do to me,
although my tail its last has waved,
from pain and suffering I have been saved.
Do not grieve, it should be you,
who must decide this thing to do.
We've been so close, we two these years,
Don't let your heart hold any tears."

Worcester Icons as Art?

Last weekend was the annual Arts Festival in my hometown of Grafton MA. Usually I submit paintings, but this year I decided to submit three entries in the category of “embellished digital photos” -- three photos I’ve taken recently of iconic buildings in Worcester, MA.

The first one shows the condemned clock tower building on the grounds of the Worcester State Hospital complex. This spooky-looking Victorian gothic edifice is all that’s left of the buildings that were the Worcester State Lunatic Hospital built around 1877.

This building is the setting for the opening scenes of Ed Doctorow’s novel “The Book of Daniel” about the Rosenberg children. It was heavily damaged by a fire in 1992 and has been boarded up ever since. Martin Scorsese wanted to use this building when he was making the film “Shutter Island” but he was turned down for reasons I can’t remember right now. It would have brought several million dollars to the city of Worcester.

Preservation Worcester has been fighting for years to keep this building from being demolished, and so far it’s still standing. The clock in the tower is actually red but I heightened the intensity of the color to symbolize that time is running out for this historic buildlng.

People who worked there on the medical staff have told me there are dungeon- like rooms and grim bathing facilities in the basement. I’ve heard that the place is haunted—and if any building has ghosts, I would imagine this one does.

Union Station—shown in the second photo above – was built in 1911 and was the heart of the city during its industrial heyday when immigrants were arriving by the thousands in the city to work in its factories. Eventually it fell into disrepair, the two towers of the building were removed for fear they’d be blown over, and the building was abandoned in 1975.

The building was completely renovated by the Worcester Redevelopment Authority at a cost of $32 million and re-opened in 2000. Since then there have been problems with parking, not many trains (but there will be more soon) and restaurants opening in the building have struggled, but it’s still a great place to soak up the grandiose retro décor and to have big events. I took this photo when my sketching class from the Worcester Art Museum was there at night to sketch passers-by but we pretty much ended up drawing each other.

The third photo shows Worcester’s iconic Coney Island Hot Dogs. Everyone knows and loves the Coney Island sign which drips mustard (when it’s lighted and working right.) The place is art deco heaven and I’ve seen it photographed in national ad campaigns.

Last weekend, when I was in New York at the prestigious AIPAD photo show at the Park Avenue Armory, I saw photographs of Coney Island Hot Dogs selling for $2,500. They were taken by John Woolf , a photographer from Boston who, I was told, likes to stroll around various cities at night and take time-exposure shots on the deserted streets with his camera on a tripod. Naturally he picked Coney Island Hot Dogs for the same reason I did—it’s irresistible.

My “embellished photographs” of these three Worcester icons did not win any prizes at the Grafton Art Festival, but they did inspire an urge to photograph (and embellish) more of Worcester’s great architecture. (The city is a virtual time capsule of architectural styles – especially the famous three-deckers that were built to house the factory workers.)

My next project is going to be the diners, which were manufactured in Worcester and still survive throughout New England.

Is Plastic Surgery a Sin? (Re: My Vogue article)

The April issue of Vogue is out with my article on page 112 under the title “A Facelift Revisited”. There is a cover line that reads: “My Three Facelifts A 20-year Nip & Tuck Diary”.

That cover line really gave me a start when I saw it, because I have had two facelifts, not three – one when I was 51 years old —18 years ago -- another ten years later when I was 61. Last year, when I was 68, I had a third procedure that was NOT surgery but Fraxel - fractional laser re-surfacing-- using the new CO2-powered laser called Fraxel Re:pair.

If you want to find out how that worked, and how long the facelifts lasted, and if it hurt (which is the first question everyone asks) you’ll have to buy the magazine.

I’m expecting that this article will lose me some friends and will also label me as the poster child for plastic surgery. As I’ve already remarked to some, I suspect that the words “three face lifts” will appear on my gravestone (although, like I said, I’ve only had TWO.) In my defense, I am not Heidi Montag, a 23-year-old actress who made the cover of People because she decided to have ten surgical procedures in one day to improve what was already an excellent face and body.

Above are the medical photos (sans makeup) taken by Dr. Dan Baker back in 1992, before and after my first face lift. I was 51 and, as I think you’ll agree, looked considerably older than my real age in the “before” picture. The “after” photo looks quite a bit better. My goal in having that face lift was to stave off the jowls which I was certain were my inheritance from my father (while my mother never drooped or sagged or looked less than stunning until she died at age 74.)

Dr. Baker said the face lift would last about ten years and he was right. So I had another one, with a Boston surgeon, a decade later when I was 61. I was less pleased with the results, as I explain in the article. There were scars left on my eyelids and pull marks on the side of my cheek and, as I passed age 65, brown patches appeared on my jaw line. So I was in the market for some solution – although I didn’t want another surgery — when I learned about the new kind of laser and decided to try it and write about it for Vogue – to help off-set the cost, because by age 68, I had a lot less discretionary cash to pay for it than I did at the age of 51.

My New York friends (I lived there for 14 years) are okay with the idea of plastic surgery —many have had some experience with it—but not so my friends in Massachusetts. I belong to a woman’s group that meets in the Worcester area about once a month, and as soon as the rumor came up that I would do this article, about a year and a half ago, my closest friend in the group told me I should not even consider it. “All your sisters are opposed to you doing this, Joan!” she scolded me.

“All of them?” I asked in surprise, because I knew one or two had already opted for plastic surgery.

“Every single one!” my friend whispered, in a voice heavy with warning.

Well, I never considered rejecting the opportunity. I’ve been a journalist for nearly 50 years and have done a lot of strange things in the name of “research”. Also, I had been trying for several years to figure out a way that I could afford a “fix” for my brown patches, fine lines and those deepening parentheses on either side of the mouth.

Furthermore, I feel it’s my face and body, and now that I’m nearly 70, I can do what I want with it.

But that conversation did give me flashbacks to my high school days when my concern for the majority opinion of the other girls would have carried a lot more weight.

In high school, I was not pretty, athletic, nor self-confident. I did get high grades and academic awards. All these factors consigned me to the table in the cafeteria with the oddballs and outsiders, far from the table where the “Gang” held forth.

I’m still not pretty, athletic, etc. but somewhere around the age of 60 I decided I’d earned the right to do what I wanted without listening to the opinions of the “mean girls”. (This is one of the many good things about cronehood. As one former high school classmate remarked at our 50th high school reunion “Just by staying alive you level the playing field.”) Even in college I began to realize that there were places where good grades and talent did not make you a pariah. And life improved a lot.

So I’m not going to justify or explain to my women’s group the Vogue article and the laser re-surfacing procedure. And I do not feel plastic surgery is a sin.

(Although I was convinced, 19 years ago when I went to the hospital in New York for my first face lift that God was going to strike me dead as punishment for my vanity. He didn’t. But in the same hospital, in the years after my surgery, two or three women did die while undergoing elective face lifts. And one of them was Olivia Goldsmith, who wrote “The First Wife’s Club.” I heard that these tragic cases were mostly due to reactions to the general anesthesia. I think that’s better controlled now—and with laser resurfacing, there is no general anesthesia, just topical.)

Anyway, if I wanted to explain my latest round of plastic surgery to the women in my group, (which I won’t -- everyone is too polite to mention it) I would repeat something that I wrote in the Vogue article.

I am not undergoing “maintenance” on my appearance every decade or so with the purpose of looking younger than my real age. I have never lied about my age and everyone who reads Vogue or looks up my profile on Facebook knows that I was born on Feb. 4, 1941. Next year I hit the big seven- oh.

I do it for the same reason I try to exercise on the stationary bike an hour a day and go to Pilates twice a week – although I hate exercise.

As I said at the end of my Vogue piece:

This is an ongoing process, not meant to hide or deny my age, but to let me wear the years gracefully.
“You look good,” [Dr.] Baker told me as we said goodbye. “Fifteen years younger than your age.”
So that means I look….53. Or maybe, to paraphrase Gloria Steinem: In the twenty-first century, this is what 68 looks like.