But I’ve learned never to bet against her when it comes to organizing my life. And my surroundings.

Simple replaces surplus.

Clarity overcomes chaos.

Fewer overtakes many.

And this human tornado touched down again about 10 days ago after Maya said to me:

“Mom, let’s take a look at your books.”

She’d caught me off guard, and I’d said “okay.”

By now I should know that when Maya says “take a look” I need to find bags.

Bags in which to put what I’m about to agree to throw out or give away.

Maya did this a few years back soon after I’d broke my ankle.

And I was confined to my bed with my ankle and my head each upraised with pillows.

And I was eager for company.

Seizing the moment, Maya targeted my closet.

Letting me know it was long past time to sort out the “keepers” from those items I’d be giving to Goodwill.

At the foot of my bed, Maya dangled each piece of clothing before me, while I played Judge Judy.

Maya is good at indulging my memories, letting me tell stories I associated with some of these outfits.

Acknowledging my memory, she’d nudge me to let go of its physical manifestation.

Usually I did, though a fair number of items I did ask her to rehang.

Meanwhile, I watched as the rejects fell from her hand, dropping out of my sight presumably into a give-away pile at her feet.

In an hour, we’d done what it had taken me two decades NOT to do.

We’d rid my closet and my drawers of clothes I didn’t wear and wouldn’t wear again.

On a recent Sunday, Maya’s target was my books.

When I moved into my Cambridge condo in 1989, I hired a carpenter to build as much space for books as the narrow L wing of my bedroom would allow.

Floor to ceiling. Both sides. Then, I moved a bookcase into the space remaining on the room’s back wall.

I wanted books to be the first thing I saw each morning. And I needed books to surround me while I writing my own.

That was 37 years ago. Was I to move in to a new home today, I’d do the same thing.

Which makes me an outlier since bookshelves aren’t “in” these days.

Just scroll through photos of homes for sale on Zillow. Its hard finding ones that even have a built-in bookshelf. More the reason for me to stay right where I am since I’m not at all attracted to the notion that our living spaces should reflect the ascendency of our digital lives.

Especially if that means diminishing the presence of books.

Fewer homes have built-in bookshelves than they did a few decades ago. Homes built from the 1950s into 1970s accomodated books since they were assumed an essential part of family life, and the display of books hinted at the resident’s sense of identity.

In my Amherst childhood, bookshelves were ubiquitous, which is not surprising in a university/college town of that era. Like my dad, many of my friends’ parents taught at UMass Amherst or Amherst College.n My family’s bookshelves bulged with weighty sets of encyclopedias — World Book and Britannica— alongside oversized photo and art books. Leather-bound sets of books by famous authors were side-by-side with novels that nudged up to collections of poetry. On different shelves were biographies ad nonfiction titles, with the classics sharing shelf space with newer titles.

Comfy chairs were nearby when I had the impulse to pull a book from the shelf to read it.

No longer. Or at least in most homes I’m in, though my sister Betty is rebuilding her home and she’s adding a library. With comfy chairs.

Once Ikea started to sell inexpensive, all-sized bookcases, the gig was up. Around that same time, built-in bookshelves no longer showed up on blueprints. Homebuyers had that square footage go to walk-in closets, larger kitchens, home theaters, and multiple bathrooms instead of “library” space.

Huge entertainment centers or rooms organized around a massive wall-mounted TV occupy that cherished space of my younger years. Shelf space, when it exists, is given over to digital devices. Or perhaps family photos.

As always, how we build the space we inhabit reflects the ways we spend our time in it.

Which tells us what we value.

In all, Maya and I filled 14 large handled grocery bags with books, roughly 20-25 to a bag, so about 320 books. I donated them to the Wellesley (Ma) Free Library. It was one of the only places I could find that would accept even a single “used” book.

Books are among the hardest things to recycle these days. That is if, like me, you fear your “recycled” book might meet the same ending that 90% of that plastic that we “recycle” does. Buried in a landfill. Burned in an incinerator. Floating in oceans, and snaring ocean beings.

I couldn’t resist sneaking in this greenwashing warning for any of you who believe that the plastics you put in your recycling bin ever get recycled.

Quick fact: Only about 5% of US plastic is successfully recycled.

Leaving us drowning in toxic plastic waste — much of it used once and tossed away.

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Reading books is over or not depending on the messenger

Here are highlights from these stories and others I read this week:

1. Teachers/professors no longer assign entire books for students to read due to their apparent inability and/or resistance to reading books. When students are assigned books, many choose to listen rather than read.

2. Screen time is more popular than reading time, not unlike what happened in earlier decades when the new screen was TV.

3. Many more women than men read novels. In all, only 38 percent of Americans read a novel or short story in 2022. And seven percent of all U.S. fiction sales last year were for books written by five romance writers, among them Emily Henry.

4. The recent drop in book reading is more precipitous among older readers than younger ones, largely because older readers were reading more when the study began.1

5. No one can predict what will happen next with books and reading, though trends generally point to us reading them less. Young people are tiring of screens and some are heading back to books. Old folks, like me, are doing the same.

What’s old might be new again!!!

It’s happened before. And it’s happening now with vinyl records and turntables. I handed my 1970s turntable to my daughter and Matthew, her husband, and when I visit they’re playing records. Not CDs. Not Spotify.

Still, it’s true that stats and trends about books and reading tell a disheartening story, especially for those of us who love books. But far beyond any book lover’s sadness is the diminishment of what books and our reading them contributes to our humanity.

And what we lose by not reading them, the “habits of our mind.” Like our ability to sustain our attention on an idea, concept and/or a story. Giving us the capacity to resist distraction rather than surrender to it. And our appreciation of the complexity of what constitutes true understanding as a book takes us far deeper than do fleeting headlines or a brief seduction by a meme that can leave us mistakenly thinking, “oh, yes, I get it,” when we don’t.

Reading books makes more muscular our reasoning and critical thinking, and it also restrains our trigger-happy reactiveness.

Books carry us into the hearts and minds of people’s lives; in novels, especially, we are ushered into character’s emotional lives, which builds empathy in us by enlarging our human understanding.

Books strengthen our imagination when they call on our participation to grasp the totality of the stories being told.

Books confirm, as little else can do, our understanding that ideas can’t be fully revealed in a short video or a social media post. Truer understanding can require prolonged attention, which can be hard to summon and tougher to sustain but can prove worthwhile in the end.

In expressing my concern about the potential disappearance of print books, I am not focused on the consequences to my experience with books. What I’d also miss is the sharing we do in reading books, such as in book groups. Or even in conversations like the ones I have with fellow book readers as we ready our crew shell to row.

In doing this, we increase our communal capacity for deeper, sustained engagement with ideas. At a time when civic involvement is vitally needed — with issues at stake profoundly central to our lives — we can’t afford to lessen this exchange of ideas and the sharpening of our thinking to be gained by reading and sharing books.

Johannes Gutenberg, and yes, the monks and scribes who came before him and copied books by hand, gifted us the greatest technology that we, as a species, have invented for cultivating the depth and dimensions of thinking that sets humans apart.

Jorge Luis Borges imagined paradise “as a kind of library.” By “library,” I imagine he meant the kind filled with books. If I’m right, then I think he’d agree that paradise on Earth exists in Riga, Latvia.

To my mind, this wall of books is the most beautiful wall humans have created.

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We’ll never run out of books — courtesy of ChatGPT

ChatGPT’s book faucet is turned on and A.I. “books” are flowing from it.

None of which I intend to read. Including this A.I. generated biography of Kashmir Hill, who writes about technology for The New York Times. Hill wrote this week about what it’s like to find your life between two hard covers courtesy of A.I. after a new acquaintance texted her about this bio she’d found.

Well, here are some books I think you’d LIKE to read

I lovingly pass these books to you in honor of the fantastic growth experienced in women’s sports. This week New Yorkers set a jaw-dropping record as 42,000 + fans turned out for a professional women’s soccer game in Queens.

And in the Midwest, Women’s Baseball World Cup group stage games begin next week in Rockford, Illinois, the home of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League — A League of Their Own — Rockford Peaches. And the Women’s Pro Baseball League debuts on August 1st in Springfield. Illinois. a

I throw out the ceremonial first pitch on July 25

In Polar Park, the home of the Triple A Red Sox in Worcester, MA,

My pitch — or should I say my throw toward the plate — happens at 4:00, after I talk about Locker Room Talk with team’s president Dr. Charles Steinberg at a lunch inside the stadium. If you are in or near Worcester that Saturday, join us. It’s one of only two “dog days” at the ballpark this season - Bark in the Park, with a dog parade around the warning track before I throw out the pitch.

Even though nearly six decades separate me from the time I lived there.

My parents moved us to Amherst when I was three months old.

Then, it was just me and them.

When I left Amherst I was 17, I had four younger siblings.

At that time, my destination was Rome, Italy for my last year of high school.

At first, when my parents told me we’d be leaving Amherst for my senior year, I’d screamed my displeasure.

At them.

How could they be so cruel as to take me away from friends I’d known for all of the years I’d been alive?

From my boyfriend with whom I’d been inseparable my entire junior year.

They were stealing from me everything I knew.

I yelled as loudly as I could, and when that didn’t work, I cried.

I tried everything I could think of to avoid leaving the only home I knew.

But nothing I said about their unfairness or meanness changed anything.

We’d sail on an ocean liner to Naples soon after school ended. Travel for a month and a half in Europe, and then I’d go to Rome.

My parents knew I’d survive, even if I didn’t see how I would.

My dad was taking a sabbatical, and that’s why we were leaving. As a tenured professor at UMass Amherst, he was owed one every seven years.

On his first one, I was 11 years old, in 5th grade, and too young to protest. Back then, we only drove an hour East on the Mass Pike to resettle in Newton, a Boston suburb, while my dad studied at MIT.

But for his second one, our family would split up. The three younger kids would live in Oxford, England with my parents, and I and my sister, who was a year younger, would be boarding students at St. Stephens, an American high school in Rome.

We’d chosen this school when my parents gave us the option of picking one in Europe to attend. It was the only one I’d heard since my cousin and a neighbor friend from Amherst had gone there.

Of course, my parents were right — my year in Rome was the single best year of my life until 27 years later when I went to China and brought Maya home to Cambridge.

Only becoming Maya’s mom could top what I’d experienced by living in Rome, and the lifelong friends I gained.

When I returned to the States, I was in college.

And never again would I live with my family in our Amherst home.1 Except for holidays, when I stayed long enough to see the doctor and dentist that my mom kept making appointments for me to see during college breaks.

Then, I’d be gone, again.

After that, exhilarating years of work I loved in cities I enjoyed living in put Amherst in my rear-view mirror.

Only in aging have I gained a clearer sense of how much of Amherst lives inside me.

Of how this town will always be what I call home. In every sense of what the word “home” means.

As the place where I feel a sense of belonging. A comfort zone, where memories of my mom and dad and brother, each of whom I’ve lost, as well as friends gone too, are alive in me.

It’s where I dug my roots.

Just as in my childhood, sturdy maple trees had dug their roots in our front yard.

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Thomas Wolfe wrote that I can’t go home again …

But I do.

I return to Amherst infrequently alas, and when I’m back, I don’t stay long.

Still, my brief returns morph into inner journeys that stick around.

Journeys that are kick-started by memories that surface when I’m back there.

Kept alive by the feelings they evoke.

All of which surfaces (if a bit scrabbled) in dreams I have days or months later.

All of which ought to give you a clue that my years of growing up in Amherst were joyful.

And enviable.

Yes, enviable, as I see my childhood in stark contrast to what growing-up in America is like today.

I could not have imagined a cell phone when I was growing up. Or connecting by social media to people I’d call friends but might never know.

For me, companionship was being with friends. And teammates.

I don’t remember feeling lonely. Maybe at times I was, but it was never a prevailing feeling.

If I felt that way, I had places to go to hang out with friends. And a bike to get me there.

Heck, neighborhoods then overflowed with kids since big families were a hallmark of the 1950s.

In the summer, we had the community pool and nearby craft tables with counselors to help make bracelets out of threads and necklace pendants from shells and stones.

In the winter, sliding hills and outdoor skating rinks and ponds were gathering zones.

Back then, we were freer to roam since parents’ fears for our safety didn’t constrict us as they do kids today.

I joined other kids at the Unitarian Church in organizing in-person protests — our way of responding to nightly TV stories about civil rights struggles in the South.

Back then, we all watched the same news.

Clicking thumbs-up wasn’t an option, so we showed up in person to plan, to act, and then to celebrate.

Strong, enduring friendships flourished in the absence of emojis.

All of which led to that closeness of my friendships that I didn’t want to leave in my senior year of high school.

Even the inevitable break-ups in our dating relationships we did in person.

As tough as that was to do.

All of which strengthened us for the emotional experiences we’d confront as grown-ups in our personal and work lives.

My childhood was not embedded in the “artificial intimacy” that MIT’s Sherry Turkle writes about in her new book of that name in which she speaks about the increasing reliance on AI chatbots — even in daily interactions — which “is slowly changing the way we form attachments and handle our emotions.”

Returning to Amherst - Briefly, Recently

I was back in Amherst two weeks ago after I’d picked up my friend, Jocelyn, at Logan Airport that morning after she’d flown from China. By early evening, I was dropping her off in Amherst, where she’d also grown up.2

“Should I take Strong Street?” I asked her, as we drove to the Amherst’s center for an evening band concert.

“No, let’s stay straight,” she replied.

I did, and as we passed the sign saying Strong Street, I felt a tug of pride for recalling its name.

Maybe it helps that this end of Strong Street was the site of my first car accident not long after I’d gotten my driver’s license when I was 16.

It happened late on a winter afternoon. I’d pushed hard on the brake but all I felt was the car turning on its own to slide sideways on ice. Within seconds, I’d slid past the stop sign and into the other road, finally stopping when bumping against another car.

People who lived in the nearby farm house and had heard the crash invited me inside to call my parents. I was shaken up and I couldn’t stop crying when my dad answered my call.

Fortunately, the crash wasn’t all that bad since the other car, after seeing me, swerved to avoide a worse collison.

Still, that’s not a phone call you forget — even 60 years later.

So, when Jocelyn and I drove by Strong Street on this recent June afternoon, those terrifying few moments popped up in my mind.

Five minutes later, when I dropped Jocelyn at the grass park across from what had been my junior high school in the 1960s, I lingered long enough to let some memories slip in.

There are apartments there today. Made of brick, like my school was, but in every other way they look very different. Yet, as I stared at the apartment complex, I was seeing my junior high school as one memory quickly yielded to another …

Initially, I saw myself at my first school dance with Bobby Vinton’s Blue Velvet playing in a darkened, decorated school gym. I’m slow dancing with Billy Crossman who’d asked me to go to this dance with him. [At our 50th high school reunion, he and I reenacted this dance to Vinton’s song.]

Then, that picture in my mind flipped over, and I was back at those evening dance classes held in this same gym. Billy and I were there with dozens of fellow students — girls seated on pulled-out bleachers on one side of the gym, boys on the other. Then, after the insstructor showed us the dance steps, the boys came to us asking us to pair with them to practice the dance.

Flip the memory card again and I’m a cheerleader for the boys’ basketball team at after-school games in this same gym.

Drawing me next to a fiercer memory of how nobody showed up to cheer for the games we played! In fact, few spectators came to see us play.

In those days, what one would call patriotic moments of celebration were occasions for teachers to lead their students to the second-floor auditorium, like they did on days when men were being launched into space. We watched on a black & white TV that we could barely see. Didn’t matter. We knew when they went into space and we cheered together.

Then came that November day when my homeroom teacher told us President Kennedy was shot and he was dead. I cried when my mom drove me home.

These moments — along with so many others — are etched in my memory, only to resurface when I go home.

These are what makes Amherst home to me.

In all the times I’ve been back, I think I’ve made only one bad mistake.

Perhaps it happened because I was trying too hard to be back in a time that can never be again.

Not content with memories alone, I knocked on the door of what was our home. And I told its occupants I’d once lived there and asked if I could come in to look around.

Don’t do that.

That day I learned a valuable lesson: it’s best to hold in your mind images of the place you call home.

See it in your mind’s eye filled with all that made it feel that way.

Like I still see my mom’s typewriter on its rubber pad on top of the metal table that she rolled up to the window on the side wall of our living room. Close to the kitchen so while she was preparing meals she could dash over and type a short note while food cooked.

I still hear the hard tap, tap, tap of her fast fingers typing letters to her friends.

When it was my turn to receive her typed letters — first in Rome, when she filled every available dot of space on the blue air mail stationary, then at college, when her typed words stood out on her white stationary with her name on top— I saw her typing them as I read what she wrote.

I hear the tapping of her fingers on the typewriter keys whenever I’m back in Amherst.

Our family home is still there, even if so much about it has changed.

Having seen it a few times, I now make a point of not driving by anymore since it saddens me when I do.

Not seeing those glorious maple trees in the front yard is tough for me. Nor the birch trees closer to the house. Gone, too.

As are the fields across the street where I played ball with neighborhood kids.

Paved over as parking for university students.

And that nearby apple orchard, cut down, too, to build the Orchard Hill dorms.

When I walk through the university, my mind glides back to fun days when our family skated on the campus pond.

I also can feel again the prickly tongues of cows licking my outstretched hand, making me giggle. We’d visit the cows when my parents biked me to the animal barns that long ago were in the middle of the campus.

At bedtime, my dad would weave fanciful tales in which the main character was the man with the long, scraggly beard who took care of the horses at the barn we visited with our hands clutching carrots to feed them.

Those animal barns are gone, and in their place is the Mullins Center, the sports arena where I watched my niece, Allison, graduate from UMass Amherst about a dozen years ago.

For me, the remaining touchstone at the university is Draper Hall where my dad had his first office and where my mom would take me on afternoon visits. His second-floor office was next to the white-rimmed porch over the entry doors on the right side of the building, pictured below.

Occasionally, I still walk up the stairs I walked up as a child when I’m at the campus.

Each time I retrace my steps, I can’t help but remember asking my mom what the word “bastard” meant after I heard a student coming down the stairs use that word alongside my dad’s name, as “that bastard, Professor Ludtke.” Apparently he’d left my dad’s office in a sour mood — perhaps with a lower grade than he’d expected.

My dad was a tough grader. I know because starting when I was quite young I’d sit on the arm of the chair where he sat grading blue book exams at home. Though he taught finance, he valued the English langugage. So, he circled misspelled words as well as those where necessary punctuation was absent. Those red circles and his numerous margin notes counted - likely not in a good way - when it came time to put his grade on the exam.

Being with my dad in that way taught me a lot as I saw him teaching others.

Another reason I’ll always think of Amherst as home.

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She liked nothing more than flying

Wally Funk, who died this week, reminds me of my sister, Betty.

From an early age, each of them wanted to fly. Both did, despite barriers each one overcame.

As far as I know, Betty never ached to be an astronaut the way Wally did.

Being an international pilot for American Airlines was enough for her.

Wally flew planes, too, but at a time when being an American female eliminated the possibility of becoming an astronaut.

Funk’s capacities to be an astronaut were tested in the“Mercury 13” program in February 1961. This privately funded program trained women pilots in NASA’s early years. Funk and the other women chosen for this program did the same training and testing required of the seven men who NASA selected as astronauts in the Mercury spaceflight program.

At 22, Funk was the youngest woman graduate of the program and told she had “done better and completed the work faster than any of the guys.”

For example, compare her test inside of a sensory deprivation tank to the the one that John Glenn did:

For his test, John Glenn sat at a desk in a dark, soundproofed room. He found some paper in the darkness, pulled a pencil out of his pocket, and spent the test writing some poems in silence. He walked out three hours later.

For her test, Wally Funk floated inside a tank of water in a dark, soundproofed room. She couldn’t see, hear, or feel anything. She emerged 10 hours and 35 minutes later, not because she was done, but because the doctor administering the test decided it might be time to pull her out. [The Atlantic, “Guess Who’s Going to Space With Jeff Bezos?: Wally Funk has been ready to become an astronaut for six decades.” July 2021]

Despite the women’s impressive results, NASA denied them the opportunity to become astronauts.

“I got ahold of NASA four times, and said ‘I want to become an astronaut,’ but nobody would take me,” Funk said. “I didn’t think I would ever get to go up. Nothing has ever gotten in my way. They say, ‘Wally, you’re a girl, you can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Guess what, doesn’t matter what you are, you can still do it if you want to do it,’ and I like to do things that nobody’s ever done before.”

NASA selected its first class of female astronauts in January 1978.

Funk became the oldest woman to travel to space on a short flight on Blue Origin. She was 82 years old. [ CNN, “Aviation pioneer Wally Funk, who trained as an early female astronaut, dies at 87,” July 9]

Celebrate a Joyful Anniversary

On July 9, 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution was ratified. It granted citizenship and “equal protection under the laws” to anyone who is “born or naturalized in the United States.”

Hold tightly to this amendment. It’s needed today perhaps more than at any time in our nation’s history except when it was ratified to give equal rights to those who had been enslaved.

It’s the Constitutional amendment Judge Constance Baker Motley cited as the basis for her order that told Major League Baseball to provide EQUAL ACCESS to all reporters/writers. Until then, women writers had been kept outside of locker rooms where the ballplayer, manager and coaches interviews with male reporters/writers took place.

The Declaration of Independence.

Memorial Day, Boston Common, 2012

In January 1776, Thomas Paine, a recent immigrant to Philadelphia, published his pamphlet, Common Sense.

“Where … is the King of America?” Paine asked. “I’ll tell you Friend … so far as we approve of monarchy … in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.

“A government of our own is our natural right … it is infinitely wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance.

If we omit it now, some [dictator] may hereafter arise, who laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.”

Paine’s words resonated with colonists. Within six months the Continental Congress wrote and adopted the Declaration of Independence This weekend we celebrate its signing.

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, JULY 4, 1776:

“Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” — Abigail Adams, 1776

Washington, D.C. Women’s March, January 2017

Though we can’t be certain this happened, it is said that a woman stopped Benjamin Franklin outside the Constitutional Convention and asked what kind of government the delegates had made.

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Seventy-six years later, on July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass, delivered his speech, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" at a Rochester (NY) event hosted by the Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society.

“I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the RINGBOLT to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”

Frederick Douglass, his second wife Helen Pitts Douglass (seated) and her sister, Eva Pitts.

Douglass: On the White Men Who Wrote the Declaration of Independence

“They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited, it ought to command respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.”

Douglass: On the “mournful wail of millions.”

“Fellow citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. … My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. … I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just. …

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In his twenties and serving in the Illinois House of Representatives, Abe Lincoln predicted that the gravest danger America would face would come from within. He also believed that “the Declaration, not the Constitution with its indefensible compromises on slavery, was the cause worth fighting for.” [Wall Street Journal, July 2, Our Freedom Still Needs Defending, by Paul Wolfowitz]

In 1854, Congress legalized slavery in the western territories legal. By doing this, Congress opened the possibility that the states formed out of those territories might gain majority representation in Congress. Lincoln responded to this action in writings and speeeches as he repeatedly asked Americans if they had forgotten what they had brought forth on the Fourth of July in 1776.

In 1855, he wrote: “When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that ‘all men are created equal’ a self-evident truth.” He observed that although the Fourth of July “has not quite dwindled away,” it is now good for nothing more than “burning fire-crackers!”

By 1857, Lincoln was wondering aloud what the point was in celebrating the Fourth of July if the Declaration was treated as “mere rubbish—old wadding left to rot on the battlefield?” [Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2026, “Abraham Lincoln Remade the Fourth of July, by Allen C. Guelzo]

In 1858, Lincoln delivered his “House Divided” speech after accepting the Republican nomination for President.

As President, Lincoln called Congress into special session on July 4, 1861. He’d made clear by then that the Confederacy was a repudiation of everything the Fourth of July once stood for. The war, he told Congress, “presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.” [Wall Street Journal, July 1.]

On July 3, 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg — the bloodiest battle of the Civil War - ended with the Confederate troops decisively defeated. That November, Lincoln dedicated the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg by citing the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal.”

The Declaration of Independence’s principles were worth fighting for.

Maya stands in front of Lincoln’s second Inaugural Address, carved into the wall of the Lincoln Monument from which the statue of Lincoln looks out over the reflecting pool.

Lincoln ended his March, 1865 second Inaugural Address, given a few weeks before the South surrendered, with these words:

"With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." -President Abraham Lincoln

When he led America’s celebration of its bicentennial in 1976, President Gerald Ford echoed the admiration of his fellow Republican, Abe Lincoln, for the Declaration.

Democracy Matters: An exhibit at the New York Historical Society

American Aspirations: Exhibition at Smithsonian Institution

Washington wrote his 1796 Farewell Address by the light of this candle stand that is in the Smithsonian’s current exhibit, American Aspirations (until July 26).

In his address, Washington assured Americans he’d step down when a new president was elected.

Let our first President’s example of peaceful transition of power light our way when we move on to the next one.

What I couldn’t know then was how eerily similar our obituaries would be.

Yes, though mine hasn’t been written, trust me when I tell you this will be so.

It’s inevitable given the odd coincidences of our working lives.

Marge and my mom were roommates at Wellesley College during the World War II years and were forever friends until Marge’s death due to cancer at the age of 61.

Nimble on the typewriter, these distant friends kept in touch by writing letters in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when marriage and motherhood defined their lives.

Keeping each close to home.

By the early 1960s, our family of seven squeezed into our Plymouth station wagon for the four-hour drive to Pelham, New York, where Marge lived with her family.

We did this so Marge and my mom could spend time together, though her husband Sam and my dad and us - eight kids in all - were there too.

On one of our visits. Marge took everyone except Sam to the Bronx Zoo. Sam had left after breakfast to take a commuter train to his office in New York City, where we’d meet him for dinner.

I was the oldest kid, maybe 10 or 11.

And one of the few tall enough for a camel ride.

Or was it an elephant?

I can’t remember the animal I rode, but I recall that a person led us around a circle while I sat high on its back.

Nor do I recall knowing anything about my mom’s friend.

Except that she was a mom, like mine.

Whatever her life — or my mom’s – had been before her husband and kids arrived, it wasn’t that anymore. At least when the kids were around, my mom and Marge didn’t talk about what had been.

Nor was I was curious enough to ask.

So it wasn’t until the evening of my dad’s birthday on March 4, 1963 that I came to know anything more about my mom’s friend, Marge.

That night I watched “To Tell the Truth” with my parents on our black & white TV. It was one of the more popular quiz shows of my teen-age years. The game involved four well-known panel members quizzing three contestants to determine which of them was really the person that each one said she was.

Marge had let my mom know she’d be on the show that night. And she wasn’t going to be one of the two imposters.

She was the REAL person – the one who’d done what the “affidavit” said she’d done.

After Marge and two pretend Marges came on stage, the host read her affidavit to the viewers and panel members.

Among the “real” Margery Welles’ achievements were these:

• She was a recognized authority on professional boxing.

• She wrote a biography of World Heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis.

• She was a sports columnist with the Christian Science Monitor for 15 years.

• She was a boxing reporter for Sports Illustrated at the magazine’s founding in 1954.

• She wrote the boxing entry for the Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1963

Though not mentioned in that affidavit, Marge was also the only woman reporter who Joe Louis permitted to join the male reporters in his locker room.

He’s once passed only this message to her:

Sound familiar?

It’s along the lines of what the L.A. Dodgers told me on the night that Commissioner Bowie Kuhn banned me from ever reporting in locker rooms, as the men did.

Fortunately for Marge, Louis ran his own locker room.

Marge (right) appeared on the popular TV show To Tell the Truth on March 4, 1963, my dad’s 39th birthday. VIDEO of the show is HERE. She was in the third segment of the show. To watch the back-and-forth questions, advance the video to 16 minutes.

The panel members easily decided that she was the real Marge Welles. The other women knew little or nothing about boxing and Marge’s answers flew out before the questioner took a breath.

Robert Q. Lewis, the host, then asked Marge when and how she became interested in boxing. Marge’s replied:

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I was definitely a so-called “Tom girl” by the time I saw Marge on TV. I loved every sport I could play.

Still, I had no clue that my path would follow hers – including as a reporter at Sports Illustrated.

Marge was brought back to mind yesterday when Arlene Schulman, a celebrated photographer and author1 and friend, published her story about Marge on Substack.

Arlene worked on her story for quite some time, writing it in her effort to reignite the campaign to have Marge inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, an honor she rightfully deserves.

If successful, Marge would be the first woman to enter the fraternity of Observers: Print and media journalists, publishers, writers, historians, photographers, artists and screenwriters at boxing’s hall of fame.

I am joining Arlene in this new effort! And any boxing folks who might read this essay, please join us. Get onboard!

It’s a travesty that the Hall hasn’t recognized Marge’s immense contributions to its sport. After all, the Hall exists to give visitors a comprehensive historic overview of the lives of those whose contributions to the sport should not be overlooked.

Pause to consider that word, “overlooked.”

It’s the title The New York Times gave to the obituaries section it launched on International Women’s Day in 2018. That’s when the newspaper started to publish the obituaries of women and people of color whose deaths it had ignored. People whose lives merited a prominent obituary but they’d been denied their due because of the sexism and racism of their time.

Similarly, the International Boxing Hall of Fame does not distinuguish itself by its refusal to place Marge among her peers with this honor she deserves.

Instead, she’s overloooked and shut out.

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Marge should have been inducted into the Hall with the class of 2012.

That was when her granddaughter, Donna Welles, sent her compelling nomination to the Selection Committee.

But she wasn’t inducted then.

Nor was she inducted after journalist Roy Peter Clark wrote about Marge’s boxing coverage in 2017,2 and then made phone calls and sent emails to the Hall’s executive director Ed Brophy.

Neither Clark’s story nor his personal entreaties moved the needle on her admission.

Not inducting Margery Miller Welles into this Hall of Fame is preposterous.

I’d hold this opinion even if the seletion committee based its decision soley on an evaluation of her astonishing and influential body of writing about Joe Louis and boxing.

But we need to add to this consideration the great odds she had working against her. We must weigh what she accomplished given that she was a woman who lived out her passion for telling stories about boxing in the 1940 and 1950s.

Doing this won’t diminish the splendor of her accomplishments. Just deepen our understanding of what it required of her to achieve them. At a time when no other woman was doing what she did.

After Roy Peter Clark wrote “Cauliflower and the Champ,” his 2003 story about Marge’s writing, he observed that she “overcame many jeers from unenlightened colleagues about her reporting from the locker room.”

Although I didn’t know her then, I can attest that it wasn’t easy going.

Even with passion and intelligence, gumption and persistence, working as a woman in a sports enviroment dominated by men is tough.

“Joe Louis: American,” was published in 1945, when Marge was 22 years old and a recent graduate of Wellesley College. Her book became a paperback sized to fit into soldiers’ uniform pockets. Marge wrote about Joe Louis for her college senior thesis, expanding that into a book that was published. Ten thousands books were printed, and each sold for $200, $37 today. It was translated into eight languages. [Arlene Schulman who set up this photo to show its scale.]

Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt reviewed Marge’s book to great acclaim in her “My Day” syndicated column after she’d stayed up until two in the morning to read it.

“. . . As I read, I realized that this was not the record simply of the boy who had reached the top in his particular sport. It was also the record of a man who, through his work in sports, wanted to win for his people, goodwill among the people of other races and religions with whom his people had to live. The story is simply told, without embellishments, but I believe many people who would not think of reading about Joe Louis, the champion, will be interested to read about Joe Louis, the man and the citizen.” [From Arlene Schulman’s Substack, June 25, 2026)

And then there is this cartoon about Marge that Arlene Schulman found on eBay.

And this cartoon about my locker room case, which I cut from a 1978 newspaper.

Oh, my. Marge and I are starting to overlap again!

Just like she and my mom did.

As Marge absorbed boxing, my mom soaked up everything about the Red Sox.

As much as Marge loved boxing, my mom loved baseball.

When she was teenager, my mom went to baseball games with her dad at Fenway Park and listened to Red Sox games on the radio when the team was on the road.

At her childhood home in Vermont, Marge read everything she could about boxing and she listened to boxing matches on the radio.

Then, one June day in 1938, when Marge was 15 years old, she went with her dad to Yankee Stadium to see American boxer Joe Louis avenge his Round 12 loss two years earlier to Germany’s Max Schmeling. Louis was the world heavyweight champion, but he’d declared, “I ain’t no champion ’till I beat Schmeling.”

With Adolf Hitler ruling the German government, the people lionized Schmeling.

And the American press portrayed the fight in broad geopolitical, with race mixed in, as they portrayed it was the German Nazi taking on the American Negro.

Louis knocked down Schmeling three times in the first round, and soon the fight was called for Louis. Just 2 minutes and four seconds into the round. Here what Marge wrote about the first heavyweight champioinship fight she witnessed.

“Schmeling went down three times. When he got up the third time, his legs were sand and his hands hung useless at his sides. He looked like a grotesque drunk who could neither think nor act … ‘Oh, Joe! Oh, Joe! Oh, Joe!’ The crowd now came near to having only one voice. It howled and shrieked. It stood on its chairs and tore its hats to bits. It jumped up and down in its frenzy. ‘Oh, Joe. Oh, Joe.’ It drowned out the formal announcement of Louis’ victory. Seventy thousand people had gone insane.”

Perhaps it’s not at all surprising that my mom and Marge cherished their friendship. For it was knitted together by a special trait which at a time wasn’t common in most young women’s lives: each was a passionate fan of a sport.

This glue in their friendship might well have gone unspoken. But I believe it was always at the core of their companionability.

Marge, my mom and me - a few words from my book

Closing this chapter about where our obituaries uncannily overlap

In this excerpt from my book, Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside, I wrote about that day when Marge took our family to the zoo before and we went into the city to the Time-Life Building to meet her husband, Sam, who was an editor at Life magazine, for dinner.

These paragraphs come at the end of a chapter in which I describe the steep learning curve I faced when hired as a researcher-reporter at Sports Illustrated in 1974. I learned quickly that my peers at the magazine were well-versed in sports coverage before they got there. I wasn’t.

“My starting line was way behind my Sports Illustrated colleagues. I had no sports writing or editing experience, nor had I taken even one journalism class, nor worked on any school newspaper. All my peers at SI had covered sports for their college or university newspaper. I played sports, so I could talk a good game, but I had lots of catch-up work to make up for my deficiencies that set me apart. But there was one special gift I had from a friend of my mom’s that helped me feel like I belonged in this place where I’d landed.

“My mom’s college roommate and close friend, Marge Miller, was the boxing writer at Sports Illustrated soon after the magazine was launched in 1954. Before being hired, she’d written about boxing for more than a decade, starting as a student at Wellesley College in the 1940s. One night on TV, when I was young, my mom and I watched Miller being questioned by the celebrity panel on “To Tell the Truth” at a time when women were not writing about boxing.

“When I was 10, Miller had taken my family to the Time-Life Building after we spent the day at the Bronx Zoo. Our elevator ride – my first – took us to a high floor where her husband, Sam Welles, worked as an editor of Life magazine. They’d met when he was a correspondent who’d followed a tip about a boxing scandal. To report this story, his editor had paired him with Miller to help with the investigation. Their romance developd, and that led to marriage, which was quickly followed by one pregnancy, then another, and eventually the birth of their three children. After she’d married, Miller left Sports Illustrated, as women did in those days, and she’d never returned to the magazine, nor to any fulltime job writing about boxing.

“The next time I walked into the Time-Life Building I was 23 years old. Riding the elevator to the 20^th floor for my first interview at Sports Illustrated, I remembered Miller, who had died by then. When she was 12 years old, she’d read about boxer Joe Louis, then listened to his fights on radio, just like my mom did with the Red Sox. Miller’s father went with her to see her first championship fight in Yankee Stadium when she was 15. That was the famous rematch that the press billed as the fight between the American Negro, Joe Louis, and the Aryan German, Max Schmeling. It was fought at a time when Adolf Hitler ruled Germany and the American Negro was ruled by Jim Crow.

“During the war, she was at Wellesley College and her friends lovingly nicknamed her “Cauliflower,” a reference to the deformed cartilage on boxers’ ears. This spoke to how much time Miller was spending with boxers training near Boston, including Joe Louis. “Joe Lewis: American,” her senior thesis, was published as a book in 1945, when she was 22.”

My huge thank you to Arlene Schulman for employing her words in the good cause of honoring Margery Miller Welles with her rightful place in the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

Had I known about June’s semi-annual stair-climbing outing, then on Saturday I could have been on the spiral staircase heading to the top of the 60-foot Sankaty Head Lighthouse on Nantucket’s Eastern shore.

To see where in 1850 its light shined its first warning glow.

It’s an adventure too good to miss. I’ll catch up next time.

Given that lighthouses are magnets for me.

Captivating me as few man-made structures do.

It’s likely that my love affair with lighthouses arises from sailing on Nantucket Sound.

Making me and certain lighthouses longtime friends.

As each encounter I have with a lighthouse creates a placeholder of memory.

Which resurfaces whenever our acquaintance is renewed.

To my everlasting delight since being around lighthouses sparks joy in me.

They’ve done this since I was a young girl racing a gaff-rigged, wooden sailboat, a Beetle Cat, on Nantucket Sound.

And my instructors handed me a chart showing me the bouys they’d use to set our race course. Some were identified by letters, others with numbers.

But what caught my attention was the demarcated triangular zone on the chart.

Bordered by thick lines, this was a forbidden area to sail. Even if we felt seduced to venture into it to gain tactical advantage.

If we were spotted doing this, we were disqualified.

For inside this zone were rocks and shallows we had to avoid.

Standing in watch of this forbidden zone was a stone lighthouse perched on a vegetated bluff at the southern tip of a privately owned island.

Leaving me to admire the Point Gammon Lighthouse from the sea.

By the time we were introduced, this old lighthouse was no longer shining its light. It was deactivated in 1858, just 42 years after being lit.

Not for an instant did this realization diminish my fixation on this lighthouse nor lessen my admiration for its elegant durability.

In our current time of disruptive changes on the Cape, the old Cape’s quaint villages — rhapsodized by Patti Page — are being whiplashed by the expansive desires of its summer wealthy elites and the economic and housing density issues of its year-round workers and retirees.

Point Gammon Lighthouse stays the course.

A gorgeous site which each summer I love to behold, as this lighthouse – holding decades of memories for me – stays anchored to its bluff.

A touchstone of predictability to older Cape Codders. Like me.

First lit in 1816 by seven lamps, Point Gammon Lighthouse emitted a fixed white light. It went dark in 1858.

Lighthouses draw me to them.

Beckoning me to climb to their glass top, if I can.

Like I do in Europe, winding my way up ancient stairways of cathedral domes and city towers.

Like I did on Martha’s Vineyard in 2024, when I climbed the Gay Head Lighthouse.

Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton was granted $570 by Congress to build Gay Head Lighthouse on the island’s clay cliffs in 1796. Its light of several wicks in a shallow circular pan filled with sperm whale oil was lit in 1799 to warn sailors of Devil’s Bridge, a nearby submerged shoal and rock formation. I sense a telescope was useful!

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When I’m sailing and a lighthouse comes into view, I head for a closer look.

Though with my childhood sailing chart in mind, I don’t to sail too close knowing why they are there.

Even as I sail away, I’ll look back to steal glances of my friend.

Until the horizon drops her glass top from view.

Twenty years ago, Sankaty Head Lighthouse was dangeroutly close to toppling into the sea. It was just 46 feet from the sandy bluff that the ocean is reclaiming. In the fall of 2007, Sconset Trust, its owner, relocated the 405-ton lighthouse 400 feet inland. This is like the 450-inward tug of Highland Light in Truro on Cape Cod a decade earlier. Each lighthouse was a victim of erosion accelerated by climate change’s sea level rise.

Each summer I drive by Sankaty Head Lighthouse.

At least once, but more, if I can.

I imagine its earliest days in 1850 when this lighthouse was lit to alert Atlantic-crossing ship captains to dangerous shoals nearby, on which many crews perished. A brigade of island volunteers in horse-driven carts loaded with life-saving equipment sometimes arrived in time to save the fortunate ones.

Day and night, Sankaty’s Lighthouse keepers made sure its massive beehive-shaped glass Fresnel lens - the first in America - flashed a parallel beam at sailors.

I’ve never seen Santaky Head Lighthouse from the bluff side, except in photos, nor flown overhead.

I’ve only seen it from its other side when I drive by on Sconset’s Polpis Road.

Pausing to feast my eyes on its candy-cane stripe and stunning top hat of glass.

Long enough to imprint a memory, until we meet again.

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Each lighthouse with its distinctive shape, coloring and style leaves me with a new story.

Usually involving people who were with me at this lighthouse.

Or I’ll remember the occasion that brought me to it.

Like the Memorial Day weekend afternoon I spent on Great Point decades ago in the shadow of its same-named lighthouse.

After 10 of us drove there in two four-wheel-drive vehicles on sandy “roads” to linger on the pristine beaches near what the islanders call Nantucket Lighthouse.

We’d put swimsuits on under shorts and t-shirts and we had towels and blankets aplenty, and frisbies and footballs to toss. Picnic lunches packed with wine to sip.

Great Point Lighthouse stands solitary guard on a spit of land where Atlantic Ocean currents meet the more tranquil Nantucket Sound. Once judged to be perilously close to the shoreline, the lighthouse wasn’t moved then, but on March 29, 1984 a hurricane-force storm toppled it. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Nantucket Sound sailor, secured two million dollars in federal money to rebuild and relocate lighthouse, moving it 300 yards inward from its former location.

Still to this day, whenever I see the Great Point Lighthouse from a distance, memories swirl and I see myself taking those quick dips in May. I’m still able to feel the chilly water and then return to the lengthy respites we took on the beach as friends.

I also revisit memories when I stand in front of this Edward Hopper painting at the Museum of Fine Arts. and when I buy the notecards so I can share my love for this Maine outpost with friends.

Lighthouse and Buildings, Portland Head, Cape Eizabeth, Maine by Edward Hopper (1927).

And each summer when I glimpse from the ferry Nantucket Harbor’s stout Brant Point Lighthouse, I’m recall the many time I sailed by this lighthouse, too.

Reliving the joy those sails gave me as I see this lighthouse now.

Knowing that by sail or ferry, I’ve arrived in a place I love to be.

The Lighthouse, by Becky Jennings

The mighty lighthouse stands secure,
Undaunted by the restless sea;
Ravaged by the changing tides
And buffeted by winds blown free.

Yet, it sheds its beacon straight and true,
Unfaltering in the bleakest night,
Guiding every passing ship
Uncertain of the course that’s right.

May we be diligent and true,
Dedicated to the right
And like the stalwart lighthouse stand
A beacon in the darkest night.

My Friend, Felicia Penn, May 21, 1953 - June 15, 2026

May we be diligent and true,

Dedicated to the right

And like the stalwart lighthouse stand

A beacon in the darkest night.

As lighthouse beacons guide sailors away from rocky shoals, my friend Felicia was a beacon in guiding her community with her steadfast values lighting the paths ahead.

Uplifting those navigating in tougher waters or facing headwinds.

Friends came to her as trusted sounding board. As an inspiring companion, too.

My friend Felicia Penn died on Sunday. When I publish this essay, I will be on the Cape celebrating a life in which conviction generated action for the community good. Hers was also life made bountiful by her love of family and friends — and of sailing!

As one of her friends commented after reading Felicia’s obituary:

Her example taught me that leadership isn’t about titles; it’s about making your community a little better than you found it. She was also hilariously funny, wonderfully sarcastic, and never afraid to tell you exactly what she thought—usually with a perfectly timed eye roll and a joke that landed before you realized you were being taught a life lesson.

Her life and mine came together in our shared love for the Cape.

Most recently we worked together in a battle to save a treasured space in the “village” of Hyannis, where Felicia was born, raised and died.

First, as a child, later with her husband, Felicia lived in the house her parents bought six months after she was born in 1953.

In working alongside her, I had a close-up view of the inner workings of what I’d only heard about – her legendary capacity to advocate strategically for the greater good.

Each of us was volunteering on the grass-roots project Save Twin Brooks that locals formed to protect the town’s environmental blessings from the rapacious grasp of an outside developer.

The odds were against us. Sadly, that’s not an infrequent circumstance on Cape Cod.

I was struck by Felicia’s outer calm, her steady composure, when she gave public testimony. To prepare, she’d summon facts, then use them in telling a story with a clarity that made her argument reach those who don’t travel in the loop of power.

Concluding one night’s brief testimony, Felicia said: “When private property usage impedes the public good, it’s time to say no.”

It took awhile, but in time enough others agreed. The residents won, sending the developers packing, while Hyannis preserved its precious woods and wetlands, its water ways and land that long ago was a cranberry bog. [See photo above.]

Tenacious and outwardly fearless, Felicia stayed steady and focused. Under pressure.

Fortunately, her traits were contagoius to those of us lucky enough to be close enough to catch them. I learned that her unflappable demeanor was buttressed by a backbone fortified by weathering the nasty criticisms well known to those willing to challenge the powerful players.

She was not deterred.

Several months before being diagnosed with cancer — and after many years of civic service, including top leadership roles on town committees and seats on institutional boards – Felicia was elected to the Barnstable Town Council.

Then, the council elected her as its president – a first for a first-time council member.

Felicia wrote Barnstable residents to express gratitude for their support:

I do not take your votes of confidence lightly. During the election season, my constituents clearly asked for change... they want to see a Council that is responsive to them. They also showed lots of concern about an inner circle of influencers who seemed to be benefitting personally from certain town policies. I pledged during my election speech that I have no conflicts and do not personally benefit from any policy or businesses located in town. This term is not about me, but about "we". I aim to make constructive changes to how the Council works together and how the public will benefit as a whole from those changes. Stay tuned....the changes will be incremental, but they will happen.

She convened numerous conversations as a first step to proposing changes in how to do the town’s business in ways benefitting the many instead of pleasing the few.

Through some tough council deliberations, I admired her calm under intense fire.

I watched as she held her ground by explaining again and again what she’d heard to convince her that this new course was the right and necessary one to take.

Right, not because she believed it so, but “right” because she’d listened well for many years to those whose voices and experiences too often were ignored.

Anyone listening to her could tell that she’d dug deeply into these issues.

Issues she knew, felt and experienced, as a town native would.

Issues she understood after serving in various civic roles to address them, as an active resident does.

Issues she embodied, as a woman who cared enough to be there for others when they needed help, and she had the heart and skills to meet the moment.

I’ll miss Felicia terribly.

So will a lot people who never knew her.

People who never had the opportunity to tell her thanks for what she did for them.

What she did for this place they call home.

Updates + Book Talk

“Meet the new bosses, worse than the old bosses”

In last week’s essay I touched on a time in our nation’s history when oligarchs ruled. Implicit was a sense of deja vu, as if what our forebears lived through is comparable to what we are living with today. But as economist Paul Krugman made clear this week, the 19th century Gilded Age was not nearly as gilded or as grifting as what imperils us today.

So, are we living in a second Gilded Age? If only. We surpassed Gilded Age levels of income and wealth inequality decades ago. We’re now in an era of oligarchy in which the power of great wealth and the abuse of that power by a tiny elite eclipse anything we saw in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. And the super-wealthy themselves are far more lacking in redemptive qualities than their predecessors.

Meet the new bosses, worse than the old bosses.

[Paul Krugman, Meet the New Bosses, Worse Than the Old Bosses: The second Gilded Age is much uglier than the first, June 15]

Rowing Her Boat

I also wrote about solo rower Kelsey Pfendler, who is now 28 days into her exhausting 2,400-mile row from California to Hawaii. She is attempting to break multiple world records – trying to be the first American woman to achieve this feat, and the fastest and the youngest woman to do this row.

This week Outside magazine published a story about her row after speaking with her on WhatsApp. Topics include her extreme sleep deprivation and intense isolation, along with the physical toll of the open sea. She’s on target to set these records.

I learned this about Kelsey’s solo journey:

I brought some stuffed animals to keep me company. I have an octopus and a crab that, especially the first week, were really comforting just to have something to hold onto when I’m sleeping. They’re like, silent observers of me sometimes, and it’s funny. It almost feels like they’re holding me accountable.

Baseball Memory

If you want to hear/watch my Cooperstown Symposium speech on Baseball and American Culture + Women that I gave at the Baseball Hall of Fame on my 75th birthday, here’s the link. Feel free to share it.

With the few words he spoke.

His unforgettable phrase galvinized Americans.

For in uttering these words when he did, Welch, who was the chief special counsel for the U.S. Army, pulled back the curtain to reveal the mortal flaws of a man who’d been holding the nation in his thrall.

Not unlike what happened to the huckster/magician who was the wizard of Oz.

However, in this case, the words he said as a nation watched were powerful enough to take down a U.S. Senator drunk with power.

They vanquished a man who was bullying Americans by his intimidating misue of governmental power.

A boorish man who until that moment seemed unstoppable, as he held the nation in his terrifying grip.

For several years, Senator Joe McCarthy had waged his reckless and vindictive assault on citizens who he claimed harbored ideological sympathies to Soviet Communism.

Leading, he said, to Communist subversion within the U.S. government and military.

Many he’d summoned before his committee were wrongfully accused.

But to him that was beside the point.

His was a campaign of intimidation, and McCarthy felt no need to produce actual evidence to prove the veracity of what he said or the charges he made against those he forced to testify.

He relied instead on sensationalist rhetoric and unsubstantiated allegations.

Masquerading as his “truth.”

Evidence wasn’t necessary as long as intimidation worked.

Roy Cohn, who later served as Donald Trump’s attorney and mentor, joined McCarthy in this pursuit as his investigative subscommittee’s special counsel.

The men radiated arrogance.

Historians decribe McCarthy’s “dreary insistence on his own righteousness,” and his “lack of respect for those he persecuted.” And they label Cohn as being the “destructive architect of modern political ruthlessness” and use descriptive phrases like "legal executioner” to sum him up.

These two men, united in “bloody-minded callousness” worked side-by-side.

And in damaging their prey, they disregarded the protective rights granted to citizens by our Constitution, especially by its First and Fourteenth Amendments.

They treated the hundreds of Americans who sat at their witness table as bit players in their show.

Demonstrating no decency.

What befell those “players” and their families mattered not at all to these men who cared only about holding center stage.

Sound familiar?

On Tuesday morning, I was reminded1 of the anniversary of this earth-shattering moment.

Wanting to refresh my memory, I decided to read accounts of McCarthy’s hearings in 1954, when he and Cohn turned their attacks on the U.S. Army.

In a fateful decision, driven by his arrogance and hubris, McCarthy had invited TV cameras into his hearings. And, on an average day, 20 million Americans tuned in.

Witnessing in real time McCarthy’s bullying as he yelled angrily at witnesses.

I watched film clips of that fatefull June 9th moment when Welch turned the table and put McCarthy on trial in the court of public opinion.

Charging him with possessing “no sense of decency.”

Welch was compelled to utter these words when McCarthy verbally assaulted one of his fellow lawyers at his Boston firm. The Senator named this man on TV, accusing him to having ties to the “legal arm of the Communist Party.”

Welch’s rebuke seems mild when compared with the career-ending accusations that McCarthy made against so many.

So, what was it in Welch’s words that made them stick when so many others had not?

Perhaps it was his decision to use a word that upheld a shared and valued human trait — one that every American watching that day hoped their children (and they) would live by.

This universality empowered the word with an authority that few other words had.

But whatever explains the potency of Welch’s accusation, we know that later that year, the U.S. Senate finally found the courage it had lacked when it censured McCarthy, condemning his recklessness.

Stripped of power, he was ostracized by political colleagues and ignored by the press.

Three years later, at the age of 48, McCarthy died “a broken man.”

Not unlike the life course of many of those whose names and reputations he’d ruined when he used his power to break them.

On June 9, 1954, Joe McCarthy experienced his Humpty-Dumpty moment, as his tumble from the political stage began.

This video fills in facts of this story which the prior video did not address. Watched together, they tell a fairly complete story of what ended the cruel, all-consuming reign of Joe McCarthy, who accumulated power by bullying and harming others and held onto power until members within his own party stopped him.

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Will Words Be Enough, Now?

As I read about and watched the 1950s-era hearings, questions came to mind.

Are words still capable of delivering the blow necessary to turn our nation away from the cursed course set in motion and propelled by our president?

Millions of words have questioned and detailed many more personal attributes than this man’s “decency.”

Yet, the center holds, even if cracks in the foundation are starting to show.

Will words even be what eventually loosen this man’s firm grip on power?

If not words, then what?

And, what role, if any, will words play in awakening elected leaders whose fear and cowardice leaves them unwilling to speak or act in the face of present dangers?

Like it was with McCarthy, the terror unleashed by this man’s callous disregard for the people he harms alarms many Americans, including me.

As does his disdain for our Constitution upon which our nation’s future depends.

Trump’s ravenous appetite for vindictive retribution, like McCarthy’s, is fueled by incessant acts of intimidation.

A strategy learned from Roy Cohn.

Trump’s arrogance, bundled into narcissism, presents us with a man who is unbound from every rule and habit of political discourse.

A man whose survival, accumulation of wealth, display of gold and legacy are all that matter to him.

And securing these seems his only thrill despite holding the mightiest job on Earth.

The rest, he admits, bores him.

Including, perhaps most of all, the presidential performance of customary acts of decency.

A quality of character he’s likely never possessed nor wants to acquire.

For this reason, and so many more, the words Welch said to McCarthy 72 years ago seems quaint today.

Hopelessly devalued.

Like the penny, decency has slid to being a worthless currency in an economy fueled by greed and selfishness.

Leaving Welch’s words a mismatch for what this moment in our history demands.

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In 1954, decency was a valued currency.

And Joseph Nye Welch was smart enough to center this word in his confrontation with a bully at the moment that he knew was being televised to America.

Welch was born as the youngest of seven children to English immigrant parents in 1890. He grew up in town in northwest Iowa so sparsely populated that his immediate family accounted for almost two percent of its 519 residents.

His childhood was likely untouched by dominant rule of America’s “oligarchs” whose exorbitant wealth meant that the top one percent of families owned more than half of the country’s real and personal property.

Sound familiar?

But by the time Welch enrolled in Grinell College in Iowa in 1910, then graduated from Harvard Law School in 1917, muckraking journalists were publishing stories they reported about massive monopolistic corruption.

What mattered was that American people believed what these journalists reported, which led to huge shifts in public opinion. Soon, the voters had swept America’s Progressive Movement leaders into office with their promises to break up corporate conglomerates, protect consumers and improve conditions for working Americans.

Which they did. With the American people’s support.

Will this history repeat for us? And if so, what will light the spark?

American Moments: Memorable Words and Visuals

“You can’t convict a million dollars.”

This famous phrase of the 1920’s Teapot Dome bribery scandal picked up on the reality of how wealth was shielding people from accountability. The Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall went to jail for accepting their bribes, but juries acquitted the wealthy oil tycoons who had bribed him. These judicial outcomes sparked national outrage about wealth and privilege.

"You think I'm licked. You all think I'm licked. Well, I'm not licked. And I'm gonna stay right here and fight for this lost cause."

In the 1939 popular film, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Jefferson Smith arrived in Washington to fill a Senate vacancy. There, his idealism collides with “corruption at home and subterfuge from his hero in Washington,” but he forges ahead by delivering a filibuster speech in which he refuses to give in to political corruption. In the end, he prevails.

“Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family don’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them.”

President Franklin Roosevelt (left in photo) defended Fala, his Scottish Terrier, against Republican’s false charges that he’d accidentally left his dog on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a Navy destroyer to retrieve him at taxpayer expense. After Orson Welles ad-libbed the Fala joke for the president, Roosevelt adopted this humorous approach in his Sept. 1944 speech, defusing this brewing scandal. Presidential biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin observed that “The Fala bit was so funny, one reporter observed, that ‘even the stoniest of Republican faces cracked a smile.’”

“We’re gonna keep it.”

In September 1952, then vice-presidential candidate Richard Nixon (right in photo) delivered his “Checkers speech” on national television when he defended himself against allegations of improper campaign funds by denying that his wife, Pat, owned a mink coat: “Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat.” He did admit that his family did accept one gift — Checkers, a Cocker Spaniel. His daughters loved the dog, he said, and they were keeping Checkers. That fall he was elected Vice-President.

“What did the President know and when did he know it?”

In June 1973, as Vice-Chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee, Republican Senator Howard Baker posed this memorable question to a witness, John Dean, the former White House Counsel in the Nixon administration. What he asked elicited a response in which Dean implicated “both Nixon and his staff in the cover-up and efforts to derail the investigation of the Watergate break-in.” As a result of this key moment of testimony, these hearings led to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

Sports Knit Us Together: Knit One, Purl Two

I live near Boston where we’ve had our own magical NBA Final moment.

We know it as the impossible-to-forget words of Celtic radio broadcaster Johnny Most — “Havlichek steals it. … Havlichek stole the ball,”

As memorable as that moment is for me, the Knicks’s tip-in-win after their dogged and deliberate comeback in Game 4 was mythic, miraculous and marvelous, even for this diehard Celtics’s fan.

In hyperbolic commentary about this victory, those swept up in the moment raised the possibility that this improbable victory might be the “Welch” spark in uniting Americans in ways nothing else had.

Alas, the center holds as the teams head into Game 5.

Don’t Miss Sherry Turkle’s New Book

Turkle grounds her insights in research, then shares them as stories that have stood the test of time as being visionary tales that need to be heard. Her new book will be published on September 29th. Artificial Intimacy offers “both a cautionary tale and a roadmap for being human in the age of AI.”

It’s hard to find a book more timely than this one? Or more necessary as a roadmap to lives the tech billionaires want us to live?

Please, remember mine, too, :

Along with my Cooperstown talk, delivered at the Hall of Fame on May 27, 2026.

Thereby, adding to baseball’s centuries-old narrative my sense of how aspects of this splendid game fit into American culture.

Which I tried to do by weaving women into its tapestry.

At the Baseball Hall of Fame last week, I gave my speech, and below, I’ll let you know how you can watch its video.

But first, let me tell you about my new friend I met there.

He is the great birthday gift I received after giving my speech on the day I turned 75 years old. For at the age I am now, we’re more accustomed to experiencing the loss of longtime friends than finding new ones.

So, I look upon my newfound friendship as a rare and wondrous gift.

Not only because of its existence, but also in what my friend’s life has taught me, again: that heartbreaking loss and soul-crushing grief are not reserved for our elder years. Nor is the never-ending work of reaching deep inside ourselves to summon the strength to carry on when those we love and cherish leave us far too soon.

As happened in Dr. Ernie Found’s life.

The the life of my new friend, who for three decades was the sought-after spinal surgeon at the university hospitals, where I was born in 1951 in Iowa City, Iowa.

With our odd connection — my birth place and his career intersecting – ensuring me that our meeting in Cooperstown was meant to be.

In introducing Ernie to you, let me turn to one of his longtime friends who wrtoe this about him when he retired in 2017: “a remarkable career as a spine surgeon, educator and perhaps most of all as best friend to everyone.”

That last phrase hits home with me!!!

Ernie Found, his friend went on to say, is “humble, mischievous, crude, caring, lovable, funny, entertaining, unreliable (at times), amusing and lovable.”

An honest assessment, I’d say, though I admit my friendship with Ernie is young.

But to truly know Ernie one needs to know about his daughter, who he and his wife Ellyn named Caroline, when she was born as their second child.

Turns out they gave her a name she didn’t like. So she called herself “Line,” just as all of her friends did.

And like the volleyball fans at West High School did when cheered its team to the state title in 2010, with Line as its setter — a.k.a. the team’s quarterback, for those who don’t follow this game.

On the court, Line called the plays and directed the ball to teammates in ways that strategically set her team up for a winning spike or a fierce return to the opponent’s weak spot. To do this, she was constantly analyzing the other team’s defense.

No volleyball team wins a championship without a “quality setter,” and for West High School the setter was Line

“Line did much more than pass the ball to the right hitters on her team. She also was their emotional leader. She always had a smile on her face and a laugh to offer others. Her enthusiasm was contagious. At the end of each team huddle, this team leader would reward a teammate who worked particularly hard that day by saying something like, “Shelley, love your hustle, West on 11,” (Shelley’s number). Off the court, Line was the person who orchestrated the goofy teenage dance moves at parties. She also had a reputation for pulling pranks and no one was immune from her antics.” [Character Development and Leadership Curriculum, Caroline Line Found.]

In August 2011, Line Found died instantly in a moped accident near her school. She was her way to visit her mother who was in the hospital. She was 17 years old, about to enter her senior year of high school and focused on the goal of repeating her volleyball team’s state championship.

Hundreds upon hundreds of Iowans filed through the gymnasium at West High School to offer their condolences. Entire volleyball teams from neighboring towns waited up to four hours in line to say goodbye to Line. The next day a funeral was held at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church where Caroline’s number 9 volleyball jersey draped the closed coffin. Her coach gave a eulogy reminding family and friends of the way Line truly lived life to the fullest. Caroline’s mother, Ellyn, found the strength to attend the funeral, and with her husband by her side, she was able to walk down the aisle. This would be the last time she ever walked. Seven days later, she lost her battle with pancreatic cancer.

Within a few days, Doctor Ernie Found had lost his youngest child and his wife.

Soon, the Trojan’s volleyball season began, and Ernie Found showed up for each game at courtside. He was, observers said, “a pillar of support for Line’s team,” encouraging Line’s teammates to pull together in what he knew she’d wanted to be another championship season.

Line’s shoes were always under the chair in which she would have sat.

The team’s first challenge was to replace Line, its setter, which was something no one on the team could imagine doing. The coach chose Kelley Fliehler, who was Line’s best friend since when the girls were three years old. “No. Please don’t do this to me!” Kelley told her coach. Then, teammates lent her their combined strength by telling her, “Line would want you to do this.” Soon, she agreed to try this new position, and gradually she acquired the emotional leadership required to manage the team huddle.

That season, Kelley ended each huddle with, “West on 9,” (Line’s jersey #), keeping her memory with them constantly on the court.

Early on, West struggled on the court, much like they did off it. Struggled in finding a way to live and play this game they loved without the friend they loved and on whom they had depended in so many ways.

As her way of healing, West High student Maddie Vernon created at-shirt with “Live Like Line” in white block lettering on a blue shirt. Soon, thousands of people had bought this t-shirt, and the 600 fans who came to watch the games wore it, sparking hope in a community devastated by loss.

As West High School counselor Amy Kanellis observed:

“It meant we were going to embrace life, smell the roses, look around, and appreciate the people that were walking the halls with us. We were going to live life in a most positive way.”

This spirit infused the players with a renewed confidence, and they ended their season with a 28-6 record.

They won their conference championship, then moved on to the state playoffs, where they won the sectionals, regionals, quarterfinals, and semi-finals.

On Nov. 12, 2012, West High School was set to play their crossrown rival, City High School, for the 5A Iowa State Championship.

The City team won the first two sets (games) of this best-of-five match. West answered by winning the next two sets. To decide the 5th set one team had to reach 15 points and do so by a margin of two points, West was down 15-14 with City serving, which is a big advantage. That serve went into the net. West found its finishing game. And on a shot by the team’s striker, West won the championship, 18-16.1

Every member of West’s team went to find Line’s dad in the stands.

To hug him.

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When Ernie Flood and I spoke at Cooperstown, he mentioned his deep friendship with Frank Deford, an S.I. colleague who I’d mentioned in my Hall of Fame speech.

Theirs, I would learn, was the bond forged between fathers who’d lost a daughter when she was young.

As Ernie said in an interview, “Frank told me that time will not heal, but time will soften things.” And then he told Ernie: “Live like Line and you’ll be fine.”

All of us who worked with Frank at Sports Illustrated knew his daughter Alex. Frank was very, very tall and Alex, who didn’t live to celebrate her 9th birthday, barely came up to his waist. Yet, when on weekends she came with hiim to our 20th floor offices in the Time & Life Building, they stood tall together as they walked hand-in-hand down the corridors.

Alexandra, like Line, preferred using only part of her given name. And as we came to know Alex, we also knew of her disease, cystic fibrosis. Every day her parents had to clear her lungs of mucus, which Frank once described as “unpleasant and painful” for Alex, as I suspect it was for him and his wife Carol, too.

Three years after Alex died, Frank wrote Alex: The Life of a Child, a book I recommend reading, and a few years later a television movie told the story of Alex’s all-too-short life.

A year after Line’s sudden death, Frank went to Iowa City to meet her father and tell her story as a correspondent with HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.

It is Frank’s story, “Live Like Line” that Ernie asked me to watch when I got home from Cooperstown.

Which I did.

Then, he said, “After you do, please write me a letter.”

Which I did.

Handwritten, of course, as you already guessed it would be.

You’ll never regret taking a few mintes to watch Frank’s story, Live Like Line: The Story of Caroline Found | Real Sports w/ Bryant Gumbel | HBO

A few years after Frank’s story about Line was broadcast, a feature film, “A Miracle Season,” was made, which streams on Netflix.

But what I want to highlight for you now is what Frank said toward the end of his story about Line. That was when he was talking in the studio with Bryant about his experiences in doing this story.

Bryant asked Frank how Ernie is doing a year after experiencing the two huge losses in his life.

“First of all it’s amazing he’s gotten this far, but he’s a man of grace and power. I know he’d going to go forward. He’s going to make it. Let me tell you, he invited us to a party when we were out there and he did magic tricks,” Frank says before telling us this:

On the Thursday evening — the last night of our three-day Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, Dr. Ernie Found put on his Mudville uniform and cap, added a mustache and swung a wood bat as he recited “Casey at the Bat” in the Hall of Fame’s sacred Plaque Gallery, assisted by my friend, Perry Lee Barber, among the first female professional baseball umpires.

No piano this time.

By chance, I had a front-row seat to Ernie’s astonishing performance and started to video him soon after he began. Howver, when I videoed it that evening, I had no idea of the significance of his recitation in the course of his healing. I’d only learn this when I returned to Cambridge and watched Frank’s story, as my new friend asked me to do.

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My Keynote Speech at Cooperstown

I am the the first annual Larry Lucchino Keynote speaker, but I was speaking at the 37th annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture at the Baseball Hall of Fame on May 27th.

If you’d like to hear/watch my keynote speech — and obviously, I hope you will, even though it will consume a bit of your time – I’ve made this easy to do by sending you to the top post on the BLOG page of my website.

Where you will find the LINK to the YouTube video of my keynote speech.

And I made photos of ALL of the VISUALS that I used to illustrate my speech. When you click on the first one in the photo gallery on the blog post, you can then advance with a click of the arrow to the next one. VERY EASY to do. So, when you see me put my right hand down on the speaker’s podium to advance the slide, you click the arrow.

I made this as painless as I could for you, though I will confess it took me a while to figure out how to transform my Cooperstown Power Point into this method of slide showing for you.

A FEW MORE STORIES OF INTEREST

“Only nine people (none of them an American woman) are known to have completed the 2,400-mile voyage in such fashion - seven men and two women - and it has taken most of them around 70 to 90 days. Kelsey Pfendler, who describes herself as a fierce competitor, hopes she can do it faster. … Rowers spend months completely alone in a world of salt and sun, being battered by waves and living on freeze-dried meals, scarcely able to stand up or walk. They return to land totally exhausted and covered in salt sores, with severely atrophied legs, and starved for fresh fruit and vegetables.” [Yahoo!Sports, May 21, 2026]

You can follow her on YouTube.

These next two items I’m posting in memory of my brother Mark. He loved the Longhorns from the moment he arrived at the University of Texas campus to enroll until the day he died.

Both of these championships happened this week.

CONGRATULATIONS to the TEXAS LONGHORN WOMEN’S ROWING TEAM

CONGRATULATIONS to the TEXAS LONGHORN WOMEN’S SOFTBALL TEAM

The University of Texas softball team beat Texas Tech 4-1 during the Women’s College World Series championship series, claiming its second consecutive softball national title.

To close us out, I invite you to listen a song that Paul McCartney released on his 20th solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, in May. He titled this song, “The days we left behind,” and as I reflect on the ground we’ve covered today in my essay, this song is a fitting way for us to say goodbye by remembering all of what we’ve done together.

“This song opens with Mr. McCartney perusing old photos (“white and black reminders of my past”) and acknowledges the fleetingness of it all—and not only in the lyrics. [‘The Boys of Dungeon Lane’ by Paul McCartney Review: Melody and Memory, Wall Street Journal, June 4]

Fortunately I still open emails.

Especially ones with enticing headlines.

Like this one that arrived on February 9th.

Cooperstown Symposium - Keynote Invitation

I said “yes.” Wouldn’t you?

And as I did, I knew I’d add to this short list of topics another: Being a woman in baseball.

In my case, a young woman, in her mid-20s, pouring her heart and soul – and a ridiculous percentage of her waking hours – into reporting on and writing about Major League Baseball.

Only to have the baseball commissioner ban me from performing this job I loved.

This job I’d landed due to the miraculous hand of fate (and good luck) when I was 24 years old.

To be one of two baseball reporters at Sports Illustrated magazine.

This job that baseball’s czar, Bowie Kuhn, stole from me.

At the moment when I was finally at the first World Series I’d been assigned to cover.

The one I’d worked hard and long to earn the confidence of my editors to cover.

And in the middle of the first game of that series, Commissioner Kuhn robbed me of that opportunity.

For one reason.

My sex.

My daughter Maya accompanied me to Cooperstown in 2017 when my dear friend Claire Smith became the first female baseball writer to win the prestigious Baseball Writers of America Association Career Excellence Award.

Because some of you have read my essays on Substack.

Or been at a talk I’ve given about my book, Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside.

Or watched me speak about my case in videos like the one with Hillary Clinton at the 92NY.

Or heard me on a podcast like the one I did with Sarah Spain.

You know my story.

Just as it’s likely that many of 150 or so people who will be in the Grandstand Theater next Wednesday when I speak to them know it too.

So it’s incumbent on me to deliver more.

Which I’ll only succeed in doing by challenging myself.

Getting myself to stand outside of my own experience.

So I can capture for them the more expansive, scenic view encompassing the cultural shifts that my legal case represented.

And, to some degree, provoked.

If I hope to convey even a modicum of insight about the cultural dimensions of what it was to be a woman in baseball in mid-20th century America, I’ll need to connect my story with what baseball’s men were experiencing — and doing – in response to my audacious request for equal treatment.

While immersing us back in that roisterous decade of the 1970s in which the world as men had long lived it was being upended by women who were rattling and rolling our nation towards equality.

Which will help explain the harsh verdict the American public rendered about me.

Which I’ll contrast with the actionable order the federal court judge issued when she ruled in my favor.

Thereby, presenting a vastly different ruling than the people’s judgment.

While many Americans were appalled by the idea that I’d go into a baseball locker room to work alongside my male colleagues, the judge matter-of-factly reminded Commissioner Kuhn, a lawyer by education and practice, that the Supreme Court had ruled that “separate is not equal.”

The justices did that in their landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision. \

Which was the case for which my judge, Constance Baker Motley, wrote its original complaint.

That Supreme Court ruling occurred four years after Kuhn graduated from University of Virginia Law School in 1950.

Perhaps he’d overlooked its significance when he said that separate accomodations that baseball teams offered me ought to suffice.

One big problem with fig leaf was that no such accomodations had ever been made for women sportswriters.

Even if they had, and players were brought to women outside the locker room, this arrange,ent would not have afforded us the same access to our sources that the men had.

Such as to a pitcher soaking his arm in ice in the trainer’s room after pitching a complete game.

This was the access we needed. Access we deserved to have.

In a permanent exhibit called Diamond Dreams at the Baseball Hall of Fame, my Clubhouse Admission pass stamped September 30, 1977 is on display. That press pass gave me full and equal access to the New York Yankees’ locker room BEFORE the World Series in which Kuhn denied me access to every Major League Baseball team’s clubhouse. For two seasons, I’d spoken privately with Yankees’ media director Mickey Morabito about my need for clubhouse access, which no team gave to women reporters then. By the end of the 1977 season, Mickey left for me this clubhouse press pass which I used to report on the final two home games of that season, then on the American League Championship series. Also on display is my 1978 World Series press credential; to cover the 1977 World Series, I was issued the same press pass that granted me access to both teams’ clubhouse. But Commissioner Kuhn revoked my access in the first game of the World Series, even though the Los Angeles Dodgers had also okayed me reporting in their locker room.

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I don’t think many of you will be at Cooperstown next Wednesday.

On the day I celebrate my 75th birthday by delivering this keynote address.

In a place the 25-year-old me could never have imagined being invited to be a half-century later.

Back then, the men in the press box at Comiskey Park were shocked to find me sitting among them. So, they went to Roger Kahn, the baseball writer with whom I’d walked into the press box, assigned by S.I. to report with him to complain.

That is a moment that Roger wrote about in his 2003 book, October Men: Reggie Jackson, George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin, and the Yankees’ Miraculous Finish in 1978.

I often use this as a slide in talks I give so I highlighted what Roger wrote.

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Roger Kahn gave this keynote address at the Hall of Fame Symposium in 2000.

He was sandwiched between 1999’s spearker, Eliot Asinof, author of Eight Men Out, the classic nonfiction account of the 1919 World Series and its “Black Sox scandal, and 2001’s speaker, George Plimpton, who never met a sport he couldn’t master nor lacked in finding words to describe how he did it.

I’ve not asked to read what these men – or any other Symposium speaker – said when it was their turn to do what I am about to do.

Heck, I’m intimidated by just seeing those three names as predecessors, along with Stephen Jay Gould, Ken Burns, Marvin Miller, Jonathan Eig, Frank Deford (my friend and colleague at S.I.), Paul Goldberger, Howard Bryant, and last year’s symposium speaker, Joe Posnanski, a friend who wrote for Sports Illustrated long after I had left.

Lest you think I’m the first woman doing this, rest assured that I stand on muscular shoulders of dear friends and a woman I admire enormously.

Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress, fired by Donald Trump, whom I hold her in high esteem.

Claire Smith, my longtime friend and the only woman to ever be awarded the Career Excellence Award by the Baseball Writers Association of America.

Jane Leavy, another longtime friend and best-selling author of baseball biographies; her most recent book is Make Me Commissioner: I Know What's Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It.

Janet Marie Smith, my long-distance friend, and ballpark architect extraordinaire, who directed and planned the modern redesign of Fenway Park, along with several other ballparks including one of my favorites, Camden Yards.

Janet Marie Smith on the roof of Fenday Park with then-Red Sox CEO/President Larry Lucchino (center) and then-Boston Mayor Tom Menino.

Early this month, the Baseball Hall of Fame sent out this announcement:

The 2026 Symposium will officially begin on Wednesday, May 27, at 1 p.m. with the Larry Lucchino Keynote Speaker Melissa Ludtke, who helped blaze trails for women covering the major leagues. The Lucchino Family Foundation is generously supporting the Symposium by naming the annual keynote speaker in memory of the late Larry Lucchino, who served as CEO of the Baltimore Orioles, San Diego Padres and Boston Red Sox.

In honoring Lucchino, the Baseball Hall of Fame published a tribute to him in April 2024, when he died.

New York sports columnist and author Mike Lupica wrote this about Larry Lucchino — and he also was the first sportswriter to come to my S.I. office on the afternoon that Judge Motley issued her court order on September 25, 1978 in Ludtke v. Kuhn.

Mike and I, who knew each other well, talked. And the next day his column was on the back page of his tabloid newpaper.

Its headline writers used a name I didn’t— my husband’s, and Lupica opened his column by portraying me as a dutiful wife.

The image Mike drew of me was quite a departure from the customary coverage of me as a lascivious woman libber with roving eyes. But on this occasion, Mike decided to show me staying home on an historic night so I could cook dinner for my husband.

A very differnt image of the girl who sued baseball so she could see men naked.

Staying home to make supper for Eric was as nonsensical as the idea that I’d ever be in the locker room when Ron Guidry put on his jockstrap. Ballplayers dressed in the locker room before batting practice and without media present. Only after batting practice were members of the press allowed into the locker room. Even then, with ballplayers in their uniforms, I was kept out — as a woman – despite no player undressing at that time.

All of which highlights the absurdity of baseball’s primary excuse for keeping me out — to protect the '“sexual privacy” of its players.

And since there was no sexual privacy to protect, it was crystal clear that banning me from having access then wasn’t about protecting players from me seeing them nude.

It was a reminder of baseball men’s persistent habit of doing all they could, for as long as they could, to exclude women from entering this line of work.

After all, men aren’t naked when they watch the games from the press box.

And yet baseball’s men told women they couldn’t sit there with them.

No women allowed!

I didn’t go to Yankee Stadium that night because I knew it would be a media circus, and I didn’t want to be the trick elephant.

With the judge’s decision handed down, every TV station in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut would send a woman reporter who’d never covered baseball to the game. They’d go into the locker room with TV cameras rolling to get clips of them asking ballplayers how they felt about them being there. That wasn’t my story, nor was it one in which I wanted to appear. I waited until the first night media hoop-la ended, and then I went in the Yankees’ locker room to my job of reporting on the final games of the Yankees’ 1978 season. Only one other woman was there, doing a story about the winning pitcher, Ron Guidry.

I won’t be telling this story in Cooperstown. I’ve got too much else to say given the task I’ve been presented.

So, I’ll close this essay with a sneak preview at a section of my keynote speech that I’ve written — but with no guarantee that if you are there on Wednesday that I will say these words.

Writing this speech is an ever-changing salad of words, which I toss regularly.

So here goes, with words chosen from the section of my talk in which I offer up some provocative words about a cherished sportswriting legend — Red Smith, who was the most influential sports columnist of my day.

In 1976, his plaque went up in the Baseball Hall of Fame. The writer’s wing.

Forty-one years before the first, and still the only women, Claire Smith, joined him and the many other men whose portraits hang there.

From my speech, as it exists on Friday afternoon:

The media floodgates opened immediately after my case was filed on Dec. 29, 1977, when The Associated Press sent news out on its wire service.

But the heat intensified for me after the dean of the sporting press published his widely syndicated column on Jan. 9, 1978.

He’d won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1976, the year before my case was filed.

That same year his plaque joined the “Scribes and Mikemen” exhibit in this building in the year before my case was filed.

HIS opinion mattered.

So, when he ridiculed my case and derided me, he also handed out permission slips to other sports columnists to do the same.

Which they did.

This columnist’s name is Walter Wellesley Smith.

And he’s the only man I’ve known to have my college alma mater in his name:

Not “Smith.”

“Wellesley.”

Everyone knew him as “Red,” and his New York Times columns under that byline were reprinted in newspapers across U.S. and Canada.

So, when Red opined that my legal case “struck a saving note of low comedy” in an otherwise serious sporting year, the rest of the sports writing fraternity joined in.

By playing my request for equal treatment for laughs, too.

Red also turned derogatory words on me by inventing scenes like this one:

If the ballplayers enjoy exhibiting their manliness to some bit of fluff they’ll seldom lack for opportunities, but they should not be required to do so, and they shouldn’t have to wait around with their pants on until the last damsel quits the premises.”

That “bit of fluff” was me.

Oh, and the “damsel,” too.

Once Red ridiculed my legal case and me, I saw other sportswriters parrot his tone and accusations.

All of this was a heyday for headline writers as they got to merge sexual puns with baseball lingo.

In Seattle, when a writer opposed the NBA Sonics opening their locker room to all writers, the headline was “Fluff in the Locker Room.”

I wonder where that came from?

Even when the rare columnist was favorable to my cause, sex still held top billing.

In Philadelphia’s Evening Bulletin, when Rich Ashburn wrote that my case rested on solid legal ground, the headline writers went with a more enticing angle:

“The Naked Truth: Melissa Has a Case.”

And even though Ashburn explained why he thought Kuhn would lose in court, he could not resist revealing his own “naked” truth with his parting words.

“It will only be a matter of time before women will know for sure that all men aren’t created equal,” he wrote

Pivoting to the popular notion that if women writers were in locker rooms, they’d use their roving eyes to stare at the men’s naked bodies.

The Baseball Hall of Fame graciously agreed to have my book, Locker Room Talk, for sale at its Symposium, in case anyone wants to read more about baseball, women and American culture.

I will NOT write my usual Friday essay next week since I will driving home from Cooperstown.

The morning had begun like others did for my mom and dad.

By then, they were empty nesters living year-round in our Cape Cod home.

My dad had parked himself in his chair in the corner of the living room closest to the ocean.

And piled his reading materials high on a side table.

He depended on the light streaming in through the large windows to either side of him to read The Wall Street Journal.

As he read, he would call out items of possible interest to my mom who was reading and writing in a nearby room.

Then, just before lunch, my mom walked to the post office to mail a package.

Gone less than five minutes, when she returned she called out to my dad.

Like she always did.

Only this time, he didn’t answer.

At least not with words she recognized.

Heading to him, she saw him slightly slumped in his chair. His newspaper had fallen into his lap.

He was trying to respond verbally but with only nonsensical sounds.

Once the seizure passed, their worries escalated.

When my mom called me, I was frightened by what she told me.

My dad had never been sick. Never missed a day of teaching finance at the University of Massachusetts in nearly fifty years of being a professor there.

He was in such good shape he still fit into Navy uniform from World War II.

Immediately, I started making calls.

I reached out to friends who I knew had a family member who’d recently been treated for two brain tumors at Mass General Hospital (MGH).

By that evening, my dad had an appointment to see Dr. E. Antonio Chiocca.

The next morning at MGH.

I drove from Cambridge to the Cape that morning to pick up my mom and dad.

As we headed to Boston, I became increasingly concerned when my dad was still having a hard time putting more than a few words together.

Even stumbling with those, though we understoo that he wanted our help in repeating the alphabet that he’d written on the card he held.

My dad walked me down the aisle in May 1978. Decades later, I expressed my gratitude for his constant love and counsel, especially during my tumultuous younger years in an essay I wrote on Medium.com in 2015. Titled “Cushioning My Landing”, its subtitle summed up my core message: “My dad walked me down the aisle, but his advice a few years earlier built the foundation I needed for the life I ended up living.”

He was my rock.

So, to hear him struggling to say the letters of the alphabet — letters he’d taught me to say when I was a child – was a reversal for which I was not emotionally prepared.

By day’s end, an MRI had confirmed that my dad had a brain tumor.

A fact none of us wanted to acknowledge or talk about as I drove to Cape Cod, and then drove myself back to Cambridge that night to pick up Maya who was with friends.

By the next day, my dad was scheduled for a tumor biopsy.

And that biopsy confirmed that he had a glioblastoma tumor in the speech area of his brain.

The prescribed treatment began with its surgical removal.

Still, we knew from the doctor that the tumor would grow back.

Surgery was followed by radiation at Mass General and chemotherapy, which he could do on the Cape.

This regimen of treatments was done to buy him quality time.

While naturally we hoped that maybe our dad would be the exception to this tumor’s deadly toll.

Maybe he’d be among the tiny, single-digit percentage of glioblastoma patients who live past five years.

Given his age, 74, his doctor responded, when my dad asked, he’d probably gain a year or more by these treatments.

For the first, his five-hour long surgery, my dad had to be awake.

While the surgeons cut into his brain.

His surgeon wanted to remove as much of this invasive tumor as he could but, as he told my dad, he didn’t want to cut out too much and render him unable to speak.

When my dad awoke from surgery, I was with him, feeling buoyed by the surgeon’s report of success in removing much of the tumor.

Still, we were well aware of this tumor’s tentacles that we knew going in the doctor could not remove. And their presence in my dad’s brain would be a constant reminder that his was the most unforgiving of brain tumors.

No longer could I avoid the reality of what he — what all of us – were facing.

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My dad died 22 months after his tumor was diagnosed.

On November 3, 2000.

By then, he was confined to the hospital bed that my mom had put in the living room.

Only steps away from his favorite chair.

With a hospice nurse there as we sat with him, talking and holding his hands.

Before he was incapacitated, my dad lived large in the time the treatments gave him.

He never asked “why me?”, at least aloud, and he lived each day to its fullest by saying, “I will.”

After the radiation and restorative speech treatments were over, my parents traveled to Germany and the Czech Republic, visiting dear friends while enjoying time away. My dad flew alone to say goodbye to his two brothers in the Southwest, and when I took him to the airport and walked with him to the gate [yes before 9/11], I discovered a friend was on his flight and agreed to help my dad at the other end — comforting me, as I left. Between chemo treatments, my parents took the trip they had to cancel when he was diagnosed in January – their longed-for boat journey through the Beagle Channel at the tip of South America.

Also on my dad’s bucket list was a visit to Pearl Harbor. He served in the Navy and felt it his duty to honor those who died there. My mom went with him.

My dad was 17 years old when the U.S. entered World War II. Soon, he joined the Navy, attended officer training and served on a battleship.

After my mom and dad listened to “Tuesdays With Morrie,” together, they let all of us know that they wanted to celebrate our dad’s life on his birthday in March. All of us knew, by then, it was unlikely he’d be with us to celebrate another.

And so we did. All of us, the five children and three grandchildren (then) showed up to be with him on his 76th birthday.

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Remembering my dad with our bike rides to help others

This Sunday morning, B.J.’s Team — the team I created to ride on behalf of the National Brain Tumor Society to raise funds for medical research – rides for its 22nd consecutive year.

In the early years of B.J.’s Team, I often sent out paper invitations, and my mom had part of my message framed with my dad’s wonderful smile. She gave it to my brother, Mark, and after he died, I brought this framed picture and words home to keep in my bedroom.

Through our 21 years of riding, B.J.’s Team has raised roughly $300,000 due to the incredibly generous individuals who “ride” with us each year — either on the road [13 riders this year] or “in spirit” with their donations. This year, we’ve raised $18,232.86 - and counting!

To each who has contributed to B.J’s Team this spring, I sent a personal thank you.

For me, it’s a big deal when someone takes the time and shows the heart to contribute to a cause they know means so much to me. Just as it might to them since many of our team’s riders and contributors have also lost a family member to a glioblastoma tumor.

So, I never cede my opportunity to say thank you to a “template” response. Or to A.I.

This spring, in some thank-you messages, I wrote about my dad in ways I had not done before. I’m not sure why but this year I felt a strong desire for B.J.’s Team members to know the man I love so dearly – my dad who played a pivotal role in my making my life the grand adventure it’s been.

And he still does play a role given the values he instilled.

My dad was my biggest supporter and the person I always turned to when I faced tough times, which I did a lot! He would help me through one crisis, and then he’d be ready for the next, always doing whatever he could to help me find the inner strength I needed to work myself through them. His faith in me gave me the strength I needed.

His brain tumor robbed me of many years we could have had, as well as the time he could have had to be an extraordinary grandfather to Maya and his six other grandkids, four of whom he never had the opportunity to know.

His heart was huge and he was among the best of storytellers.

Our family members gathered last May near the end of our bike ride to spend time with B.J. at his “In memory of” sign. From left to right: Matthew (Maya’s husband), and his grandchildren, Sophia, Anya, Nate, Augusta and Maya, me holding the sign, and the cousins’ mom Betty slightly behind us.

If you’d like to donate to B.J’s Team for our Sunday ride, you can do so at this link:

http://www.braintumorcommunity.org/goto/BJsTeam2026

Remembering Jason Collins

A courageous leader and beloved man who lost his battle this week against his glioblastoma

I first knew about Jason Collins when he played for the Boston Celtics in the 2012-2013 season.

In April 2013, the Celtics traded him to the Washington Wizards.

But he was back in Boston in June to march in the city’s Pride Parade.

By then, he had publicly claimed his sexual identity, and in doing so he became the first active professional male athlete to do so.

Later, he said he felt envioius when he saw his Stanford University roommate Joe Kennedy III marching in the 2012 parade.

That was before Collins found the courage to say he was gay.

Of course, Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova, along with seven notable WNBA players had come out publicly by 2013, as a few of them reminded the headline writers when they pegged Collins as the first athlete in a MAJOR team sport to do so. To this day, I find that sportswriters and columnists get around crediting top women athletes by inserting the word “major,” as if professional women athletes don’t play what are considered “major” sports.

In December 2025, Jason Collins went public again on ESPN, this time to talk about his glioblastoma diagnosis:

“But now it’s time for people to hear directly from me.”

I have Stage 4 glioblastoma, one of the deadliest forms of brain cancer. It came on incredibly fast.

In May I married the love of my life, Brunson Green, at a ceremony in Austin, Texas, that couldn’t have been more perfect. In August, we were supposed to go to the US Open, just as every year, but when the car came to take us to the airport, I was nowhere near ready. And for the first time in decades, we missed the flight because I couldn’t stay focused to pack.

I had been having weird symptoms like this for a week or two, but unless something is really wrong, I’m going to push through. I’m an athlete.

Something was really wrong, though. I was in the CT machine at UCLA for all of five minutes before the tech pulled me out and said they were going to have me see a specialist. I’ve had enough CTs in my life to know they last longer than five minutes and whatever the tech had seen on the first images had to be bad.

According to my family, in hours, my mental clarity, short-term memory and comprehension disappeared -- turning into an NBA player’s version of “Dory” from “Finding Nemo.” Over the next few weeks, we would find out just how bad it was. …

My glio is extraordinary for all the wrong reasons, and is "wild type"-- it has all these mutations that make it even more deadly and difficult to treat. What's that mythical creature where you cut off one head, but it learns to grow two more? The Hydra. That's the kind of glio I have. …

As an athlete you learn not to panic in moments like this. These are the cards I’ve been dealt. To me it’s like, ‘Shut up and go play against Shaq.’ You want the challenge? This is the challenge. And there is no bigger challenge in basketball than going up against prime Shaquille O’Neal, and I’ve done that. …

When I was making my decision to come out publicly, I remembered a scene in the movie “Moneyball” where Red Sox owner John Henry (Arliss Howard) says to Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) that the first person through the wall always gets bloodied.

I feel like I’m right back in that position now, where I might be the first person through this wall. We aren’t going to sit back and let this cancer kill me without giving it a hell of a fight.” [Jason Collins: I have Stage 4 glioblastoma, Dec. 11, 2025, ESPN]

He fought hard, including travelling to Singapore for an experimental immunotherapy treatment. He did this not only for himself but in the hope that he’d add to medical knowledge about his “wild” type of tumor. Perhaps his experience would help medical researchers advance their research so as to one day give others who will confront this same diagnosis a fighting chance.

That’s the same reason why I know my father would have wanted us to ride and raise funds for the research that one day will lead to finding a cure. It’s why he donated his brain to Harvard Medical School, hoping researchers learn something by examining his tumor. Perhaps even discover something that will help others.

Listen as Jason tells of his startling diagnosis and how he, his husband and family members, including his twin brother Jarron, came together to research and decide how he’d fight it so they’d have the time with Jason that they longed to have.

On Sunday, B.J.’s Team rides in memory of my dad

and we ride in memory of so many others

All of whom were loved by people who contributed to our 2026 ride.

John’s wife, Beth Pfeiffer, my Wellesley College classmate; Bill’s two brothers; Jen’s sister; Jane’s sister; Adele’s son-in-law; Parrish’s brother; Peg’s partner; Betty’s son; Eric’s brother; Nancy E.’s father; Nancy N’s father and cousin; Anne’s husband and my friend; Pattie’s beloved friend; Suzyn’s friend; Mary C.’s friend; Liz’s friend’s dad; Lauren’s friend, the father of one of her children’s classmates; Kathryn’s friend; Adrienne’s friend; Barbara’s mother-in-law; Dave/Jen’s classmate; Barbara’s dear friend.

We ride knowing of the devastating sadness so many families have felt when their loved ones died due to a glioblastoma. And here I turn to public figures since we know how they died. Obviously, so many other families have faced this loss as well.

Senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain, Beau Biden, drummer Neil Peart, singer Tom Parker, Tim Conway, Johnnie Cochran, Cecile Richards, Bobby Murcer, Tug McGraw, Ethel Merman, Micheal Tilson Thomas and Bert Convy.

If you haven’t read my book, you might want to!

On Amazon, Locker Room Talk is selling for less than $20.00. New.

But I can’t since I write these essays on my keyboard.

Pressing keys to form words you’ll read on your screen.

Building in several degrees of separation in what’s meant to have a human “touch.”

Ironic, especially as I write today, since my words are about handwriting.

And what happens to us, as humans, and to our brains, as our thinking place, when hands and writing rarely meet.

As they did all the time, not that many years ago.

In the handwritten letters and notes we wrote one another.

Like the ones I’ve kept for decades in shoe boxes that I mostly store in my basement.

Though my more recent letter boxes live my bedroom.

Adding up to a fair number through the decades as I’ve transported each one of them from home to home in my many moves.

Never, for an instant, did I think of discarding them.

How could I toss the large box with my teenage “love” letters, mixed in with chattier ones from childhood friends I left behind when I went as a senior to high school in Rome, Italy, 4000 miles away from my hometown buddies in Amherst, MA.1

I’ve tossed very few letters. Instead I stow them away. First, in desk drawers or in piles held together with a rubber band.

Later, I transfer them into boxes. Keeping them close by. To dip into and reread letters when the mood strikes.

Or maybe I won’t ever reread some of them.

Doesn’t matter since the comfort they give me is in having them nearby.

As cherished companions.

Each a letter once opened and read. On some, the ink is fading though still readable. All are neatly folded and returned to the envelopes in which they arrived.

An assortment of letters written to me when I was young. By now, my shoe boxes (and other containers) are stuffed so high with letters that I have to tape the containers shut. The smudged address on the envelope held a letter sent by my 16-year old summer boyfriend, Mark, when he was at boarding school. He sent me lots of letters and when I found out that he’d died in his 50s, I reread some of them. In the lower left corner I can see my sister’s handwriting on an Aerogram, a relic in our time. She wrote small on a lightweight, foldable and gummed sheet of paper since her writing space was limited. She then folded the page of writing into itself, creating an envelope for international airmail. I have many Aerograms in my shoe-box collections.

For most of my life, letters reached me with greater frequency than they do now.

And even with that relative plentitude, I treasured each one.

I remember a crowd gathering in my college dorm at the time when the postal person sorted a big bunch of letters and slid them into our boxes, which had combinations to unlock them. These letters were precious.

And in contrast to those feather-weight Aerograms limited to words, forcing us to conserve space with concise writing, we are now awash in words.

Drowning in them, I’d say.

Space for words is unlimited today; what’s in short supply is the time to consume them.

In fact, that’s the most popular excuse people give as the reason they ignored the words you sent them.

Time, not space, imprints its value today.

As each of us decides how we’ll spend it.

So, for us to carve out time to handwrite a letter is an act of gift-wrapping one’s self.

By bundling feelings with news from your life.

By merging tales of a life journey with sympathy for the loss experienced.

Sent in letter written by hand.

A gesture that says you care before the recipient has read even one word.

Said without words merely by the act of doing.

And, of course, your recipient will look for a quiet place and time to read what you took time to write.

In fact, she’ll devour your words given the rarity of this human touch.

What Happens When We Write by Hand?

I can’t warm up to handwriting’s digital replacements– e-mails or texts.

In fact, I find it hard to let go of my ingrained letter-writing habits when I am writing emails. Which results my emails reading like letters.

In less than two decades, mails moved into the category of chores.

A handwritten letter is still joyful to write.

In ways that even typing one on a fresh sheet of paper is not.

Since in the act of handwriting, you foretell the joy in the person who will open what you’ve written to them – even if the topic itself isn’t joyful.

Not like email, is it?

An experiment done recently with college students supports my supposition.

When students wrote three letters that included an expression of gratitude, they felt happier by the time they’d sent the third letter.

And more satisfied with their own life.

Handwriting letters inherently taps into our wellspring of gratitude.

We’re grateful for the friendship that inspired us carve out time to handwrite a note.

Finding joy, too, perhaps in choosing a decorative notecard with its visual expressing an aspect of our friendship.

I’ll send cards with pictures of typewriters to my old journalist friends. Sail boats to my coastal ones.

After we seal the envelope, we chose a stamp befitting the recipient.

Each step in this process slows us down.

Just as the handwritten letter upon arrival calms its recipient.

Some – likely even a few among us – will label my words about letter writing quaint.

Pat me on the head and agree to move on with the way things are - and will be.

They’ll call me nostalgic for bygone days better left behind, while speed and efficiency and tech take over.

They’re doing a fine job, don’t you think?

Well, no, actually I don’t, especially as people turn to A.I. to “express gratitude,” i.e. write a thank you note.

I say, don’t bother sending it.

Handwritten letters let us touch our correspondent through the comforting familiarity of her script.

Reminds us that her hand — and not a mechanized one – touched this page.

Through her distinctive slant of certain letters, she comes alive, as she does in the predictable spaces she leaves for her words to breathe.

So I can inhale them.

And see in my mind’s eye the moments she recounts. As if I lived them.

We’ve surrendered too much in removing our hand from the touch of our words.

To be human is to desire human touch

When it doesn’t happen, especially at times when we expect that it will, it’s natural to feel crushed.

I was reminded of this feeling this morning in reading a friend’s social media post.

I just gotta get this off my mind… my [18-year-old-daughter didn’t get a single card on her birthday except from me. Nothing in the post [meaning mail]. Not one damn card from any family member. She hasn’t said anything but I can tell she’s a little hurt. I know we don’t have very much family left, but holy cow, 18 is a big birthday. I thought she’d get three or four at least. AITA for feeling awful for her? Like, I try to remember birthdays. … sometimes I fail. But an 18-year-old about to graduate … that seems worth the effort to remember … even just a nice heartfelt text. My heart sorta breaks for her.

[After the first comment, this mom replied] “Not a single call that I remember. No cards. A couple of text messages. I thought my family and my chosen family friends would at least text or send a card.”

Ask ourselves these questions: How will we celebrate occasions in a friend/a relative’s life - from a distance? How will we console them? How will we show them we care?

If no one has time anymore to read or respond to email or texts, and no one calls anyone anymore, and very few of us bother to buy stamps or stash notecards for special occasions or make time to write to someone because they matter to us …

Then how are we to retain what is human about us?

In 1987, Americans received a personal letter, on average, every two weeks.

Surveys tells us that roughly one-third of children have never sent a handwritten letter or received one. But 85% of children in one survey said they’d be excited to receive one - 75% of 15-year-olds and 93% of 7-year-olds.

I share two envelopes that caught my eye this week; the first, I saw online, the other, I received.

“Gotta love the Nantucket Post Office,” wrote best-selling author Nathaniel Philbrick when this letter reached him.

Before opening this letter, I paused to admire the classic cursive which spoke my name. My friend’s gorgeous handwriting is not a big surprise; she’s a woman in her 90s who was taught how to write cursive letters as a child when handwriting was valued and taught.

In 2010, the Common Core standards omitted the skill of handwriting. Today, more than two dozen states require cursive instruction in schools. A move in the right direction, I say, especially when I heard historian Drew Gilpin Faust discuss her story in The Atlantic “Gen Z Never Learned To Read Cursive,” on NPR.

Faust shared this startling exchange with students in her Civil War history class:

“Well, I was teaching a class, a seminar for undergraduates at Harvard, Civil War history. And a student was giving a report to the class about a book he’d read. And he said one of the great attributes of the book is it had many wonderful illustrations, including illustrations of documents from the Civil War era. But, of course, he couldn’t read those because he didn’t read cursive. And I said, what? What? Wait a minute. What do you mean you can’t read cursive?

And then it turned out that two-thirds of the students in the class couldn’t read cursive. And I was just stunned. I had no idea. So I set out to explore some of the implications of that for historians and for history, because I am a historian, but also more broadly, just what it means when you can’t read your birthday card from your grandmother and you have to have your mother translate it for you.”

Speaking of classrooms, let’s peek into what’s happening after only a few years after A.I. became the author of many students’ writing assignments.

Now, professors/teachers are trying to rein in tech’s grab. Why? Because many of them believe students should learn how to write — instead of learning how to give key words to A.I., then add their name and turn in the assignment.

“In a rapid shift, teachers are requiring students to write inside the classroom, where they can be observed. Assignments have changed too, with some educators prompting students to reflect on their personal reactions to what they’ve learned and read — the type of writing that A.I. struggles to credibly produce. [New York Times: How A.I. Killed Student Writing (and Revived It - gift link, by Dana Goldstein, April 30]

I’ll admit that few things are more challenging than being handed a blank page and told to write. Even when a prompt is given, the blank page looms large.

Is it any wonder that young people, who have the option, are turning to A.I.? Passing the baton to a machine to take on a tough assignment?

But those who are teaching them, who were taught how to write — and expected to write – see many downsides to surrendering to A.I., not the least of which is how its use diminishes our brain’s functionality. (When you don’t use it, you lose it.) They want to push A.I. aside, at least for the writing part of assignments.

According to this New York Times’ story, students transitioning from laptops to pens and pencils are expressing gratitude for having fewer “distractions,” calling this new approach “a relief.” Students describe greater connection with their classmates and they like how a return to writing actually makes them want to “communicate well.” [ How A.I. Killed Student Writing (and Revived It)]

When we leave writing to A.I.

A recent study with 600 participants revealed “a significant negative correlation between frequent A.I. tool usage and critical thinking abilities.”

Referring to this study, Cal Newport, a computer science professor, wrote: “Let’s consider exercise: the cognitive equivalent of aerobic activity is contemplation — the intentional focusing of your mind’s eye on a singular topic with the goal of increased understanding. Just as the sedentary lifestyles that emerged in the mid-20th century degraded our bodies, our current lack of contemplation is degrading our brains.” [New York Times op-ed, Technology Weakens Our Minds. We Can Fix This. By Cal Newport, March 26, 2026]

Discovering my friend’s art project

This week, I also stumbled upon my childhood friend’s art project. My eye became fixated on the handwritten letter my artist friend put in his art project. He wrote it, attributing it to a fictional Dutch relative in his story, and next to it he placed a pen and reading glasses.

This artist, Chris Demarest, wrote on April 8: “I realized the other day I needed to find something positive to focus on. Inspired by some 3D pieces seen at our local art museum [on Bainbridge Island], I thought I'd return to my love of toy sailboats and work on telling a story about a beloved toy boat through generations of small and large hands.

In addition to the boat and box is the story (fictitious) about the Dutch relative. And he included drawings (2 x 2 1/2) of family members, below, adding an image of his own son – as the fictional son – “because I can.” Then, he bound his drawings into an accordion-fold book.

He undertook this project as he neared his 75th birthday.

This wooden box, what I refer to as a ‘time capsule’, came about from a small wooden sailboat I had made a few years ago. That boat became the catalyst to tell a story, using my Dutch heritage, of a fictionalized ancestor and his story of life at sea and, like myself, an artist.

Having recently reached the age of 75, I am using this ancestor looking back at his own life, to reflect on my own. In his story, through the building of this box, ‘Pieter des Marets’, inspired by the gift of a small sailboat built by his grandfather, shares his life as a fisherman, artist, and family man. As I built his memory, it became clear to me that it was also a reflection of my own life which included many adventures of my own.

As Pieter is dedicating his creation to his family, in many ways, this creation is also a thank you to those who inspired me, to my family and especially to my son, as he finds his own adventures a professional artist.

Chris Demarest, Bainbridge Island WA, 2026

My daughter Maya’s handmade notecards

As a child, Maya loved to draw and paint. Now nearly 30 years old, she draws and paints primarily portraits, turning them into notecards. She sells them at pop-ups and art exhibits locally and online at her Papaya Printing Studio on Etsy.

My final story: This week a high school friend from my year in Rome, Italy called me to say how much she loved receiving my thank you note. This was a rare phone call for us, so I was happy Maya’s notecard inspired it. I’d my handwritten note on a gorgeous card that Maya had painted. (I’ve purchased a hefty supply of her cards.) In this phone call, my friend asked me to request that Maya choose six notecards for her to buy. I mailed them this week.

If you want Maya’s notecards, you can let me know in your comments and I’ll arrange with the artist to get them to you.

We will need your mailing address.

As I would if I was mailing you this essay.

Completing her first year of public high school, as the only girl on its golf team.

Arguably the team’s best player.

Which is where her story begins.

As she stands before the Masconomet, MA school committee, testifying about the bullying and harassment she has experienced.

From her male teammates.

After her parents had heard enough, they filed a Title IX complaint with the school district. Which the district dismissed the same week it was filed.

Her parents paid an attorney $20,000 to appeal the district’s quick dismissal of their complaint. A three-month investigation ensued.

With denials aplenty from her teammates and the golf team’s coach, Charlotte felt unheard and unprotected.

“A report filed by an outside investigator the district hired to review the Title IX complaint found no substantiated evidence of bullying or harassment during the golf season.” [The investigator did not evaluate the alleged treatment of Charlotte after the complaint was filed.]

Her family did not have the financial resources necessary to continue the legal fight.

In the Title IX complaint, they had pointed to sexually explicit comments that male athletes had made about Charlotte in school hallways.

Her English teacher began walking her to class each day “so she didn’t have to walk alone past some of the senior athletes who bullied her.”

They also told of her teammates’ behavior on away-game bus rides.

When the boys “blasted” songs with “sexually explicit and demeaning” lyrics. They sang along. Loudly.

Which left Charlotte wondering “how they thought of her ‘if they were thinking about women in this way,” she told an investigator, according to this Boston Globe story [gift link], ‘I was left unprotected’: Star golfer accuses school administrators of failing to remedy harassment from male teammates, published this week.

After the Title IX complaint was filed, Charlotte says that the boys’ abusive treatment of her escalated. In a locker room, a varsity hockey player allegedly threatened her with sexual violence in the company of golf team members, while other boys talked about “her performing sexual acts on them in the locker room.”

A member of an all-boys Snapchat group, created by her male teammates, let Charlotte know that “no one on the team believed she deserved to represent” Masconomet in the postseason play, her father told the Boston Globe.

She decided not to compete in sectionals because she says “she felt unsafe,” according to her father. “To have them turn on her like that, it killed her,” he said.

Speaking to the school committee, Charlotte said she leaving this high school and would enroll in a different one in the fall.

Listen to her brief but powerful testimony in which she tells the committee that her leaving does not solve the problems that her experiences brought to the attention of the school district. She urges them to act.

Students stood with Charlotte, as “nearly 200 students from high school and middle school staged a walkout, marching to the superintendent’s office, chanting, ‘We report! You support!’”

On the day the Boston Globe published this story, Governor Maura Healey, who played basketball for Harvard and professionally for an Austrian team, was asked about Charlotte’s account on Boston Public Radio. After expressing sorrow that such treatment of girl athletes still occurs, she said she’d call her.

That night Governor Healey (in pink) and I were at MA Planned Parenthood’s annual fundraiser. She received an award and participated in the panel talk I moderated.

After our “fireside chat,” Governor Healey and I spoke. She knows about my experiences with Major League Baseball and wanted to talk about the abusive behavior that Charlotte Rollins endured. As our conversation ended, she told me, “I’m going to call her.” With those words hanging between us, I looked around and she was gone.

A 15-year-old-girl describes “the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day.”

Charlotte described threats of sexual violence in detailing the disquieting harassment she experienced in playing the game she loves — and in which she excels.

Also note that she played on the only competitive golf team her school fielded — the boys’ team.

Meanwhile, in The Guardian, a girl Charlotte’s age illuminated the daily online assault experienced by millions of girls their age.

She wrote her op-ed anonymously – for reasons too obvious to mention here.

She alerted us that she doesn’t go out of her way to see misogynistic posts:

“I actively try to avoid online misogyny, but I am met with it incessantly whenever I open my mainstream social media apps. It only takes a few minutes before there’s subtle or overt misogyny, such as comment sections on a girl’s post filled with remarks about her body, videos made by men or boys captioned with a degrading joke, and even topics such as domestic violence or rape, trivialized and laughed about.” [[The Guardian: I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day, anonymous, Feb. 2026]

“Often it feels like we’re hated not only if we’re sexual but simply for existing.”

Older folks like me need a glossary to know what’s being said.

“Teenage boys degrade us and equate us to animals. … We’re also “thots” (whores), “community pussy” and “bops”. “Bop” stands for “been over passed” and is a derogatory term used by boys to refer to a girl they’ve decided has been “passed around” or had too much sex. … Words such as “bitch” are the least of it. One of the worst labels is “foid” – originally from incel subculture but now becoming mainstream – which refers to women as being less-than-human, female humanoids.

When it comes to teens having sex, this 15 year old wrote, “it’s absolutely fine for boys to have sex, but when girls do, they are called worthless and referred to as objects. ‘When community pussy tries to insult me, I just want to beat that bitch up,’ is a message I saw on TikTok.”

She shared examples, each one as disheartening as the next [bold is mine]:

A few days ago, I saw an Instagram reel of a young woman talking about how she had been raped six years ago, struggled with thoughts of suicide afterwards, but managed to rebuild her life again. Among the comments – the majority of which were from men – were things like “Well at least you had some”, “No way, she’s unrapeable”, “Hope you didn’t talk this much when it happened”, “Bro could have picked a better option.” Reading those comments, which had thousands of likes and many boys agreeing with them, made me feel sick.

If a girl my age posts any video of herself online, the comments section will be filled with objectifying and hateful remarks about her, regardless of what the topic of her post was. If she wears anything revealing, or just happens to have larger breasts, she’ll be abused and sexualized. Completely unprompted, there might be hundreds of comments insulting specific features she may have, or rating her attractiveness out of 10. “Sub5”, for example, describes someone who is below 5/10 in attractiveness. I’ve seen videos of boys telling anyone who is unattractive that they should end their own life.

Despite the sexual ways in which boys my own age describe us online, there is also an extreme emphasis on female purity and virginity. Sex is often called as “cracking” by my age group, where men do the cracking and women get cracked. “Body count” – referring to the number of times someone has had sex – is used only to degrade women. A girl with a “highbody count” is “used up” and no longer has value. “You can always tell if she’s ran through,” one boy said on Instagram.”

This girl wrote of sensing “a strong divide now between girls and boys in my generation, especially when the way they talk about us in real life mirrors the way they do on the internet. I can’t speak for every girl my age, but I frequently feel objectified, dehumanized and disgusted by the hate towards women I see online, and I can say with certainty that most of my friends would agree with me.”

“The way they [boys] talk about us in real life mirrors the way they do on the internet.”

As we know, the internet’s anonymity expands and intensifies the abuse.

And recently a headline in USA Today proclaimed that “31% of Gen Z men believe wife should ‘obey her husband,’ study finds.”

The growth of such attitudes offers clues about this divide the 15-year-old-writer sees. And yes, 15 year olds are in Gen Z - born 1996 - 2012, albeit at the tail end.

Below, I highlight this global survey’s key findings of Gen Z’s mens’/boys’ attitudes, released on International Women’s Day in early March. (With a U.S. readership, I’ll spotlight the survey’s U.S. percentages with the global findings of 23,268 men in 29 countries in parentheses.)

• 31% of Gen Z men (globally) said a wife should "always obey her husband," compared with 13% of Baby‑Boomer men.

Anyone hear “trad wife”? As in:

• 40% of U.S. Gen Z men agreed “we’ve gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are discriminating against men” (57 % of global men)

• 44% of U.S. Gen Z men say they are expected to do “too much to support equality.” (59% of global men)

It ought to shock and dismay each of us when so many men want to return to 1950s America, when ads like this were popular - and their products profitable.

SKY SPORTS Social media abuse, stalking and death threats: Why it’s never just about performance for our sportswomen

Georgia Evans wore a bow in her hair to play a rugby match.

She dressed her ponytail with a bow like she often does.

Thinking nothing of it. Until after the match. When she went online.

“I went through the comments and there were a lot of derogatory remarks regarding my appearance, how silly and childish I looked. There were a number of other derogatory comments and, while I didn’t take them too personally, my teammates and family were seeing them.”

Feeling she needed to respond, after she tried many too many times to find just the right words, she clicked, sending this message to her followers:

At her team’s next match, thousand of young girls, women and men wore bows to express their solidarity. While she’ll forever be grateful for their show of support, she wishes for a sports environment in which what she wears in her hair or how she looks doesn’t serve as a rallying point for derogatory online judgments about her.

Women’s Tennis Association [WTA] and International Tennis Federation [ITF] published a report in 2025 revealing that 458 players were direct targets of abuse in 2024 while leading players including Britain’s Katie Boulter, Elina Svitolina and Jessica Pegula, among others, have spoken of being sent death threats and explicit pictures by online trolls. A study by FIFA found that one in five players at the Women’s World Cup in 2023 saw one in five players receive discriminatory, abusive or threatening messages.

What’s Next for Melissa … and Locker Room Talk?

A return visit to Cooperstown, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame. There, on May 27, I will deliver the keynote address of the annual three-day Symposium on Baseball and American Culture.

If you’d asked me when I was 26 where I’d celebrate my 75th, I never would have said Cooperstown. Back then I was in federal court listening to MLB’s lawyers tell Judge Motley that if she granted me equal access to talk with ballplayers in the locker rooms she would destroy this hallowed game’s century-old sacred traditions.

Fortunately, she acted boldly. Tempted fate. Ruled in my favor. And baseball was not destroyed.

While in Southern California, a 12-year old girl named Billie Jean Moffitt had an epiphany.

That changed my life.

And changed our world.

She was one year into playing tennis.

A sport she’d taken up after she found out she couldn’t be a baseball player.

Like she wanted to be.

Like her brother Randy Moffitt grew up to be.

Because she was a girl.

And girls didn’t play baseball.

Not when they were young. Not as women professionals either.

At least not in 1955, a year after the WWII-era All-American Girls Professional Baseball League shut down.

Ending with inevitability once the men were back from war.

And it was time for women to put down their gloves and bats.

And go home.

In 1954, Billie Jean learned to play tennis on Long Beach city courts.

Using a wood racquet she’d bought with the $8.00 saved from her odd jobs.

A year later she was honing her skills at the Los Angeles Tennis Club.

There, she noticed everyone on the courts was wearing white clothes.

Playing with white balls.

And, as she said on Tuesday at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, in accepting its prestigious award for her decades of game-changing leadership as a citizen activist:

“Everybody who played was white.”

This isn’t right, she continued

I’m also 12 years old.

I thought about the world.

If I could be number 1 in the world. And tennis is global.

See, I read history. I’d already read "The History of Tennis,”

Knowing history is really important.

Because I knew what came before and how much others had gone through.

The more you know about history, the more you know about yourself.

And most importantly how you could help shape the future …

I just said, if I could become number one.

I knew already as a girl, a second-class citizen.

And I knew that my sisters of color didn’t have it as good as I did.

Like people who were handicapped, as we said of disabled people back then.

I said something’s not right.

If I became number one, I’d have a platform to help change the world to be a better place.

After one of her first tennis lessons, she’d already told her mother, “I’m going to be No. 1 in the world.”

Susan Williams, her friend who suggested Billie Jean take up tennis, is on the left, and Billie Jean is on the right.

It wasn’t bravado speaking.

This 12-year old girl really did envision herself reaching this goal.

Because it wasn’t about aggrandizing herself.

She saw it as necessary if she was going to be a leader in lifting up others.

First, by changing tennis.

Then, by changing the world and its societal rules and norms holding so many back.

She’d leverage her fame to lead the fight for equity.

Eleven years later, Billie Jean King was the #1 woman tennis player in the world.

A title she held five more times into 1974.

By then she was also leading a revolution in tennis.

Challenging gender inequity in prize money on the tennis circuit.

When she’d won Wimbledon in 1968, Billie Jean’s prize money was 37.5 percent of what the men’s champ Rod Laver received.

Two years later, she convinced eight other top women players to leave the tennis tour to protest this disparity.

A huge risk for each of them.

They did it.

Then, with them, she created a tennis circuit all their own.

By begging people to arrange tournaments to play on their own.

She also found corporate sponsors who’d pay the women players what they deserved.

Only after the women’s demands for equity were met – at the 1973 U.S. Open, though it would take decades for other major tournament to catch up – did the women return to play with the men on tour.

By then, Billie Jean already had become the first female athlete in any sport to earn more than $100,000 in a single season (1971).

Also in 1973 she played that culture-shifting match against Bobby Riggs in the aptly named Battle of the Sexes.

A match she reluctantly knew she had to take on after the #1 player Margaret Court lost to Riggs on Mother’s Day. In a match Billie Jean never wanted any woman to play.

But after Court lost, Billie Jean had no choice but to step up to the challenge posed not just to women tennis players but to all women.

By the man who delighted in mocking women, who called himself a male chauvinist, at a time when of women’s movement was fighting for equal rights.

Billie Jean said she’d take him on.

Then, she beat him in three straight sets.

With 90 million people watching on TV.

“I thought it would set us back 50 years if I didn’t win that match. It would ruin the women’s [tennis] tour and affect all women’s self-esteem. To beat a 55-year-old guy was no thrill for me. The thrill was exposing a lot of new people to tennis.” — Billie Jean King

On Tuesday, I heard Billie Jean King speak about leadership.

I was mesmerized from her first story – the one I’ve shared with you today.

I was there because my friend, Joyce Linehan, reached out to a friend to see if I could get a ticket to the event.

She thought I should be there. And I’m grateful she got me there.

Then, she took this photo of the two of us.

Billie Jean and I reconnected after she spoke, with me reminding her of our first meeting in 1973, just days after her Battle of the Sexes victory. I said “Ellie Riger,” and she grasped my hand tightly, as she said, “Oh, Ellie. An incredible women.” Then, I told her how when I was a jobless, 22-year-old college graduate Ellie invited me to hang out with her and her all-women production crew working on a TV special she was producing for ABC Sports called “Women in Sports,” featuring her and Title IX. When I was there, Billie Jean had walked into the small production studio. At that moment my life changed. In some ways, it was my moment of an epiphany since I decided right then that I’d move to New York City and figure out some way to get a job in the business, despite having no work or school experience at all related to sports media or journalism. A year later, Sports Illustrated hired me as a reporter-researcher. From there, I’ve never looked back.

Joyce and I sat together at the Billie Jean event on Tuesday afternoon.

Each of us soaking in her guiding principles.

The ones on which she’s always relied.

Since her epiphany at the age of 12.

And still into her eighties.

As she has just devoted several years of her life to helping establish the Professional Women’s Hockey League.

In which my team, the Boston Fleet, play.

The team I’ll be cheering for in this year’s playoffs.

With Flau’jae Johnson who was the eighth pick in this April’s W.N.B.A. draft , Billie Jean King and her wife Ilana Kloss participated in the ceremonial puck drop at the recent PWHL game (New York vs Seattle) at sold-out Madison Square Garden.

So, once again, let me say, as I’ve said so many times:

“Thank you, Billie Jean King.”

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Billie Jean knows that the necessity for the kind of efforts to which she’s devoted her life will outlive her.

As she sees the progress she and others made together being pushed back.

And so her fights will be picked up by people in new generations.

Informed, she hopes, by learning history.

So, they will know themselves.

Inspired, I hope, by the culture-shifting actions she and others courageously took.

Likely with more still for her as one can see the fire still burning bright inside of her.

Invented anew by today’s mighty 12-year-olds, compelled to act, as she did, by seeing injustice in our world.

And feeling, as Billie Jean did, the call to be a change-maker.

Like 12-year-old Maria Pepe who went to court to fight the men who said girls can’t play baseball.

When all she wanted was to play the game she loved.

The game she played well enough to be chosen for her hometown Little League team.

Sadly, for her, the court case took so long that by the time the judge said she could play, she was too old.

Like Billie Jean’s battles, Pepe’s court fight overcame injustice, clearing the way so that others would not to confront what she had to endure.

“In 1972 a 12-year-old girl stepped onto a Little League field in Hoboken, New Jersey. Three games later she was told she couldn’t play anymore. Her name was Maria Pepe, and the rule that forced her off the field said girls were not allowed to play in Little League Baseball. What happened next became one of the most important legal battles in the history of youth sports. The case didn’t just change one team or one town. It opened the door for millions of girls to play baseball. Maria’s story is the beginning of a much larger history of women pushing their way into a sport that tried to keep them out.”- Women in Baseball Week Facebook group.

Girls and women play baseball today.

Some of them in tournaments named after Maria Pepe.

And on Little League teams. Professionally, too, with the debut of the Women’s Pro Baseball League this summer.

In a league of their own that Justine Siegal dreamed into being.

Then, she made it happen.

Despite the naysayers assuring her that it would never happen.

Like Billie Jean, Justine believed. Then, she led others toward believing, too.

By never losing sight of her goal: that one day girls would play the game she loved.

The game they love.

The game she was told she could not play.

“I was 13 years old the first time I was told I shouldn’t play baseball because I was a girl. My coach explained to me that he didn’t want me on his baseball team and that I should play softball instead. It didn’t matter that I was one of the best players on the team, that I loved baseball, or that I practiced way more than any of my male friends. It only mattered that I was a girl.

“The day my coach told me to quit was that day I decided to play baseball forever.”

Justine Siegal, who founded Baseball for All and is now the commissioner of the Women’s Pro Baseball League.

For my readers in Massachusetts, I urge you to join me at Worcester’s Polar Park, home of the AAA WooSox on Saturday May 9th when Justine Siegal speaks at the Larry Lucchino Writers Series at the park before the afternoon game. Yes, I will be speaking there on July 25th, so I hop you’ll be with me for that talk and game.

A Girl on the Mound

These days it’s not uncommon to read a social media post about what girls who play baseball endure when they play the game they love.

Court fights and laws being change enable them to play on youth teams alongside boys.

But achieving that turns out to be easier than changing people’s attitudes.

A fact of life that I was reminded about on the day I heard Billie Jean speak. When I saw these words posted in a Facebook community, “My Daughter Plays Baseball Like A Girl”:

“So tonight our daughter -10-year-old - came in to pitch in top of 5th inning for her Little League team with score tied 6-6. As the 1st batter walked to the plate, a boy in the opposing dugout, shouted “Don’t get struck out by a girl, that would be Embarrassing!” Fast Forward three batters and that same boy comes to bat with two outs. Well my girl proceeds to strike him out to end inning and they go in to score winning run in bottom of 5th. After the game the boy and his mom walked over to us and Mom had him, with tears in his eyes, apologize for saying what he did. My daughter gave him a fist bump and that was that. He got a little taste of karma, but we also thanked him for addressing it and wished him luck for the rest of the season. Unfortunately this probably won’t be the last time something like that is said, but was most proud of my daughter for letting it roll right off and not affect her performance and kudos to the mom for not letting it go unaddressed.”

Nearing the conclusion of Tuesday’s event, Billie Jean addressed the words of Coretta Scott King in acknowledging the incompleteness of her life’s work.

So, when you see 12- and 13-year-old girls in your community, I hope you will think of her as possibly the next generation’s Billie Jean King, Maria Pepe or Justine Siegal.

Or as herself, armed with a dream, fighting for a better world. And curious enough to learn about women like these three on whose shoulders she will stand.

When after seeing ongoing injustices, she sets out to act against them.

I cannot urge you enough to listen to Billie Jean King in Tuesday’s talk

Even if you don’t see yourself as a leader, her life’s lessons are invaluable.

To lead or not, we’re human beings, and at the core of her lessons is the essential message that guides her life:

“I want every person to be respected.”

It turns out when you believe this fundamental truth with every fiber of your body, you can change the world.

She did.

Start at minute 12:30 to hear Billie Jean King describe her essential elements of leadership. Just before she speaks you’ll see a dynamic video about her life and times — giving you the essence of her grit and gusto that changed our world.

You’ve just read my 100th Essay on Let’s Row Together

To all among us who have clicked on my Friday links and read my essays.

Thank you!

To all among of us who have shown support for my essays by buying a subscription.

Thank YOU!

For the joy that writing these essays brings me each week by challenging me to do what is hardest in life to do — to write, I am grateful.

And speaking of new challenges, next Tuesday evening I will moderate this star-studded roundtable Fireside Chat at MA Planned Parenthood REPRO2026PARTY.

In my lifetime, a woman’s right to control her reproductive health and her own body has been won — in 1973, Roe v. Wade, and lost — in 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Thank you MA Planned Parenthood for entrusting me with this role as I’m joined by three remarkable women to engage in conversation about the consequences of what’s happened and what can be done to protect women whose rights are taken away while we fight to restore rights of women that the U.S. Supreme Court took away.

About whom my 1970s Sports Illustrated colleague John Papanek wrote this morning, describing her in this way.

To which I’ll add a few personal descriptors: my soulmate and guiding spirit, my fellow traveler as S.I.’s woman baseball reporter in the 1970s, and dear, dear friend.

More recently, Stephanie and I exchanged emails after we’d worked with Myra Gelband, our Sports Illustrated friend, to gather our 1970s S.I. colleagues to pay tribute to Jane Gross, who left us too soon.

Within minutes of that Zoom tribute ending, Stephanie emailed me.

“It was very Jane worthy. Thank you for the effort, the ear and the sensitivity.”

I wrote back:

Dear Stephanie,

Your poignant portrait of Jane set the tone for a meaningful exchange of memories that I felt brought Jane to life with the complexity that made her the person and friend she was. Your honesty with her - and with us - rang true to what I think most of us who knew her, though not so well as you did, sensed in the times we spent with her. On a personal note, I’ve cherished being back in touch with you in our walk up to this gathering and look forward to staying in touch more often as our lives push ahead.

And she responded:

“Talk about all good. You’re a force, Ludtke. Keep on keeping on.”

Stephanie kept me keeping on when I was in my 20s.

And far beyond.

In my 20s, I was uncertain in all the ways Stephanie seemed confident.

As luck would have it, Stephanie became my co-pilot in preparing me for a future flight I didn’t know I’d be taking when we met.

Establishing a pattern in our lives. She was always there for me, even when we were thousands of miles apart.

And often, she’d be there at times and in ways I didn’t expect.

Whenever she was, I felt so fortunate to have her with me. To be in her company felt incredibly special every time it happened.

For in her inimitable way, her words struck just the right note. High or low, she was pitch perfect.

She’d ring bells of joy when we hit peaks. Or held a long chord, holding me, when we found ourselves in valleys.

Either way, Stephanie’s words always conveyed the unsung chorus of our friendship:

“Keep on keeping on.”

We met at Sports Illustrated when I arrived in September, 1974.

Each of us shared a cubicle with another reporter-researcher in the cozy corridor called the “bullpen.”

This was a warm-up zone for those who’d entered it with confidence and ambition - those were mostly men.

Only recently had men started to be hired as fact-checkers. And only after Time Inc.’s women filed their gender discrimination case against the company. They’d detailed long-standing practices of Time Inc.’s male editors hiring men as writers and editors while hiring women (with the same college degree) as fact- checkers, copy clerks, and secretaries.

Time Inc.’s women won in 1971, the year Stephanie was hired. S.I. had begun hiring men into its entry-level editorial ranks. Previously, it was a women’s ghetto.

It was S.I.’s strategy for evening its gender playing field. Evidently bringing men in this side door seemed easier than rectifying its biases by promoting women into jobs as writers and editors, which many deserved.

Instead of lifting women up, S.I. added men at the bottom. Then, thy called it a day. For a decade or two.

As a consequence, S.I. lost talented women (including Stephanie) to major metro newspapers when the real threat of gender discrimination lawsuits sent editors scrambling to hire one woman in the sports section. These pioneering sportswriters became their newspaper’s shield against such gender discrimination accusations.

When I got to S.I. in the fall of 1974, the bullpen was a holding zone for women since relatively few of us would rise to a job in which “reporter” wasn’t part of our job title.

That title “reporter” was itself a fancied-up title for what our actual job was – a “fact-checker.”

In my book, Locker Room Talk, I traced the origin of the Time Inc. fact-checker’s job to its earliest days (the 1920s) when a male editor at Time described the contentment that a woman would find in making fact-checking her career:

From the start, Time classified this as a role for “girls,” attesting that its requisite tasks were especially well suited for them. “Any bright girl who really applies herself to the handling of the checking problem can have a very pleasant time with it and fill the week with happy moments and memorable occasions,” he wrote. Among these girls’ “happy” obligations was being the insurance policy that protected male writers and editors from bearing responsibility for their errors or mistakes. It was the girl’s job to scrub stories clean of writers’ and editors’ mistakes. Constantly at the ready, she was his Gal Friday. Then, as if speaking directly to these fact-checkers, the editor sternly wrote: “Remember that when people write letters about mistakes, it is you who will be screeched at.”Checking the facts of stories that men mostly wrote.

For me, the bullpen was my journalism school; unlike Stephanie I’d never written sports for my college newspaper. She’d honed her instinctual wisdom in stadium press boxes when she’d covered sports at Purdue.

In my early days in the bullpen, I heard legendary stories told about Stephanie.

Often she’d be with us during their telling and I relished hearing her dress them up with humorous asides.

Humor aside, it was in hearing these stories I came to know her gutsiness – and to admire her for it. Through them, I came to understand how being a woman reporting baseball demanded every bit of the grit she had.

All too soon, I found myself adapting lessons I’d learned from Stephanie to my new job at S.I.. Since, when she left S.I. in the fall of 1975, her baseball reporter’s job became mine.

I needed her assuredness, though I knew it would take me a long time to make it my own.

That and her composure.

Well, as life turns out, Stephanie and my friendship extended decades more. And in an email exchange in 2013, Stephanie revealed that what my younger eyes saw in her was not what she was feeling inside.

With our veneers stripped away, finally we could appreciate that our younger selves were more alike than I’d believed they were.

I wrote to Steph:

Ah, but what’s great about life is that we don’t know what will happen next. I’d say the same thing about the evening in the Bronx when I asked a “Mother, May I” question about getting access to talk with Tommy Lasorda and ended up in federal court nine months later. Like you, I’d never been one for confrontation ... funny how the two of us ended up in these situations, with the temperaments we had.

She wrote back:

I’ll bet that’s true of most of us women sports writers of that period. The controversy and confrontation found us and drafted us to the cause. We were raised to be good girls with good manners who tried not to piss off men, but somewhere our sense of fairness got in the way. Once again, I am SO glad you are writing this book!”

Stephanie interviewed pitcher Tom Seaver as a sportswriter for the San Francisco Examiner.

Our Paths Didn’t Stop Crossing

A year after Stephanie left Sports Illustrated to be a freelance sportswriter in California, the San Francisco Examiner hired her to cover Bay Area pro football and baseball teams.

By the fall of 1977, as Time Inc. was considering what, if any, legal action it might take to respond to Major League Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, Stephanie broke the news in early November that Time Inc. was considering filing a lawsuit against Kuhn.

She never shared her source with me, nor did I press her. It wasn’t me.

Her front-page sports story and her follow-up column detailing her difficulties in reporting on the Oakland A’s sent shockwaves through Major League Baseball after Leonard Koppett, a West Coast sportswriter with The New York Times, faxed her story to the Kuhn’s office soon after it was published.

I glued her stories into my scrapbook, which I donated to the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Below is an excerpt from her personal account of covering baseball.

When my lawyer, F.A.O. Schwarz Jr., prepared my case for our April 1978 court hearing at the Southern District Court of Manhattan, Stephanie’s news-breaking story played a pivotal role in framing his argument. When deposing Commissioner Kuhn, Schwarz turned to an internal Major League Baseball memo featuring her story that he’d found in the discovery phase of our case. Using this memo in his deposition of Kuhn, he created an awkward moment for Kuhn when his testimony conflicted with the memo. This became a key part of his argument to the judge.

On Dec. 27, 1977, when Time Inc. filed its complaint in Ludtke v. Kuhn, Stephanie was proved right. A few weeks later, ABC Sports broadcaster Howard Cosell brought the two of us together again on his Sunday afternoon sports magazine show.

I videoed this clip of Stephanie from my monitor so the sound quality isn’t good, but I hope you’ll watch this very short clip of her at work in the Golden State Warriors locker room.

In 2020, I emailed Stephanie letting her know I was heading to Brooklin, Maine to join that community’s celebration of The New Yorker’s Roger Angell’s 100th birthday.

Stephanie wrote back: I spoke with Peggy a bit ago. They are cheered to know you’d make such a long drive for Roger’s public fete. Apparently, they’re expecting a cascade of friends and relatives, most of whom have chocked full R&P’s schedule before and after the ceremony and into the next day. They do hope to wave and blow you a kiss from the steps of the library. Take care of yourself, old pal. Best – Steph”

After an earlier porch visit in 2015, I sent this photo to Stephanie, also relaying my surprise about a story Stephanie evidently hadn’t shared with Peggy.

“Somehow Peggy has made it through life without hearing about you being tossed out of the Baseball Writers' dinner. Roger and I shared the story, as best we could reconstruct it, with Peggy ... but I am certain it could use some telling by YOU,” I wrote Stephanie.

Her reply: “Golly. Thank you so much! How neat you got 2-for-1 with fabulous Roger and my dear cuz. I’m dying to hug them both in the fall. Of all the baseball Peggy and I shared, I think the BBWAA incident got mercifully lost in the shuffle. I envy your super access to them and beautiful Maine. Hugs back to you.”

Roger and I had painted a picture of the Baseball Writers annual dinner in 1973 for Peggy. Suffice it to say that Stephanie had not sipped her soup when several men approached, each telling her she had to leave. When a security guard finally came over, she left, threatening to sue over her expulsion.

The reason for her early exit: no women allowed. Pun-filled headlines pursued her:

In January 2020, she recounted this encounter in an MSNBC story in which our two young selves starred out from our S.I. offices. Side by side, again.

I read what she told MSNBC about S.I.’s managing editor supporting her.

SI’s managing editor was supportive, and he and Salter planned to sue, but the company’s legal team advised that because SI writers weren’t eligible to be members of the association the case likely wouldn’t proceed.”

I was dumbfounded. Hadn’t anyone told her the truth? Maybe I was the only one still alive who knew the truth? So, I told her.

Duped by the Top Editor at Sports Illustrated

When Stephanie’s idea of using Time Inc’s conciliation agreement, signed in 1971 to resolve the gender discrimination charges, reached André Laguerre, who was S.I.’s managing editor, he refused to support her.

What follows is an exchange of letters that my lawyer got hold of when he requested all Time Inc. documents related to gender discrimination in discovery. In this one, Laguerre responds to Time Inc.’s lawyer tasked with overseeing gender concerns; he accuses her of setting out “to provoke a political incident” and refuses to support her.

That lawyer [Steed] then demanded that Laguerre write and sign a letter to the baseball writers association. He counseled him that his letter should take “the form of a dignified protest to the BBWAA” and address the “exclusionary nature of their function [which] seems to S.I. to be out of keeping both with the law and current mores.” He reminds Laguerre that the BBWAA “certainly wouldn’t exclude Black male reporters.”

For her entire life, Stephanie had believed her managing editor stood by her side. Why shouldn’t she? He’d sent her a copy of the letter he signed - the letter he had refused to write. He’d told an assistant managing editor to write it before he begrudgingly signed it

When I sent her the confirming documents, she wrote back:

“Do you have a few minutes for a call about the NBC thing? These emails are killing me.”

She wrote to MSNBC wanting to correct the record. Nothing happened. The story reads today as if she believes Laguerre supported her. A gross distortion of history.

I’ll close with our exchange a while back, sharing what Stephanie wrote me.

“The [baseball writer’s dinner] ticket was gold, I do know that. I framed it with my first BBWAA card.”

Note to readers: Her BBWAA card from her time at the Examiner reads: Mr. Stephanie Salter. One of the men who demanded she leave the BBWAA’s dinner in 1973 issued her that card.

“I REALLY did not think they’d enforce the men-only rule. Confrontation has always made me queasy. (Ironic but true.) If I’d known I’d be thrown out, I probably wouldn’t have gone!”

Oh, dear Stephanie. You’d have gone to that dinner. Just as I would have gone to the Dodgers at the 1977 World Series even if somehow I knew that doing so would trigger Kuhn to ban me from clubhouses.

Neither of us sought the confrontation. Yet each of us rose, in her own way, to meet it. In your unforgettable words, we kept on keeping on. And that made all the difference.

Nor do I believe I’ll remember my death.

But who knows? Maybe I will.

For now, death remains an unanswerable mystery of life.

Inevitable, and unknowable, except for what we we’ve been told by those who “died” but were brought back to life.

Seeing a bright light. Traveling through a tunnel. In blissful peace.

A sensation of “knowing.”

Joy, euphoria, serenity.

Experienced in people’s brief forays into death.

No matter the number of years we live, none of us avoids death.

Nor do any of us depart this life without etching memories into the minds of those whose lives we touched.

If we are fortunate, we pack our lives with purpose.

Marinate them in meaning.

And lasso them with love.

Still, in course of a life, each of us seeks sources of strength to weather the grief we will undoubtedly feel.

For if we live long enough, losses will be as inevitable as death.

It’s a lesson I’ve learned, again, and again, and again.

Because as I’ve age, dear friends die.

Sadly, too many at ages far younger than I am.

Their lives cut short, such unfairness enlarges my grief.

Even when departed friends live long and full lives, I have to summon inner strength to reckon with the absence of a companion whose presence I’ve known as part of my being.

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In absorbing such losses, I am not able to call upon religious teachings to enhance my understanding of death.

Often I wish I could like many friends are able to do as in embracing their religious roots to help them make sense of this passage. To be able to accept it, as a stepping stone to another, different life.

My parents raised me in the Unitarian Universalist Society in Amherst, MA. In my primary school years, I wasn’t studying the Bible nor attending bat mitzvah training after school. Instead, in Sunday school I took field trips to learn about other religions. We’d attend religious services nearby. When I wasn’t at these services, we talk about the religion’s history through stories we read and were told.

Out of all of these stories, just one nested deep inside me.

Always there when I need it.

Like now.

When after my friend Julie Lamb died in late December, I’m going to New York City this weekend to celebrate her life.

Julie Lamb sits between her Sports Illustrated (S.I.) colleagues, me and Myra Gelband, in a photo taken a decade ago in the front yard of her summer home in Wells, Maine.

The Mustard Seed Story

I remember this memorable story told to me as though its telling happened yesterday.

I was probably about 11 years old when I heard it.

Back then, I was the eldest child of a mother who was grieving intensely after a car accident stole her dearest sister from her life.

At times, I wondered if she’d ever again be the mom I’d had before her sister died.

Perhaps that’s why this Buddhist story lodged in me.

It told of a time when the young son of a married woman named Kisa Gotami died after a disease settled in their village. She’d carried her small boy’s body from house to house pleading for medicine to cure him. When the villagers told her he was dead, her grief was so great that she refused to believe them.

Then, a villager told her: “I can’t give you medicine, but I know a man who can. Visit the Buddha in his monastery.”

She did.

“Please give me medicine to cure my son!” she asked the Buddha.

“I can cure your son if you can fetch me a mustard seed,” he told her.

“Of course!” she said, readily accepting this simple request.

“One thing, though,” the Buddha said. “The mustard seed must come from a house in which nobody has ever died.”

When Kisa Gotami knocked on doors to ask for a mustard seed, those who answered said, “Yes, of course.” But when she told them of the Buddha’s insistence that their household had not experienced death, she could collect no seeds.

In time, Kisa Gotami understood that death was universal. Each household had suffered when a loved one died.

Kisa Gotami accepted that her child had died, held a funeral, then returned to thank Buddha for his teaching. She asked to become a nun and she was ordained. Through diligent practice, she achieved nirvana which freed her from suffering and the cycle of death and rebirth.

When I lose a friend or family member to death, I visualize Kisa moving house to house in search of an item no one can give her. But in her act of trying, she finds a deep understanding that she hadn’t known she was seeking.

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My friend Julie Lamb died at the age of 85 after living an adventurous life.

Accompanied by her wit and grit, her curiosity and humility, she lived with the unbounded determination to live as fully and joyfully as she could after multiple sclerosis struck in the prime of her life. In time, her illness paralyzed Julie from the waist down shifting her mobility from her legs to the wheels of her chair.

This illness didn’t diminish her zest for life.

Nor did it derail her spirited independence, though she was never shy about asking for help, summoning it when needed to retain her hold on those things that brought her join. She’d call on members of her wide circle of family and friends who were eager to be with her as she attended plays and choral concerts, visited museums and ate with friends at favorite local restaurants.

Julie travelled the world with Sports Illustrated. As a licensed pilot, she also flew with her brother and a friend, circumnavigating the U.S. in 1966 in a small plane from the East Coast to Alaska, down the West Coast, and the Southern route home.

She illuminated every journey with her passion for reading history.

When she graduated from Vassar College with a major in medieval history, she set out for a year-long trip through Europe and Egypt. When she returned to New York City, an ad for a “copy girl” at Sports Illustrated caught her eye. She applied, was hired, and so began her three decades at S.I..

When her tenure ended due to progression of her illness, Julie was an Assistant Managing Editor, which was the highest position any woman had held at S.I.. Her steady ascent had begun in the 1970s when women at S.I. were given opportunities previously offered mostly to men.

On Saturday, when family and friends gather in her New York City apartment – or in her building’s garden, weather permitting – stories will flow, as tears already shed give way to expressions of gratitude for Julie’s presence in our lives — a role memories will sustain.

And it simply isn’t possible to speak of Julie’s death without recalling a June day, a decade ago, when friends from Sports Illustrated joined family at the seaside home in Maine that Julie co-owned with Demmie Stathoplos, another dear friend and our S.I. colleague.

Cancer had taken Demmie from us, so on a Saturday we celebrated Demmie’s life by telling stories before coming together on their home’s bluff as a lobster boat paused in front of us as Demmie’s ashes were scattered into the ocean she loved.

I’d visited Demmie and Julie at their summer home in Wells, Maine. I loved our times together then. No longer consumed by our work lives, we came to know each other in ways we’d not found time to do in those younger hectic years when our lives were punctuated by deadlines and primed by ambition.

When I am at the ocean, I know I’m home. So one day my ashes, like Demmie’s, might be tossed into the sea though I have not ruled out the possibility of my body nurturing a tree.

If I had to wager a bet, it’s likely the ocean will win out.

Ocean

– Mary Oliver, with me bolding words midway through her poem.

I am in love with Ocean
lifting her thousands of white hats
in the chop of the storm,
or lying smooth and blue, the
loveliest bed in the world.
In the personal life, there is

always grief more than enough,
a heart-load for each of us
on the dusty road. I suppose
there is a reason for this, so I will be
patient, acquiescent. But I will live
nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting
equally in all the blast and welcome
of her sorrowless, salt self.

Accompanying another friend to the sea

Further north in Maine, and just one year earlier, I’d attended another ocean farewell after the mid-life death of Peter Chase, husband to my lifelong friend Sophie and a man who devoted his life to building wooden boats.

They’d raised two daughters on a remote point of land surrounded on all sides by ocean water. Along one side of their peninsula, a waterway flowed like a river, but its raging tidal shifts showed the nearby open ocean’s rhythmic flow.

On this August day, boats were our pews. Wooden ones, many that Peter made. Wearing a floral headpiece and white summer dress, Sophie was rowed by her daughters in a boat Peter built. Together, all of us waited in the slack-tide of the inlet for the turning of the tide to carry us, this wooden boat flotilla, toward the sea.

We’d trail behind the tiny Viking ship holding Peter’s ashes that would be launched from shore.

Before this happened, words celebrating Peter’s life were said from the shoreline and songs were sung with voices from the hillside forest mixing with those from the boats.

In Viking times, a ship set on fire with the deceased in it symbolized the cleansing of the body and release of the soul.

What I knew in those moments just before the tide turned that day,

and Peter’s boat was set on fire,

and we turned our boats to drift behind his burning ship,

heading toward the open ocean.

Was that Peter was going home.

Saying Hello to 90

Then, there are totally joyous times when friends gather to celebrate a birthday of a longtime companion.

As her birthday card rightly says (see photo below), my 90-year-old friend is brave, bold, kind, proud, courageous, fierce, strong, determined, inspiring, and loved.

Jane O’Reilly is all of those things, and more. She’d been my friend since the day we met in Los Angeles in the summer of 1984, only a few days before that city’s Summer Olympic Games began, with each of us assigned by Time magazine to cover them.

Until that group dinner on the eve of those Games, Jane and I had never met.

Nor did our paths cross during the two weeks we were on assignment at the Games.

But that didn’t matter. A friendship had already been secured.

Somehow we knew we’d find each other again. As we did.

Since being reconnected, we’ve threaded ourselves into each other’s lives, and so it was that last Saturday that I found myself with a hundred people or more in an East Boston restaurant celebrating Jane, who like Sophie wore a floral headpiece as she sat on a chair — that day the chair was a throne – absorbing the love surrounding her.

It’s been said that you don’t want to live so long that you outlive your friends.

Jane never will experience this, as she accumulates new friends along the way.

Jane collects friends and creates community in the daily acts of her city life — from friends she makes as she walks her dogs or shows up for events in the neighborhood. She’s still an icon in the fight for women’s rights and a stalwart in the struggle to hold onto our democracy, and a battler for human rights and social justice.

After decades as a journalist, she’s now a community activist, recognized at this celebration by a City of Boston proclamation written in her honor and read by her City Councilor Gabriela “Gigi” Coletta Zapata.

In case you are wondering why first cover of Ms. magazine is imprinted on Jane’s birthday cake, she wrote the cover story – Click! The Housewife's Moment of Truth.

Jane’s “Click” epitomized the moment when a woman realizes her life can — and should - assume a different trajectory. Her story ignited a flame that propelled the women’s movement forward in the spring of 1972.

In times of loss, what a refreshing and uplifting gift it was to be with Jane as she turned 90, and I got to watch so many friends embrace her, demonstrating their love for all of the love and friendship and community building that she’s given them.

How wonderful to feel this love when you are still here to take it all in.

Spring Training Starts for Me!

In late July, I’ll fly to Rockford, Illinois for Women’s Baseball World Cup Group Stage baseball games before heading back East to throw the ceremonial first pitch for the Triple AAA Red Sox at Polar Park in Worcester, MA on July 25.

If only Mark “The Bird” Fidrych could train me!

A Worcester, MA man with an exemplary, albeit injury-prone stint as a pitcher with the Detroit Tigers, Fidrych led the major leagues with a 2.34 ERA in 1976, winning the American League Rookie of the Year award with a 19–9 record.

Americans loved his bird-like antics on the pitcher’s mound giving him the nickname “The Bird”. In the spring of 1977, I was the Sports Illustrated baseball reporter assigned to hang out with Mark when he came to New York for a cover photo with Big Bird.

If you are near Worcester — and who isn’t, if they live in Massachusetts? – I hope you’ll be at Polar Park for the July 25th game.

With Fidrych no longer with us, Mary Grant, the president of Mass College of Art and Design (MassArt), will step in. She threw the first pitch at Fenway Park when MassArt turned 150 years old in 2023. Right over the plate!!! We’ll start training soon.

Before I throw that pitch at Polar Park, I’ll do a book talk with the club’s president as part of the Woo Sox’s Author Series.

Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside is widely available in print and audio. Hardcover is just $22.00 on Amazon.

If you haven’t read about my 1978 equal access case against Major League Baseball yet, perhaps you’ll fit it into your spring training plans.

But she was swimming toward Nantucket.

Her stroke smooth and rhythmic.

Barely a splash from her powerful kick.

As it always was when she swam.

The slight turn of her head to breathe barely perceptible.

As her body cut through the water sleekly.

As it always did.

In the short time it had taken me to get her a beach chair.

Apparently she had dove in the ocean to swim.

As she always did.

Only this time was different.

A few minutes earlier I’d helped her to change into her bathing suit.

Something I’d never done before.

I had to since Alzheimer’s had stolen from her simple things that she once did.

I’d dressed her for the beach.

Just like she’d done for me six decades earlier.

When she’d brought her first child to meet the ocean.

Dangling my legs, first, then dipping me into the salt water of Nantucket Sound.

Where she’d swum her entire life.

Now I had brought her here to be near the sea she loved.

When I went to get her chair, I hadn’t expected her to walk directly into the ocean.

And swim.

Why I didn’t, I don’t know.

Swimming was natural to her. And the ocean was there.

As if calling her name.

Welcoming her back to this place where she could just be.

This rare place on Earth where she was free to be who she was.

That “asocial” woman whom she had described in a letter she wrote to me at a time when we weren’t getting along.

Let me try my personality description: withdrawn, tending toward reclusiveness, enjoy solitude, given to negativism, tend toward asocial (preferring one-on-one relationships to group situations)-and, from now on less about personality than active dislikes: crowds, cities, noise, the Standard American Diet, parties, display of wealth, politicians, SUVs, capitalism, Jesse Helms, obesity, racism, preppies, organized religion. I am also not loathe to express myself on these and other topics, probably in a too loud voice and in vehement disagreement.

Swimming was joyful for her.

Life-sustaining.

Invigorating.

Buoyed by salt water, the emotional weight carried in the rest of her life fell away.

As she swam to Seal Rock, a huge boulder visible from shore, yet a good distance away.

Where in winter seals perched.

Circling it, she’d swim to shore.

Or her frequent jetty-to-jetty-to-jetty swims. Four, maybe five jetties, she’d pass by on her swim in which she remained parallel to the shore.

My dad, and maybe a kid or two, trailing behind.

Struggling to keep pace.

My mom and dad on the beach in Hyannis Port, MA on Nantucket Sound.

My mom died at the end of June, 2011, a few weeks after her 87th birthday.

A few weeks shy of 11 years after she’d finished first in her age category in a four-and-a-half-mile swim across Chesapeake Bay.

My sister, Betty, who also swam this distance greeted my mom on the other side.

When it became my turn to describe my mom in her obituary, I wrote this:

Those whose lives she touched remember her as a woman who voiced what she believed, was equally strong willed in her personal actions, whose friendship was resolute, and who asked for nothing more from a summer day than the opportunity to watch a Red Sox game (hopefully a winning one against the Yankees) and to swim in Nantucket Sound.

As I reread the words I chose to sum up my mom’s life, I realize how much of her is inside of me as I interact with the world I find waiting each day.

Of course, our shared love for the ocean —and the Red Sox – top that list.

The turn in the road where the ocean comes into view on my walk to the beach.

Taking strong-willed action

My mom was a climate activist, even if for most of her life no one described her as such. That term wasn’t in vogue back then.

Still, that’s what she was.

With her daily habits aligning with the practices of those concerned with the rippling effects of climate change today.

In living through World War II, my mom had taken to heart the values of conserving our resources.

She lived — and transmitted — these values in decades before most Americans did.

And as a citizen who was not loathe to express herself, she typed erudite Letters to the Editor when she saw wrongs that needed righting.

So, when I saw an email about Ocean Day lobbying at the State House, I signed up.

Immediately.

It felt as though my mom hit “reply” for me.

And this past Tuesday morning, I rode the Red Line from Cambridge to Boston.

Climbed the hill to the gold-domed State House.

Went inside through the oddly named General Hooker entrance.

And found my way to Room 428 where more than a 140 citizens came together at 10:00.

Each of us there to learn throughout the day about the ocean’s health.

And in this building to meet with state reps and senators.

To tell them why we believe it’s vital for them to pass bills that will sustain our oceans and protect their ecosystems.

Meet Earth’s ocean

It covers 70 percent of our planet’s surface.

And 97 percent of the Earth’s water is in our ocean. (Roughly two percent is frozen in glaciers and ice caps and a tiny fraction is water vapor.)

Less than one percent of all the water on Earth is fresh.

The warming of our climate has set in motion multiple stressors affecting the ocean.

The stressors are heat, acidity, sea level rise and ecological disruption in our ocean. Each stressor reinforces the others, making recovery harder.

Why we must protect the health of the ocean:

• 3 billion people globally depend on seafood as their primary source of protein.

• Oceans generate more than half of the oxygen we breathe.

• Coastal economies — in the U.S. and throughout the world – rely on the ocean being healthy.

Living in New England makes these concerns are especially relevant. The Gulf of Maine and the nearby waters of Cape Cod Bay and Nantucket Sound are warming faster than 99% of the rest of the ocean. The accelerated warming of the Northeast U.S. continental shelf is driving this worrisome circumstance.

• Warming water disrupts marine ecosystems and migration patterns. It reshapes food webs as fish and plankton shift toward cooler regions. Already, more than 80% of marine species have moved North or gone deeper as the ocean warms.

• Hurricanes and typhoons are more powerful, causing greater damage.

• Chronic flooding occurs.

• Oceans are more stratified with less mixing of oxygen and nutrients. Dead zones expand and marine ecosystems are less productive.

• Heat stress causes coral bleaching. Coral reefs support roughly one-quarter of marine species; many reefs might lose their ecological function well before 2070, resulting in a loss of biodiversity hotspots, less coastal protection and negative impacts on fisheries and tourism worldwide.

Sea level rise: The ocean is 8 to 9 inches higher than it was in preindustrial 1880s due to sea ice melt and thermal expansion of water.

• By 2070, the ocean is likely to experience 1 to 2 foot rise, depending our on-going global dependence on fossil fuels.

• Coastlines will be reshaped as states and cities permanently lose land and saltwater intrudes into freshwater supplies.

Ocean becomes more acidic: already it is 30% more acidic than in preindustrial times.

• Drop in ocean’s pH level leads to rise in acidity, and it is happening faster than at any time in hundreds of millions of years.

• Clams, oysters and coral need carbonate ions to build shells and skeletons. But as oceans absorb more carbon dioxide, they’ll warm, and it will be more difficult for shell-forming organisms to survive.

• Rising acidity will further destabilize food chains.

Telling our stories to spark changes we want to happen

Even before I got to the State House, I was assigned to Group 8, which has a schedule of meetings set up with legislative staff.

I’d been offered training to learn how to share the stories I had to tell. But I’ve been telling stories to legislators for more than a decade, so I passed.

In all, 12 groups were dispatched throughout the State House to talk about Ocean Day’s two priority bills. One bill banned polystyrene - that ubiquitous, horrid foam packaging that is toxic to human health and harms marine animals who consume its microplastic nibbles as food.

That this harmful product isn’t already banned is shameful. I testified at the State House to have it banned six years ago, yet I’m her again, arguing with common sense and scientific facts, and I am still unsure the legislators will do the right thing given the pressure that comes from industry.

When I mentored my daughter’s Sprouts of Hope group, inspired by Dr. Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots, in 2008, those gutsy 12-year-old girls convinced the school district in Cambridge to ban the use of polystyrene trays in their cafeterias. At the same time they replaced their trays, the district introduced composing of food waste.

On Ocean Day, we also asked for greater state investment in marine biodiversity.

Group 8: Chris Borgatti, chair of Surfrider Foundation MA and closest to camera, led our group, circling from his left, Ernst, Anne, me, Arianna and Katherine.

Group 8 turned out to be an extraordinary assemblage of citizen advocates, each of us with a story to tell, one story building on another. My colleagues inspired me with their deep commitment to this fight that had brought me to the State House.

With me remembering my mom.

A few lessons from my day at the State House:

LESSON ONE: Stop just texting and emailing. Or calling to leave a voice recording. Get out into your community and find folks with whom to join forces. Take a chance on an opportunity like an Ocean Day at the State House even when you don’t know anyone who will be there. Tell yourself, “I’ll take a chance.”

LESSON TWO: Talk with your state reps and senators, your Congressional reps and senators and/or their staff about your concerns and the bills you want to be passed. It’s easy for me to take the subway to Boston to be at the State House. Not everyone lives so close. But reps and senators hold office hours and show up at local events. TALK WITH THEM. They represent YOU!!! And you have the right to tell them how you want them to vote — and why.

Final Act(ion)

For decades, Ernst, a member of our Group 8, has scuba dived. His frontline view of the ocean depths illuminated what few of us get to see. He described a barren ocean scape he’d seen in which starfish, who eat sea urchins, had totally disappeared. This left a forlorn undersea desert populated by only sea urchins. By then, those hungry sea urchins had consumed all of the kelp, which absorbs carbon from our atmosphere.

Ernst was witnessing the death of an ocean ecosystem. And this is occurring writ large.

It felt angry hearing his tale. It remind me of finding starfish in the ocean when I was young. When I’d hold them in my hand, I felt tiny tube feet tickling my palm.

As our meetings neared their end, Ernst would pull up a photo on his phone to show to the person with whom we were speaking.

It was a photo he’d taken after a recent dive in Folly Cove, which is north of Boston on near Gloucester. First, he’d found this plastic milk crate discarded on the beach; in it, he loaded mostly plastic trash that he picked up on his 15-minute beach walk.

Have we become so accustomed to our use-it, toss-it away lifestyle that we simply leave our trash at the place where we enjoyed the beach? For someone else to pick up? Or for it to be swept into the ocean to endanger marine animals or join a floating island of plastic trash that pollutes our ocean?

How is it that we remain so oblivious (or uncaring) to plastic’s harm to our health and to our Earth when its fossil fuel production spews emissions into our atmosphere and its disposal pollutes our Earth?

I am my mother’s daughter: my letter to the editor

When I am not at the State House, I’m often in Zoom meetings figuring out how to collaborate with others in convincing legislators to pass bills to reduce plastic in our lives. I call plastic “our new coal” given the ever-increasing fossil fuel emissions that go into its production.

So, this week that I typed a Letter to the Editor and sent it to the Boston Globe. My letter is about modernizing our state’s Bottle Bill, an effort I’m supporting through a petition campaign. [If you live in Massachusetts, please take a moment to add your name to our petition.] Then, I heard from an editor that the Globe is considering publishing my letter on Sunday. But if they don’t, and even if they do, I’m going to share a preview with you.

I believe my mom would approve.

[I’m giving you a GIFT LINK to Boston Globe column in my letter.]

Seldom have I read a more apt phrase than the one Jeff Jacoby uses to explain his support for the Bottle Bill pending at the MA State House. In “Debating the bottle bill — with myself” (March 29), he describes the Bottle Bill as a lever worthy of turning “an act of civic decency into an act that also pays,” as he embraces this bill as a government initiative worth trying. His lifelong disdain for litter brought him onboard. Like him, I habitually pick up litter, but my strong support for the Bottle Bill arises out of broader concerns.

If we don’t kick our throw-away-plastic habit with bills like this one, we’ll keep on harming our health and polluting our lands and oceans, with more animals perishing too. Just as worrisome are ever-increasing greenhouse gases that stream into our atmosphere when fossil fuels get transformed into plastic. Making plastic cooks our Earth while our haphazard disposal despoils it, harming us.

It’s long past time for MA legislators to modernize our Bottle Bill. I’m delighted that Jacoby and I agree on this.

Melissa Ludtke

Cambridge, MA

Finally, at the end of this month, on Tuesday evening, April 28th, I will moderate Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts’ featured event at its annual fundraiser. If you are nearby, please come to this event. It’s a worthy cause at a time when women’s reproductive rights are being targeted in states around our nation. Massachusetts is providing support and services to women in states where strict abortion laws are in place. Their work deserves our support.

RANDOM MUSINGS

The Nasturtium is in bloom and now hangs from balconies at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. If you are near Boston, don’t miss this annual rite of passage into spring. Whether you can get to the Gardner’s courtyard this spring or not, CLICK on this very short video to be transported to this dreamy space with soothing music.

Count me in with that sentiment, Gloria!

As in Steinem.

With my health cooperating, I intend to live fully, productively, strongly and actively, until I’m not.

Without a but left to utter.

At 92 (this week), Gloria is fighting the fights she led in the 1970s since what she and others changed is being undone.

She’s also building community around the causes she champions.

Age be damned.

In my mid-70s, I dare to say “ditto” to these actions as well.

Since I am doing what I can to win back fundamental rights we’ve lost. And protect ones we’re in danger of losing.

Building community, too, around the issues and causes of utmost concern to me.

Something I didn’t do when I was younger when being a journalist kept me on the sidelines.

Observing those who were actively engaged.

Now she and I are old women, chronologically.

But in other ways, not so much.

Certainly not seen in the typical mold of what an old woman is. Or does.

I don’t presume to speak for Gloria, but … and there’s that vital but again.

But I don’t think she wastes her time thinking about being old.

She certainly doesn’t accept its prescribed limitations.

Or adhere to aging’s course as being a glide path heading to decline.

Internalizing a sense of inevitability about our descent.

Well, that’s not my take on aging, nor my experience either. And I can’t be hers.

For starters, I’m physically stronger than I was a dozen years ago.

Why? Because I lift weights. Attend barre classes. Spin at the gym.

Squat, a lot, often with weights. And team train.

I throw weighted ball at round circles above my head.

And I row, three nights a week.

I like to think my mind is healthier too, though like most of us, I get distracted in ways I didn’t used to. I don’t concentrate as well as I recall I once did.

But hey, nobody can, or so the studies say.

Telling me that my own troubles are not so much a by-product of my aging as they are a consequence of my digital habits.

Habits I’m trying hard to break. It isn’t easy.

Making up for that is an attitude shift that’s more positive the older I’ve become.

And I’m adjusting my life choices in ways that keep me in this energized flow.

To do otherwise would be to give in to despair about our nation and the world.

Easy to do these days.

But if I do that, I won’t have the strength I need to resist.

On Friday afternoon, April 20, 2012, The Sprouts of Hope, a Roots & Shoots group I mentored in Cambridge, MA, had tea with Gloria Steinem at a New York City apartment where we stayed. Jane O’Reilly, a friend of mine and Gloria’s (from their time at Ms. magazine) wrote to her friend to find out if she’d spend time with the girls. Jane made this request after it became apparent that the girls didn’t know about our country’s second wave of feminism despite being taught in middle school about the first wave, which was the suffrage movement. Yet, it is due to the women’s rights movement building efforts of Gloria and her colleagues that these girls have the opportunities they do.

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For three and a half decades, Diana Nyad tried swimming from Cuba to Florida.

Her lifelong passion is long-distance swimming. But until she was 64 years old, she’d failed four times to swim those 110 miles. “I said when I did that swim, which was 12 years ago, that that was the prime of my life,” she told a Washington Post writer this month. “She felt in better shape physically and mentally than she ever had before. ‘And honestly, at 76, I’m even better now than I was then,” she said [“People 65 and older can get better with age, study shows. This is the key.” Washington Post, March 25, 2026]

A recent study in Geriatrics buttresses Diana’s sense of a strengthened self, finding that “nearly half of the participants older than 65 improved — physically, cognitively or both.”

Things I didn’t do for decades, I do now.

Freed from the constraints of the paid jobs once defining me, I get to define myself.

With my rebellious nature, it’s not at all surprising that I’m pushing back against out-dated notions about how an old woman should act.

In the media industry where I worked for four decades, wrinkles still foretell women’s departures from TV. When grey hair shows, either dye it to secure a younger look or court dismissal.

Men age, and people say they’re dignified.

Women age, and they pick up signals they’re to be ignored, which none of the old women I hang out are willing to be.

In the medical lingo, I’m geriatric. It’s a descriptor I don’t embrace, a word I haven’t spoken since I zoomed past this zone’s entry gate at 65 – about a decade ago.

Awareness of my elder status hits occasionally, such as when no one bothers to ask for my ID when I purchase cheaper “senior” tickets.

They know I’m old, even when I keep forgetting.

Friendship energizes elders. That’s one of the hints shared often about how to live better while being old.

I’ve known this forever, it seems, just as I know how isolation depletes us. Setting us elders up for intense memory loss that I hope I don’t experience before I depart.

When I can find time in my non-stop life, maybe I’ll play those timed online games that experts claim can slow our cognitive decline.

Can’t hurt. Can it?

Recently I was heartened by news that the human brain has four major turning points.

It gave me a boost in aspiring to reach my final change – at 83!

Here's what awaits me, according to one of the study’s researchers.

“If you had a direct bus to work, but one day it stopped running and you had to take two buses, the transfer station would suddenly become very important.”

Well, I’ll let you know when my bus, whoops, my brain, gets there!

For now, first thing each morning I do Wordle, then a crossword puzzle, Connections, then Sports Connections, too.

I’m stretching my brain like I stretch before exercise.

I know nature refreshes and staying inside four walls does not.

Again, I see this advice highlighted in the endless stream of stories about getting old.

Targeting me, a Boomer, which means I’m part of the big demographic bubble.

That post-WW II generation, the next to depart. In bulk.

Before we do, we’re a prime audience for ideas of how to forestall our departure.

Even if what I do tends not to be taken from I read but is instinctively who I am.

Strikingly, it’s remarkably like the advice my mom gave me long ago.

Only now, her words that I laughed at when I was young are paying dividends I didn’t appreciate then.

Eat well. Keep moving. Get a good night’s sleep.

Try again, even if you fail the first time. Ignore the doubters. Keeping pushing ahead.

They all work.

Then, at times, the observations of a person about half my age will catch my eye.

This week, it was 43-year-old film star Anne Hathaway’s words.

“I think that very often, conversations about aging presume that the first part of life is the happiest and the most fulfilling, and I don’t necessarily think that’s true, I wasn’t expecting to find another gear at 40.”

Here’s the two bits of advice I’ll offer Anne:

1. Enjoy being 43 since this so-called “aging cliff” is coming soon.

2. Don’t click on aging stories. If you start now, you’ll never stop.

Instead, leap into fresh challenges with gusto. As I see you’re doing.

I live with the feeling that showing my age works best. I know in your business for a woman to show her age can be career ending, though some do it and succeed. Katharine Hepburn comes to mind.

I believe that the more women in the spotlight who are willing to age naturally with an acceptance of who they are along the way, the more they’ll help women and girls coming behind them. They’d do this by wearing down societal demands that women must do all they can to retain their youth.

There is freedom in living heartily without pretending you are an age you are not.

It took me a while to get there; for years, every six weeks or so, my hair was slathered in bleach and wrapped in foil to keep its highlights blond. And me looking younger.

In time, I arrived at my age-in-place attitude, saving me big bucks, retrieving hours I’d surrendered to vanity. And I felt less stressed. I see you are shedding life stressors, too.

My eyes could use a touch-up, my chin a lift. And friends of mine have turned to the surgeon’s knife to customize a youthful look.

Only to emerge as looking odd to me.

Just the word “plastic” coming before surgeon is clue enough for me!

Be who you are. Inside, first.

Then, on the outside, too.

These precious years we have on Earth as women already have given us “a wisdom born of pain,” as Helen Reddy told us when we were young.

Let life’s accumulated moments – joyful and sad – draw your older life’s contours.

While you reject the myth of inevitability that has us on a path of gradual decline.

Go in search of life’s peeks. Climb them. Then, push through the valleys.

The views you’ll discover are worth every step it’s taken you to get there.

RANDOM THOUGHTS inspired by OPENING DAY

“The Bird” won our hearts by doing what he did to pitch

Yes, my team, the Red Sox, won their opener in a shut-out of the Cincinnati Reds. And that, my friends, is reason for my joy today.

But I want us to celebrate the game’s seasonal renewal by recalling the joyful spirit of a Monday night game in late June, 1976. That evening a national TV audience became enthralled by the bird-like behavior of a curly haired pitcher named Mark Fidrych. For those who remember his complete game win — yes, he pitched a complete game that night, one of 24 complete games he pitched that season – the highlights deserve another look. Too young to watch the game - or know The Bird – enjoy this video.

I was assigned to be with Mark for a weekend photo shoot he did with Big Bird in New York City. The Bird and Big Bird would be Sports Illustrated’s cover photo on June 6, 1977. When Big Bird was finished, I joined The Bird for a pitch or two.

A “personality hire”

Sarah Graves rarely plays for the University of Texas women’s basketball team. She’s made just seven baskets this season. Arguably, however, she’s the team’s most valuable player as a “personality hire.” I hadn’t heard this term before, and I think a better one can be found, but I instantly understood her role – and knew its inestimable value.

With surplus energy and boundless positivity, Graves is the Longhorns’s North Star and spark plug (from the bench) rolled into one. As an Athletic writer put it: “Anyone who has ever played sports understands the value of energy givers and culture setters. They boost morale, strengthen team bonds and push others to greater heights. But the role might still be underrated — and misunderstood.”

Sounds like a winning formula for aging, too.

Taxing to do my taxes

After I devoted my Sunday to preparing my taxes, I stumbled on what Albert Einstein had to say about filing taxes: “This is too difficult for a mathematician. It takes a philosopher.”

Beautifully said!

Sanity prevails

This week two U,S. courts ruled against Meta and Google in legal actions brought against the tech giants by plaintiffs who claim their companies’s products harmed children’s mental health due to “addictive and dangerous design features.”

Then, I read about Greystones, an Irish seaside town south of Dublin. In 2023, its wise townspeople launched “a grass-roots initiative led … to loosen the grip of technology on their younger kids by adopting a voluntary ‘no smart devices’ code and supporting it with workshops and social events.”

Not surprisingly, it’s working.

Unsustainable Greed

This week, my State Senator Patricia Jehlen devoted her entire email newsletter to the widening economic inequality. This is just one reason I wish she hadn’t decided not to run again after representing me for 20 years.

In 2023, the top .1% (1 out of 1000) owned 13.9%of the nation's wealth; the bottom 50% (half of us) together owned 2.6%. Since then, the top .1% has gained a larger share and the bottom 50% has lost a little.

Maybe out of fear. Perhaps due to shock.

After they saw their daughter’s webbed hands.

Hands with no thumbs.

And her misshapen legs

Her knee”floating” in her C-shaped left leg.

With X-rays, doctors looked inside.

Revealing her partial stomach, a missing kidney and no tibia in each of her legs..

All of these abnormalities due to the noxious radiation spread by Chrenobyl.

In the catastrophic nuclear accident that happened close to where she was born.

Three years before her birth in 1989.

Likely, her mother and father felt helpless to help her.

Though we’ll never know why they left her for others to raise.

In three Ukrainian orphanages by the time she was 7 years old.

Where, in the last one, by the age five she was being sexually abused.

Frequently. In what she’s called “the room upstairs.”

In an orphanage she’s described as “an underage brothel.”

Where she was always hungry.

And where she never cried.

“I was the smallest one there and you learned not to show any emotion, whether you were sad or happy. … “I was always afraid of what would happen if I cried because nothing good happened in that orphanage if I cried. So you learn to laugh when, in those hard moments, you just want to cry.” [The Guardian, 2023]

Enduring abuse and hunger as she lived with fear.

Clinging to a thread of hope.

Hope made possible by the passport photo of a woman’s face that she kept by her bed.

A woman she’d never met but felt she knew.

A woman, she’d been told, who one day might come to take her home.

To be her mother.

“I memorized that picture. I memorized those eyes,” she says of this tiny photo, when asked about it today.

This unknown woman’s picture gave her “an ounce of hope.”

For two years, she clung to this hope.

As this woman in America, who’d seen this girl’s “haunting eyes” in a blurry photo, also kept her photo nearby.

“When I saw her picture, I just knew she was my daughter,” Gay Masters has said.

She was single and a university professor at that time.

Who was propelled by the emotional connection she made with this girl’s eyes.

To push and push and push, past corrupt officials and around bureaucratic barriers so she could adopt this girl.

Until the day when finally she sat next to this 7-year old girl in her orphanage bed.

Peering up at her, the girl told her: “I know who you are. You are my mother.”

After they flew to America, this family of two settled in Buffalo, before later moving to Louisville, Kentucky.

Her name: Oskana Masters.

Oskana, honoring her past, and Masters, welcoming her future.

“I remember that day so vividly when this dark, shadowy figure kneeled down next to me and I felt the pressure on the bed. You wake up and see the face of the person you’ve been staring at [in a photograph] for two years. She was there in real life and I claimed her: ‘You’re my mom.’ It was pure happiness and contentment. I felt safe in her presence instantly – without even knowing her.” [The Guardian, her interview with Donald McRae: Oksana Masters: ‘Without sport, I would not have had that healthy way to scream’ 2023]

(From left to right, clockwise) Oskana Masters para-cross-country skiing; with her fiancé Aaron Pike, a fellow Paralympic athlete; Masters leading the pack in a para-cycling event; Masters when she was adopted; Masters practicing for biathlon events.

In winning 19 Winter Paralympic medals – in cross-country skiing and biathlon, and five Summer Paralympic medals – in rowing and para-cycling, Oskana’s medal count stands at 24 medals won in 14 years.

She's been a four-sport competitor in eight Paralympics, not winning her first gold medal until her fourth Games.

Making her third most decorated Paralympic athlete.

With the 2026 Winter Paralympics just ended, Oskana is eager to get on her bicycle so she can train for 2028 in the Los Angeles Paralympic Games.

By then, she’ll be 38 years old.

But first she’s getting married to Aaron Pike, a fellow competitor who she met 2014 Winter Paralympic Games in Sochi, Russia. After a long engagement, they’ll marry in Italy where the Winter Games took place.

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The more I’ve learn about Oskana – her physical challenges, her determination to overcome them, her athletic achievements – the greater my admiration is for her resolve to push herself, as she says, “to prove to society what’s truly possible.”

I’m lucky to have experienced “what’s truly possible” by observing up-close the grit of para-rowers powering across the finish line with gutsy determination. I’m in the boat rowing with them, sensing their energy and lending my own.

This is a photo of the para-rowers at Community Rowing, Inc. (CRI), where I row on the Charles River. CRI’s mission is “rowing for all” and it lives these words with its para and adaptive rowing programs. On the right side of this photo, you can see my pink cap’s bill tilted skyward. On this day, I rowed in boats with para-rowers as we raced in the CRI classic regatta. Several days a week that summer, I’d volunteered with the para-rowing program helping rowers with physical and intellectual disabilities experience this remarkable sport.

When she rowed, Oskana was in control, a rare feeling in a life that had been so powerfully controlled by others. “I found out quickly the more I pushed myself, the stronger, faster and more in control I became.”

When she placed her oar in the water for every stroke, Oskana could feel the force of the water. Pushing with her legs while pulling her oar with her arms against this force was “my way to scream and let everything out,” she’s said. Lifting the oar out of the water at the end of the stroke, she felt “that instant release.”

She describes herself as “an angry racer.”

Stories of Adoption

I tell stories of adopting Maya, my daughter.

In past essays, I’ve shared a few.

Such as writing about the June morning in Changzhou, China in 1997 when an orphanage caregiver placed a nine-month old baby – whose photo I’d memorized – into my outstretched arms. I felt an overpowering rush of emotion as that feeling of love twinkled inside me.

This sensation inhabited my being, transforming me and my life forever.

Staring into her eyes, I knew who I’d become.

Her mother.

Maya has her stories to tell. Hers begin later on, around the time she discovered what brought me to her in China and brought her to America with me.

Of course, her memories will differ from mine.

And neither of us can know anyone else’s story of adoption. Like a couple welcoming a child through birth, no two experiences of adoption will ever be the same.

In China, I learned about people’s belief in an invisible “red thread” connecting those who are destined to meet. This thread might stretch or tangle, but it never breaks.

For it has forged a connection that defies rational comprehension, and its emotional power binds strangers as family with the strength of steel.

For the fortunate ones, this thread holds for a lifetime.

Oskana posted on Instagram a story from her orphanage along with her gratitude to her mom for “choosing me.”

Pause now. To listen as Oskana and her mother tell their stories about finding their way to each other and why it matters to each that they did.

When she was seven years old, Oskana weighed just 36 pounds and was 37 inches tall, which in medical terms put in the category of “failure to thrive.”

As she grew, her right leg was six inches longer than her left. Together, her legs could no longer support her weight, so when she was 9 years old, her left leg was amputated above her knee. At 14, her right leg was amputated, above the knee as well. Multiple reconstructive surgeries removed the webbing that held her fingers together. And the surgeons created a thumb on each hand.

While her physical disabilities were evident, her mental health challenges were not.

It should surprise no one to learn that Oskana’s instinct was to do all she could to bury the abuse and the horrendous treatment she’d endured.

But burying what she’d lived through wasn’t possible. And living in America in the absence of the pain, harm and fear – and in the presence of love – was hard for her when pain, harm and fear had defined her “normal” for so long.

She experienced acute Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) at the same time she was adapting to life in suburban America as a disabled, Ukrainian refugee.

And with memories too vivid to avoid, Oskana cut herself. Self-harm “would numb everything,” she’s said.

Sport Saved Her

Oskana was introduced to adaptive rowing when she was 13.

By the time she entered her first Paralympic Games in 2012, at the age of 23, she was a champion rower.

After those games, people involved with the US Winter Paralympic program asked her to consider competing in a winter sport. Cross-country skiing was first, then biathlon, as she applied the same intensive and extensive training and determination to those sports as she’d done with rowing. It wasn’t long before she competed at top levels of both sports – winning Paralympic medals.

In 2020, Oskana co-founded the Sisters in Sports Foundation, which supports female athletes with disabilities through financial grants for training, travel and adaptive equipment, plus mental health resources and mentorship.

In her peak performance, Oskana won seven medals, including three golds at the Beijing Winter Paralympics in 2022.

Just as those Games got underway, Russia invaded Ukraine.

“My mom always said my Ukrainian heart gets me through, being resilient, being tough and being a fighter. I think the world is seeing there is something special in this Ukrainian DNA.”

She competes for the U.S., yet the Ukrainian Paralympians have adopted her as an honorary teammate. When introduced for Paralympic events, it is as “Oksana Masters – representing the United States and Ukraine.”

“From day one with my mom I told her: ‘I’m not going to learn English. I’m a smart girl and I will teach you Ukrainian.’ I was so proud to be Ukrainian. It was not the country itself that gave me those darker experiences and memories. It was just a few bad people, caretakers and men from Russia, Poland and different areas.”

Just a year before, she’d won two gold medals as a cyclist at the Tokyo Summer Paralympics in 2021, after those games were delayed by Covid.

Oskana’s capacity to overcome setbacks is a hallmark of her athleticism.

A reminder of her resilience, both personally and in athletics.

Just three weeks before the 2018 Winter Paralympics, she dislocated and broke an elbow. Her doctor let her know that “there would be a four-to‑eight month recovery period – for a normal person.”

Oskana was at the starting lines of cross-country and biathlon competitions in Pyeongchang with her elbow strapped.

She won five Paralympic medals, two of them gold.

For several years she’d trained hard for the 2026 Winter Paralympic Games in Italy. But as the Games approached, medical challenges came at her.

A bone infection returned in one leg forcing her to be hospitalized for a week. She also had to recover from a concussion. And she had surgery for a torn ligament in her hand. All of these medical issues forced her to pause her workouts.

Yeah, it was definitely a lot - a lot of hard resets, forced pauses. But at the same time, I know that - I try to focus on the positives of, my team is going to show up for me and is doing everything they can to have me the best athlete I can be and the best version of myself I can be, and not to waste the energy of stressing and worrying of things that are beyond my control. [NPR, March 12 interview]

Her primary concern through all of this was to get her leg healthy enough to race.

She told NPR’s Scott Detrow that she cried every day leading up the Games: “I’m not the same skier as I was training to be.”

Still, she knew she’d be in Italy competing.

She believed in “showing up with what you have and just seeing what you can do.”

For her, add a layer to why she pushes herself hard. Not, she says, for an individual victory, though those she wants, but she feels a need, an obligation of sorts, “to increase awareness of Paralympic movement in the U.S.”

So, at each starting line at the 2026 Paralympic Games, Oskana told herself, as she always does, “I am strong and I’ve got this.”

In Italy, competing in cross-country and biathlon, she won four gold medals and a bronze.

In Beijing, Masters had won silver in the cross-country sprint race while skiing with a broken elbow. In the 2026 Paralympic Games, she was 131 feet behind Yunji Kim at the start of the final sprint incline when she accelerated to overtake her – earning a redemptive victory.

In her memoir, The Hard Parts: A Memoir of Courage and Triumph (at Bookshop), she courageously takes herself back to her early years in those orphanages. She does this because she believes it is essential for people to know what can happen to vulnerable children who live in institutions.

Her legacy, Oskana hopes, when her racing days end, is to be someone who “breaks down the walls for the young girls and women behind me.”

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Why don’t we watch, celebrate and know the para-sport athletes as we much as we do those who compete for gold when the world’s eyes are focused on them?

I leave you with a question, essentially the one Oskana raised in talking about the need she feels “to increase awareness of Paralympic movement in the U.S.”

Why aren’t more of us watching para-athletes compete?

Why don’t more of us tune in to see athletes who’ve overcome challenges that many of us will fortunately never confront compete in a place where weeks before we were championing the heroic the feats of Olympians.

One obvious answer: by the time they arrive, global free-to-air TV has largely left.

But not entirely:

In total the Games will be broadcast in a record 126 countries by Media Rights Holders on their linear free-to-air and Pay TV channels, and streaming, digital, social and audio platforms. In the remaining countries, the global stream will be available on the official Games digital platforms.

In Italy, RAI broadcast the opening and closing ceremonies along with some events.

And online at paralympic.org. And streaming, too, on YouTube and other locations.

However, without daily media coverage reminding us to tune in, many fewer viewers do.

So, good progress is being made as the reach of TV broadcast has expanded through the years; by 2024, coverage included live broadcasting of all 22 Summer Paralympic sports for the first time.

A bit of background on the Paralympics might be helpful: the idea surfaced in 1948 with a small gathering of disabled British World War II veterans came together to compete. Later on, proposed by Dr. Antonio Maglio, the first Paralympic Games were held in Rome, Italy in 1960 with 400 para- athletes from 23 countries. Sixteen years later, the first Paralympic Winter Games were held in Ornskoldsvik, Sweden.

In early March, in Italy, a record number of athletes (611) represented 55 National Paralympic Committees. The Milano Cortina Games included 79 medal events in six sports—Para alpine skiing, Para biathlon, Para cross-country skiing, Para ice hockey, Para snowboard and wheelchair curling.

To give you a sense of what it looks like — since we can’t possibly tell you what it feels like – to race down a Giant Slalom course without seeing where you are skiing – take a look at this video.

37-year-old Slovakian skier Marek Kubacka was the only fully blind male athlete to compete in the vision-impaired class in giant slalom. Wearing darkened googles, his head tilted up to the sky, he has competed at six Paralympic Games, starting at Torino 2006. He first skied with his guide and friend Maria Zatovicova at PyeongChang 2018 and she has been with him ever since, including Beijing 2022 and Milano Cortina 2026.

Zatovicova wears a voice box on her back so her instructions can be heard not only by Kubacka ,who skies behind her, but by any other skiers who might ski near them when they practice. The goal is to stay within a gate of each other at all times.

To maintain their connection.

It is only fitting for us to end with the word “connection.”

With the red thread.

Connecting Oskana to her mom. Connecting Marek to Maria.

Each thread making possible a connection meant to be.

And she gave me two books.

One for kids. The other meant for me. Each telling a remarkable story I’d never known.

About two suffragist women - Alice Burke and Nell Richardson – driving a car farther than any woman ever had.

Circumnavigating America in 26 weeks in 1916. In a yellow Saxon roadster.

“Ten thousand bumpy, muddy, unmapped miles – facing danger and adventure all alone, with just each other (and a kitten) in their little yellow car.” [“Around America to Win the Vote”]

Alice and Nell brought with them a typewriter, sewing machine and fireless cooker!

“They said the typewriter and the sewing machine were all part of their plan. If anyone said women didn’t have brains to vote, then Nell would dash a poem off right then and there to prove they did. If anyone said they should cook and sew and leave running the nation to men, then Nell would whip an apron up while Alice gave a speech to prove they could do both.”

At the time these women drove, few women did. They were usually passengers.

For a woman to drive, especially a long distance, was an act of liberation.

Rebellious women breaking the mould of their day.

Which was exactly the point of Nell and Alice’s decision to drive around America.

To showcase the rebellious women they were – and their rebellious cause.

By driving a distance, they’d attract media attention, as curious men turned out to write newspaper stories about women who dared to be different.

Women painting outside the prescribed lines of their gender role.

Oddities made news. Women didn’t.

As members of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, Alice and Nell knew their road trip would stir up headlines. Become front-page news.

Letting Americans hear their arguments for why women ought to be able to vote.

To drive a yellow roadster across America was a gimmick, their way to catch the eye of the men who’d bring their cause to Americans.

By shining first a spotlight on them — then, by necessity, their cause.

To get the vote for women!!

They did this at a time when the suffrage movement was stalled.

Driving through 29 states and Washington, D.C..

Collecting signatures on their petition for the voting amendment. Winning converts and leaving naysayers with reasons to reconsider.

In 26 weeks of driving, they spread this message far and wide:

It was long past time for women to vote.

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One hundred + 10 years later, a hardy group of women – my breakfast companion among them – left New York City on March 2 to retrace a good part of Alice and Nell’s 1916 route.

Their cause: Congressional recognition of the Equal Rights Amendment [ERA].

With the ERA’s progress stalled – just as Alice and Nell’s suffrage cause had stalled in 1916 – women are driving the Golden Flyer II, a restored 1914 yellow Saxon roadster, on their 2026 Vote for Equality Tour.

One goal: To collect one million signatures by Election Day in November.1

The Golden Flyer II will traverse 25 states as its drivers mobilize voters and motivate Americans to join the national ERA petition drive. [You can join, too, by signing it at Sign4ERA.org.] At each stop, Jeryl Schriever, who wrote Driving the Vote for Women, about Alice and Nell’s rebellious – and within a few years successful – drive to get the women’s right to vote, aka the 19th Amendment, in our Constitution.

Eyes are opening to this cause. Here’s the New York Times headline.

Along the way, the women make stops of remembrance. In Lorton, Virginia, they visited the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial on the grounds of the old Occoquan Workhouse. In 1917, suffragists, ages 19 to 73, were arrested for silently protesting at the White House and brought here to live in filthy and inhumane conditions. Denied contact with family and lawyers. Some endured solitary confinement; many were severely beaten.

“That is the ground the Golden Flyer II pulled into on the morning of March 7.”

Here’s why the ERA fight matters — and is winnable

The ABC’s of the ERA. What it means for YOU!

Give me an E! – Economic, Equal Pay, Education and AI Equality. Equality under the law – written in our Constitution – is foundational for our economic security.

Give me an R! – Rights, Reproductive Freedom and Decision-making. Women’s equality - written in our Constitution - strengthens accountability for sexual violence and trafficking and undergirds our rights in reproductive health care.

Give me an A! – The ERA works for ALL of Us. This demand links us to our nation’s founding when Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, “Remember the Ladies.” If attention was not paid then, she said, “we are determined to ferment a Rebellion”

Just Nell and Alice did in their time, rebellious women are doing today.

Suffragist Women Led – and Men Followed

It took another friend of mine, Brooke Kroeger, handing me her book to help me discover this time when powerful men joined forces with rebellious women.

These influential men did not assume leadership roles but did tasks to help women win the right to vote. Suffragist women determined the campaign’s strategy, then the men got to work doing all they could to make the women’s strategy succeed.

“Brooke Kroeger shows how the suffragist movement, engineered by women from top to bottom, cleverly stitched in the involvement of men from all walks of professional and political life, directed by women who used neither gun nor blade to direct the men, but the weapons of intelligence, cleverness, and when necessary, subterfuge. The collaboration in this balance of power between prominent men who invested in the movement, and the women who directed them, has everything to teach us today.” – written by author James McBride in his review of this book.

The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote tells the story of New York’s most powerful men creating the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage. Between 1909 and 1917, their league grew from its 150 founding members to thousands in 35 states. The book shows men acting at the behest of the movement’s female leadership, explaining why they did.

The National American Woman Suffrage Association decided wisely to accept the men’s offer to act as “suffrage foot soldiers,” a role they accepted with “uncommon grace.” The men carried the suffrage message “to the streets, the stage, the press” and to legislators and executive branch leaders, convincing more than a few uncertain politicians. They engaged “a dismissive public and dealt with a largely hostile press in support of the women’s demands.” [Adapted from Kroeger’s description.]

“Together, they swayed the course of history,” Kroeger wrote.

Could such support from men happen today?

A Perfect Pairing: Baseball and Women’s Suffrage

As chairman of publicity for New York’s Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, George Creel, a highly respected former newspaper editor and publisher, flexed his influencer muscle to promote “Suffrage Day” on May 18, 1915 at New York City’s Polo Grounds.

The Chicago Cubs were in town to play the New York Giants and the suffragists had purchased 8,000 tickets and 125 boxes to sell on commission for the game. Similar ballpark Suffrage Days had occurred in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. With men seated in most ballpark seats, the suffragists found it a promising place to try to change a few minds. Besides, baseball was a great way to get their male allies involved, too.

On game day, the Polo Grounds were festooned with yellow banners and streamers – yellow being the suffragists’s color due to sunflowers in Kansas. The banner blew in the breeze, while ballplayers wore sashes championing the women’s vote despite polls indicating their near unanimous opposition to this idea.

We don’t know if Trixie Friganza, a New York suffragist and vaudeville star, was at the Polo Grounds that day. It’s likely she was since off the stage “she was an influential and prominent suffragist who advocated for women’s social and political equality.”

“She attended rallies in support of women’s right to vote, gave speeches to gathering crowds, and donated generously to suffrage organizations. “I do not believe any man – at least no man I know – is better fitted to form a political opinion than I am,” Friganza declared at a suffrage rally in New York City in 1908.” [Smithsonian magazine, July 2020]

We also know that Friganza was Jack Norworth’s mistress.

And Jack Norworth, a songwriter, was inspired to write baseball’s most famous song, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, when he saw the sign “Baseball Today—Polo Grounds,” from a subway car. He’d never been to a baseball game, nor had the man who wrote its music.

Friganza became Katie Casey in Norworth’s song – a baseball-loving young woman. Hear a sultry Carly Simon sing it!

Katie Casey was baseball mad,
Had the fever and had it bad.
Just to root for the hometown crew,
Every sue – Katie blew.
On a Saturday her young beau
Called to see if she’d like to go
To see a show, but Miss Kate said “No,
I’ll tell you what you can do:

Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd;
Just buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,
I don’t care if I never get back.
Let me root, root, root for the home team,
If they don’t win, it’s a shame.
For it’s one, two, three strikes, you’re out,
At the old ball game.

And Norworth’s song a nod to suffragists.

“Take Me Out to the Ballgame” tells the story of a woman operating and existing in what is traditionally a man’s space—the baseball stadium. Katie Casey was knowledgeable about the sport, she was argumentative with the umpires, and she was standing, not sitting, in the front row. She was the “New Woman” of the early 20th Century: empowered, engaged, and living in the world, uninhibited and full of passion. She was, historians now believe, Trixie Friganza.” [Smithsonian magazine]

When its sheet music was published in 1908, Friganza’s photo was on the cover.

Baseball fans sing the chorus of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” But few people – myself included, until I wrote Locker Room Talk, – have heard of Katie Casey, nor have any idea that Norworth wrote this popular song about a baseball-mad girl begging her beau take her to a ballgame to root, root, root for her team. As I wrote in my book:

“What if I’d known about Katie Casey when I was a girl who loved to play ball? Or a woman going to ballparks to report on games? Would knowing this have made a difference? I think it would have. To not see oneself in the place where you want to believe you belong makes it harder to keep taking those steps inside. Or in Shirley Chisholm’s way of thinking, I’d have known how to bring a folding chair so I’d have a place to sit as I found my way inside. [Adapted from Locker Room Talk]

Hillary’s Expressions Speak for Millions

When she gave testimony about the Epstein files, Hillary Clinton’s “expressive face displayed a full range of aggravation. It was incredibly satisfying to watch, because it felt as though she was channeling the exasperation and rage that many American women have felt at least for the past decade. … Watching this long deposition also reminded me that we are experiencing a vacuum of durable female political power at the national level.” [New York Times, What Watching a Furious Hillary Clinton Showed Me, Jessica Grose]

So, I figured why not offer another chance to check out Hillary’s expressions when she and I talked at the 92NY last October.

LET US commit ourselves to creating durable female political power at the national level. If men want to join in, I say “welcome aboard.” Start right now by signing this ERA petition, strategically organized by Congressional district. Then, take a petition with you to the No Kings rally on March 28 to collect signatures there. And follow the Golden Flyer II as its campaign rolls on.

So strong was my desire to raise a child that in my late 30s I sunk into a deep clinical depression and was hospitalized in an effort to deal with my emotional emptiness.

Brought on by my sorrow in thinking that motherhood would never happen for me.

In my twenties, I’d had an abortion after a hazily remembered, post-bar escapade had resulted in a pregnancy that I wasn’t ready to continue. Six months later, I married the man who I’d dated only a few weeks before saying “yes” to his midnight proposal.

I hastily accepted amid the dizzying whirlwind of my widely publicized legal case against Major League Baseball [MLB] charging gender discrimination. At that time, I was in the bullseye of the media’s evisceration of me for having the audacity to fight MLB over equal access to locker rooms.

In other words, I felt exceedingly vulnerable. In need of buttressing.

So, when his idea of marriage popped up, in my mind I saw marital stability, a stability that my media-maligned life as a single woman lacked. Okay, I know this rationale does not make sense, but I’m telling you how I thought at that time as I was waking up to the daily onslaught of mocking, mean-spirited public words said about me.

It was this dreamy promise and not my love for this man I barely knew that compelled me to accept his proposal. But, all too soon after saying, “I do,” I understood all too well the promise wasn’t real. My cockamamie idea of stability in marriage vanished.

Thankfully, I had paused my desire to be a mother at the moment our relationship began, a good thing since soon I realized how unhealthy we were together.

A while later, I walked out of my marriage after ducking my head just in time to avoid being hit by the wooden clog my husband threw at me.

In reintroducing myself to the single life, I relaxed. At 30, I had time for motherhood to happen. Surely, I’d find a partnership in which I wanted to raise a child.

First, I needed to strengthen the core of my own life. Fortunately, my journalism career as a Sports Illustrated reporter, and after leaving my marriage, a correspondent for Time, was enormously fulfilling. And I filled my life with close friendships, family gatherings and more activities than my wall calendar could hold.

Motherhood would happen. Just not right away. I had time.

At bat for our Sports Illustrated Publisher’s League softball team.

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This essay about motherhood takes a hard look at the decisions women globally are making to NOT be mothers, while many also resist the pressures put on them by the state and their families to be wives, as a prelude to motherhood. Their decisions have broad ramifications for the health of nations’s economies, which is why governments are doing all they can to convince women to have babies.

Once a nation enters the low fertility trap, it rarely escapes. And nations move into this trap when their Total Fertility Rate (TFR) falls below 1.5. In East Asia, the TFR of several countries is below 0.8, otherwise known as “severe.”

In France, 29-year-old women (and men) received letters from the health ministry reminding them to have children. President Emmanuel Macron speaks of the need to “demographically rearm” after its fertility rate fell 18 percent over a decade.

“How would I feel if my government wrote to me, reminding me to have children? … on the one hand, it’s none of your business who has kids but on the other, how about we just all keep out of each other’s business? … [and] while unveiling a 16-point plan to tackle low birth rates, why not make the 17th point that if anyone could afford to house themselves, they might be quicker to settle down?” [The Guardian, Feb. 9, “France’s letters to 29-year-olds to remind them to have babies is a spectacular missing of the point.” ]

In the United States, birth rates keep falling with the biggest drop among teens and white women ages 20-24. Half of all 30-year old women are childless. A woman in her 40s is more likely to give birth now than a teen. “I would expect them [birth rates] to fall because childbearing is highly related to economic conditions and uncertainty,” a family demographer observed.

In response, the Trump administration took measures to encourage more births, issuing an executive order designed to expand access to and reduce the costs of in vitro fertilization. It also backed the idea of “baby bonuses” to try to convince more couples to have kids”.

In the European Union, fertility experts expect “its population to hit a peak before sliding into the first sustained decline … since the 14th-century Black Death.”

Commissions in Scandinavian nations examine new strategies, while looking at why their “strong welfare programs couldn’t prevent a fertility rate nosedive.” Nationalist leaders roll out generous financial incentives to urge births “while extolling traditional families.” Italy gives bonuses to working mothers with two or more children. Poland boosted a monthly payment to families — $220 for every child every month – as its president okayed a large tax break for parents with two children or more. [Washington Post, Europe is panicking over its shrinking population, Dec. 13, 2025]

Before turning to how China is responding to rapidly declining rates of marriage and motherhood, I’m going to bullet-point my own quest for motherhood:

• When a three-year relationship with a childhood friend in my late 30s led him to suggest marriage but reject children, I walked away and joined Single Mothers By Choice to learn from women my age how they were approaching motherhood. By then, mothering on my own seemed my destiny.

• For a year, I went monthly to a clinic for donor insemination. When hormones I took to stimulate ovulation caused havoc with my mental health, I stopped.

• I set out to write On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America for Random House, describing my personal journey while also exploring unwed motherhood as a societal issue and portraying experiences of many single moms. In the early stages of writing that book, I fell into my clinical depression; it was impossible for me to separate my longings to be a mother from my writing about single moms.

In 1997, after finishing my book, I went to Changzhou, China to adopt a nine-month old girl whose birth family “left her to be found” in China’s one-child policy era. I was 46 years old.

Since then, I’ve closely tracked news coverage out of China — and about China – that relates to the lives of girls and women and reproductive messages and policies of the government. China’s women lost their bodily autonomy during its one-child era under the strict government enforcement including forced abortion and sterilization. Today, women of childbearing age again are being pressured about their reproductive lives, this time pushed to have babies the state realizes it needs. Women are told to have three children, even though wives and mothers often live under harsh economic conditions and raise children amid traditional patriarchal attitudes and practices.

In 2015, when China declared an end to its decades-long one-child policy, I wrote an essay on Medium.com about adopting my daughter. For nine months, she lived in an orphanage crib in Changzhou, China after police took her there when she was three days old. Her birth family likely wanted a son. She was found in the rural farming town of Xiaxi in Jiangsu province in September 1996. An excerpt:

I’ll be watching closely in years ahead to see how this two-child change by China’s leaders affects the intense pressures already being put on its well-educated young women to adjust their lives to fit their expected family roles of wife and mother. … for urban women who might not be so interested in reducing their own ambitions for a marriage at a younger age, there is already a popular slang term that stigmatizes them as “leftover women.” This morning a close watcher of women’s rights in China tweeted that this new second-child policy could be summed up in this way: “Hurry up and have two children, leftover women.”

Well, now it’s “Hurry up and have THREE children"

For a fourth consecutive year, China’s population fell as its birth rate plunged. Hit a record ​low in 2025 of 1.0 to 1.09 children per woman, which makes it one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Experts warn of further decline, which would be catastrophic for China’s economic growth. In Beijing to plan the nation’s next five years, top lawmakers put population planning ⁠at the top of its economic strategy.

In 2026, Beijing will spend 180 billion ​yuan ($25.8 billion) to boost births, according to Reuters estimates. Key costs include its national child subsidy, introduced for the first time last year along with the government’s pledge that pregnant women will have “no out-of-pocket expenses,” with all of their medical costs, including in vitro fertilization (IVF), which are fully reimbursable under its national medical insurance fund.

China adds its top-down approach to censor disparaging messages about marriage and motherhood. Before Chinese New Year, the Cyberspace Administration of China described the actions it would take against online accounts that “maliciously incite negative emotions.”

Prominent examples included posts “promoting unhealthy values such as refusing marriage and childbearing, advocating anti-marriage and anti-natalist ideas, stirring up conflicts between men and women, exaggerating fears about marriage, and increasing anxiety about fertility”.

In the comments section appeared a screenshot of the post that led to Uyghur stand-up comedian Xiao Pa being punished. In early February, she wrote: “I was down with fever for two days, and I thought if I had a husband and children, I would have to lean against the wall to prop myself up and cook for them.” [South China Morning Post ]

Given space constraints, I’m linking you to an excellent resource about policies and approaches that are more likely to succeed in promoting motherhood,

A FEW LOOSE ENDS … relating to last week’s essay

Here’s a great example of the ol’ girls’ network in action: the hockey essay I wrote last week was read by my longtime friend, Lynn Povich, author of The Good Girls Revolt who was the moderator for my talk about Locker Room Talk (on sale, half price on Amazon) at the New York Historical Society. Lynn was impressed by Sarah Spain’s video exhortation about the Olympic hockey blow-up so she sent it to her friend Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the founding editor of Ms magazine. She listened and agreed with Lynn that more folks need to hear it. Pivoting from her customary focus on news, she wrote her Substack about Sarah’s video. Thank you, Lynn. Thank you, Letty.

The Professional Women’s Hockey League will host sold-out crowds in team debuts at Madison Square Garden and TD Garden; Sirens play Seattle on Apr. 4 and the Fleet play Montreal on Apr. 11. These will be the largest home-game attendance for both teams.

In you missed SNL’s open last weekend, don’t miss it. Fun surprise at the end!!

In closing, this week marked the 50th anniversary of the Yale women’s crew team’s 1976 protest-heard-round-the-world. A reminder of that historic day.

They hold on beyond their sell date.

Slow to fade from public view.

This week a locker-room moment is sticking around.

Oh, you know the one I’m talking about. I’m sure you do.

Hard to imagine breathing and not somehow picking up that the U.S. men’s hockey team laughed when the President, talking by phone, whined about having to invite the Olympic women’s team if the men’s team were his guests in D.C., an invitation already extended. Otherwise, he quipped, he’d be impeached.

His words were again met with a supportive chorus of guffaws.

A moment to which global attention was — and still is being – paid.

A moment so embedded in this week’s conversations and commentaries that when folks aren’t being queried about the Epstein tapes or asked to define the “Epstein class,” they are opining on locker room talk.

A topic I know a bit about, and about which I’ll have more to say later in this essay.

Anyway, this locker-room-talk moment lingers, in part, due to familiar bells it rings.

Bells that women hear, loudly.

Maybe they’re muffled a bit for men, though heard still, perhaps for different reasons.

Like the latter stages of the 2016 presidential race. Access Hollywood, anyone?

When we had stage-lit exposure to the misogynist-in-chief’s bragging about the ease of sexual abuse.

So, when the uproar ensued, he apologized, well, sort of, in a typically insincere way: “if anyone was offended,” while shrugging off his lewd comments with these words: “It's locker room talk and it's one of those things.”

Regretfully, this moment was ignored by too many Americans who’d joined his cult.

Little did we appreciate then how his locker room talk foreshadowed the future.

His future as a defendant found guilty in court and ours living in the nation he rules.

He and his followers demeaned women, then.

They still do. Aided by a social media army eager to weaponize such words and attitudes. Trying to intimidate and silence women.

All the while claiming immunity under the “locker room talk” excuse.

Just boys being boys.

All said, in good fun.

Get over it. Stop being so serious, the detractors are told, when the men’s talk escapes its locker-room walls.

I mean, can’t you take a joke?

All the while, our nation is more and more suffused with misogyny.

Not coincidently at a time that women’s rights are being erased and women are being punished (at times, left to die) for their reproductive choices.

Matthew Tkachuk (19) carried Noa Gaudreau, daughter of their teammate who died in a tragic accident, onto the ice following the men’s ice hockey gold medal game between Canada and the United States. Photo by Petr David Josek The Associated Press

Imagine how different - how much more uplifting – our conversations about hockey would be now if this image of the triumphant moment when Tkachuk hoisted Noa up to his shoulder was telling the story to America of a daughter of their fallen teammate one day holding her own gold medal.1

Instead, here we are, stuck in the predictable cycle in which women feel they must speak up, if only to challenge men to do better.

Inevitably, in scenarios such as this, the spin cycle tosses women full circle.

As they start off being the butt of men’s jokes.

Then, a few brave folks, usually women, protest this treatment, knowing that if such behavior isn’t called out, it tends to be repeated. And it intensifies.

Inevitably, name calling and belittling ensue, often in an attempt to push away these women’s consternation.

Men chime in to say it’s all just silly to be so upset, and so it goes, until women end up being blamed for making more out of these insults than we should.

“Complain all you want that I’m being overly sensitive. That’s your right. Rant all you desire if you feel the men’s gold-medal performance is being unfairly overshadowed. But that’s not my fault. Blame the locker room celebration seen ’round the world, and the laughter whose echo won’t go away.” [Sports columnist Tara Sullivan, The Boston Globe, The US men’s hockey team should be celebrated, but the gold medal won by the US women is no laughing matter, Feb. 25]

Meanwhile, men do their best to slip out the back door.

Sit tight. Waiting for things to blow over.

Some still issuing ad hominem comments while heaping praising on themselves for supporting the women’s team.

Let It Go

Let it go, we’re told.

I’ve heard this so often I just might start singing, on repeat like 3-year olds do, the ear-piercing chorus from Disney’s Frozen.

I heard this said or implied in a few conversations I had this week.

You’re making too much about what should be seen as unthinking behavior of young men who were caught up in the exuberance of their gold-medal locker-room moment.

Not exactly a time to expect them to model emotional intelligence.2

I mean how can we expect young men not to laugh when the man in charge expects them to?

Just like his crowds who laugh when he demeans others.

Even if I accepted this excuse, which I don’t, since when cooler heads prevailed no team apology was publicly offered, it doesn’t mean that women should lose their right to speak out when this banter sounds all too familiar to what bombards them in their daily work.

In the men’s laughter, women heard many echoes.

And saw many flashbacks of the demeaning attitudes that seep into their lives as women hockey players, who are paid far less than the men to play, whose games are covered much less by the sporting press and broadcast less often, which adds up to fewer viewers. And fewer endorsements.

Disparities not confined to locker rooms, but which play out in real ways in real lives.

Why shouldn’t women commentators (and yes, some men) convey in this moment the pain that these insults inflict on women athletes?

Why should they be castigated for urging men’s put-downs to stop?

By them speaking up, the U.S. women hockey players could remain on high ground, ceding the response space to the multitude of commentators, like this hockey fan, wife, and mom, below, who spoke what I’m sure many hockey women feel.

The U.S. women’s captain Hilary Knight urged us to just get on with celebrating what the women and the men hockey teams achieved at these Olympics.

“Our genuine level of support and respect [for each other] is being overshadowed by a quick lapse … the guys were in a tough spot … and it’s a really good learning point to focus on how we talk about women not only in sport but industry. .. the joke was distasteful, … Now I have to sit in front of you and explain someone else’s behavior. It’s not my responsibility … but what is [my responsibility] is shifting the focus and the narrative of this amazing accomplishment we did together, the women’s and men’s teams; it’s never happened before. I want the legacy of this team to be remembered, and so that is what I am trying to shift in the narrative to what we’ve accomplished in the last two weeks together. … This is the best American women’s team we’ve put together on a world stage when the lights have been the brightest.” [And The Guardian’s story on her remarks.]

But even as Knight lauded the support the teams gave each other, she was applauded only once, when she bluntly said it shouldn’t be her responsibility to sit in front of microphones and be asked to explain the men’s behavior.

No it shouldn’t be.

And that’s the value this flood of commentators bring to this moment – both those who work in sports media and the individuals, like the mom in the video above, who refused to stay silent when confronted with this latest round of locker-room talk.

It matters that they push back.

For not speaking up has its own price to pay, as we witness in history’s tendency to overlook and hide women’s achievements.

Tipping the telling of our history towards the men. Yes, it must be said, the white men.

By not walking away, these women say to daughters watching and listening that they’ve left a sign on their pathway telling them “when you see her, you can be her.”

So, here’s some really good news: my friend, Jean Fruth, whose visual storytelling created the terrific documentary film, “See Her Be Her,” about young women playing baseball globally, has turned her camera on women hockey players, including on the 2026 Olympic ice. Her photography book will be out in the Fall, 2027.

Can’t arrive soon enough!

But right now we have Norah O’Donnell’s book, We the Women: The Hidden Heroes Who Shaped America that was published on Tuesday. In it, she reminds us — by using Constance Baker Motley, the judge in my federal court gender discrimination case against Major League Baseball, as a prime example – how women’s achievements too often are hidden from view.

I’m delighted to add that US. Courts also honored Judge Motley this week.

“Remember the Ladies” - We hear you, Abigail!

Now is a good idea to pause and take in the thrilling overtime win by the U.S. women’s hockey team against its arch-rival Canada.

Followed by the team’s ebullient gold-medal ceremony.

Which never gets old, despite how many they’ve had — in 1998, 2018, and 2026.3

Yet, these gold-medal women were not invited to the White House or the State of Union.

Their invitations must be lost in the mail.

Just like the praise from on high for what is arguably America’s best women’s hockey team ever is deafening in its silence.

Clearly an oversight.

But even with this context in mind, when women dare to raise their ire at these men’s complicit laughter, they’re blamed for spoiling what was harmless fun.

This charge brings to my mind the moment in my legal case’s hearing when baseball’s attorney made his audacious claim in what can only be seen as a ridiculous argument. Here, I quote from my book, “Locker Room Talk”:

“Can’t the player just protect himself by a curtain?” Judge Motley asked Andrews [the lawyer representing baseball], posing to him one of the questions she’d put to Climenko [another of baseball’s lawyers]. “Put a curtain on front of his cubicle if he doesn’t want anybody to see him or a towel or something like that while he is naked. I don’t suggest that he ought to be in front of anybody naked. It seems to me he doesn’t have to be. This is just being injected in here. He doesn’t have to be naked.”

“It’s the women being injected into the locker room,” Andrews replied with a brash certainty that Climenko didn’t bring to his responses. This younger lawyer was faster on his feet and more adroit with words. “Nakedness is indigenous to the locker room and women are not,” he added. His sharp-edged responses pushed me back in my seat, and I sat upright and attentive as he pressed on. “There are many affidavits, which no doubt you will have an opportunity to read, which establish that nakedness and openness are part of the entire spirit and atmosphere of the locker room. These cubicles are tiny. To put these men who are star players behind a curtain and in bathrobes to go to shower would cut down on their access,” he explained.

Andrews had stolen our word – access – and was using it against us. Like most people in the 1970s, I’d watched on TV as heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali wore a bathrobe as the writers surrounded him to talk after a fight. It never crossed my mind that in doing this he had “cut down on his access.” Access to what? I wasn’t sure I understood what he’d meant by “access,” and evidently Judge Motley didn’t either.

“Cut down on their access to one another?” she said, asking his to clarify this point.

“When a fellow comes off the field, he takes his clothes off and casually walks about talking with his friends while he undoes his shirt,” Andrews explained. His descriptive details brought the locker room scene to life in ways that Climenko never managed to do. “They talk to one another in and out of the shower room.”

“Yes, they talk to each other,” she repeated, but seemed skeptical about this had to do with what the ballplayers wore or didn’t wear while they talked.

“They visit one another at the cubicle,” he told her, again. “They don’t go behind cubicles and hide from one another.”

“They could if they didn’t want anybody to see them naked,” she countered, seeming a bit bewildered about where Andrews might be leading her.

“It would change baseball, the locker room and the way teammates have related to one another for one hundred years,” he declared.

So, baseball’s argument came down to its tradition triumphing over equality of access.

Judge Motley, who seemed uncertain of what to ask next, called on my lawyer.

So, lighten up, ladies. I mean it’s not like women don’t get to play hockey.

I mean, you’ve heard how these two Olympic hockey teams supported each other. Hey, they respect each other, too. They hung out with each other at the Games. Heck, they drank beer together at 3:00 am in the Olympic Village, didn’t they?

So, with that in mind, Jessica Valenti, author of Abortion. Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win, took time out from her usual writing about the life-threatening challenges to women’s reproductive choices to share thoughts about this harmless fun.

“Publicly supporting women is nice, but what really matters is what men do behind closed doors. What matters is how they hold each other accountable. The men’s hockey team shouldn’t get a pass because they were in the locker room—that’s where women need their support the most.” Jessica Valenti on Substack, The U.S. Men’s Hockey Team Failed the Locker Room Test: Men need to stop bonding over humiliating women, Feb. 24.]

Yet in the Olympic locker room, gold medals dangling, beers being chugged, laughter came at the expense of their fellow Olympians.

The fellow Olympians they support. And respect. And drink beers with.

In that moment, those women were a punch line. And their laughter enshrined them as that for everyone – as them being butt of what Knight generously referred to as a “distasteful”4 joke.

“It’s not about offence; it’s about tackling everyday sexism and changing the culture of sport. When equality is framed as optional or inconvenient—even if done so as a "joke"—it sends a clear message about whose achievements are seen as important and whose are not.” [Psychology Today, Gill Harrop, Feb. 23]

But heard in the locker room video, if one listens carefully, are two voices standing out, each separating himself from the laughter by the act of speaking up.

“We’re going to have to bring the women’s team,” one voice near the camera replies, "Absolutely," while another says, "Two for two," highlighting that both teams had won gold. These voices were in the minority and were largely drowned out by the laughter of the others, but the fact that they were there at all is vitally important.” [Harrop, Psychology Today]

As the week moved on, I listened to, watched and read lots of commentaries about this moment, as well as tracked many interviews with men who were in that locker room and women who were not.

To my ears, none stood out as the one done by sports podcaster Sarah Spain. When her voice stood out, I emailed her, asked her to post it to YouTube so I could embed it in my essay to share with you. Sarah did. I hope you’ll take a few moments to allow her words to sink in. Might not change your mind, or any mind, but no one who listens to her can come away without knowing that they now know why women feel the way many of them do about this locker-room moment and why some are speaking up.

Sarah Spain on her podcast “Good Game,” on which I appeared talking about women and locker rooms in October 2024.

And here is excerpt from this week’s Boston Globe magazine describing what it feels like to be at a women’s professional hockey game in these early years of the league’s existence.

“Walking into the Boston Fleet women’s hockey game was like that scene in Barbie where the Barbies hold every position of power. Women in green and blue jerseys packed the stands; little girls on peewee hockey teams pressed their homemade signs against the glass; and everyone belted the lyrics when Taylor Swift blasted through the speakers. … love [for a sports team] isn’t measured in stats or factoids. It’s measured in the moments we show up for the ones we love, even when they’re in a slump. It’s defending them with our whole chest when the opposition is out for blood. It’s staying up past our bedtime to watch them do the impossible.

Eight-year-old Emily always knew that. She just needed a place to be reminded.” [Emily Schario, Feb. 25, 2026, Boston Globe magazine.]

GROUNDING US

In Milan, U.S. women won six gold medals and 17 medals overall.

The U.S. men took four golds and twelve medals overall.

Two more gold medals, four overall, were won in mixed gender events.

At past Olympic Games, Team USA’s women have brought home more medals than the men have at three consecutive Winter Olympics and four consecutive Summer Olympics. [USA Today, Christine Brennan]

Now, as promised, my “a bit more later” words about locker room humor, which in this case is genuine humor, delivered by men and received by me, as such. This is a scene in my book from the winter of 1978, before my case was heard by Judge Motley.

“Reading [Roger] Angell’s affidavit [written for my case] took me back to that winter evening when he and I were in the Nets’ locker room at Madison Square Garden. When he entered, I was seated on a narrow bench in front of lockers talking with Phil Jackson, who was the Nets’ player-coach. Angell approached and I watched as the two men shook hands. Jackson made space for Angell to join us and soon these two men were talking about women writers working in locker rooms. Jackson assured Angell that “nobody thinks about it anymore.” In the prior season, he told Angell, when he was playing with the Knicks, a few of the rookies “were a little tight about it – a few guys ran into the training room – but we told them to shape up, and they did.”

Suddenly, Jackson shifted gears and offered Angell an unsolicited opinion: ‘I don’t know why baseball makes so much of it all. Nobody cares or notices.’

“I stayed quiet, just listening to these two men talk. Then, Jackson surprised me by turning to look in my direction as he kept talking with Angell. With a mischievous grin on his face, he said to Angell, ‘Nobody looks – except Melissa here. Melissa is a peeker, a regular Peeping Thomasina.’ The three of us howled with laughter as I was at ease with his humorous aside. His lighthearted frivolity gave us all a moment to exhale.

“Only when our laughter faded did I realize how tired I was of the biting, demeaning humor and tiresome, insulting jokes that too many men didn’t tire of repeating. How refreshing to be with men whose conversation about my situation was tinged with the kind of humor that erased the nasty stuff. That people made a huge stink about a circumstance that was relatively easy to fix irked me. It delighted me to discover that the first female writer to work in an NHL locker room had also used sardonic wit to counter the absurdity of how men wrote about our equal access to locker rooms. “Ifound myself forced to muster Supreme Court-worthy arguments for an inane essentially logistical problem that could easily have been solved by a few big towels,” Robin Herman wrote years later on her “Girl in the Locker Room” blog.

“In his New Yorker article,“Sharing the Beat,” Angell nailed the end of our encounter with his perfect-pitch words: “He [Phil Jackson]laughed, and we laughed, and he put on his underpants.

Women’s Professional Baseball

In upcoming essays, we’ll talk more about the women’s professional baseball. This new league plays its first games on August 1, 2026. For now, I’m leaving you with a photo and a video— each marks this special moment in the lives of girls and women who fought for decades to play baseball.

Young women with dreams of playing baseball will finally realize their dreams.