7
Alan Alda Opens the Park
I sent a letter of invitation to Alan Alda to cut the ribbon for the new visitor center on July 17, 1982, for the grand opening. The Women’s Rights National Historical Park was still vulnerable to Secretary Watt’s determination to abolish unnecessary parks. I wanted an opening event that would reverberate all the way to the halls of the Interior Department headquarters in Washington. I wanted James Watt to read about the opening ceremony in his morning paper. Lucille Povero had earlier appealed to Alda to come to Seneca Falls for a fund-raising event for the Stanton Foundation. He had made a generous contribution but declined to come, saying he did not do public appearances. Since we knew his address, thanks to Lucille and her cousin Ann Mazzaro, I sent the invitation off by Federal Express, which the Park Service had recently authorized us to use. If Alan Alda agreed to come this time and to cut the ribbon, it would be a major event that would surely make the papers in Washington.
Pat Haines, who had been hired as park staff to help with administration, had suggested the park sponsor a women’s history conference. She subsequently coordinated what exploded into an expansive three-day history conference during Convention Days weekend in 1982. But the park had no money for historians flocking to Seneca Falls for the weekend. Pat decided to drive to New York City to seek funding for the conference from a few nonprofits she had previously worked with. On the spur of the moment I decided to go with her and personally invite Alan Alda to preside over our park opening ceremony. I drove down to Ithaca to meet Pat at her home, and she drove us to New York City. We left very early on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Pat dropped me off at the midtown address I had for Alda and then headed off to her uptown meetings.
The lobby of his building was large and impressive, with grand expanses of marble. There was no desk to greet the visitor, no concierge, and no directory on the wall, just a security guard. I retreated to a corner to pull a pair of more professional looking heels out of my tote bag and managed to stand on one leg and change shoes as I stuffed the driving shoes back into my tote bag. I was not far from the security guard. After I composed myself, I walked up to him with as much dignity as I could muster and asked where I could find Alan Alda’s office. The guard announced somewhat loudly, “I can’t tell you,” and then with a knowing grin whispered, “but you might try the ___ floor.”
I took the elevator up to that floor, and there were only four doors off a small foyer. All were shut, but three of them were emblazoned with the name of the organization they housed. One door was blank, so I opened it and walked in. It was a small room with a very large brown leather sofa, a receptionist’s desk, and a credenza behind the desk. The woman sitting at the desk inquired what I wanted, and I said I had an invitation for Mr. Alan Alda. She rolled her eyes and gestured at two piles of eight-by-eleven-inch envelopes neatly stacked several inches high on the credenza. None of the envelopes appeared to have been opened. However, I could identify the only Federal Express packet in the two stacks, as it was larger than the paper envelopes, and the distinctive colors were peeping out. I pointed to the bright-orange-and-blue packet and said, “That is the invitation!” She pulled it out from the pile and opened it. After scanning my enclosed letter, she said, “Sit down, I will be back,” and disappeared through a door.
I sat down on the sofa and waited several minutes. Finally, after what to me seemed hours, she came back in the room and reported, “He’s here, and he wants to talk to you.” My heart began to pound so hard I could barely breathe. Then he himself, Alan Alda, leaned around the door jam and said, “Come on in.” I did not immediately recognize him as he looked very serious, almost stern. For a second I thought it was another staff person. Once in his office he welcomed me with his huge smile, and then he looked like the megastar he was. His warm welcome immediately put me at ease after the stress of driving hours to Manhattan hoping to find him and talk to him.
His office had huge windows overlooking midtown Manhattan, a vista of beautiful modern buildings. Alda sat down behind his large desk. It was a comfortable office for working—not a large room, with only the desk and a few guest chairs. He began our conversation with an emphatic proclamation that he did not do public appearances, including ribbon cuttings. I profusely thanked him for his donation of $11,000 so that the Stanton Foundation could purchase the Stanton house.
He started to question me: What was the state of the park? What were my dreams? How would I make them happen? He was respectful and attentive and obviously genuinely interested. He was curious about everything. He became the interviewer, to my surprise.
I had the immense joy of talking to him for two and a half hours. He reminded me at one point that it was Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend, and he did have to drive to his home in New Jersey. He said he would rather talk to me than sit in traffic, so we talked till he needed to leave for home. I was humbled, thrilled, excited, and grateful. I was floating on clouds going down the elevator to the lobby and walked into a small gift shop next door to his building. There was a small poster and a small porcelain plaque, both covered with bright rainbow bands of color. Each band of color had an inspiring phrase. I bought both the poster and the plaque. The affirmations reminded me of the extraordinary good fortune of meeting with Alan Alda, and the sayings inspired me through many a discouraging moment in Seneca Falls:
- Whatever your mind can conceive and believe it will achieve.
- It is astonishing how short a time it takes for very wonderful things to happen.
- To accomplish great things, you must not only act, but also dream, not only plan but also believe.
- Believing is magic.
- You don’t know what you can do until you try.
- You are unique. In all the history of the world there was never anyone else exactly like you, and in all the infinity to come there will never be another you.
- Never affirm self-limitations.
- What you believe yourself to be you are.
- Defeat may test you; it need not stop you.
- If at first you don’t succeed, try another way.
- For every obstacle there is a solution.
- Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
- The greatest mistake is giving up.
- There is a gold mine within you from which you can extract all the necessary ingredients.
- There is no failure except in no longer trying.
I took a cab to the uptown site where I was to rejoin Pat Haines. I was hours late, but on hearing my news of getting to meet and talk to Alda, she wasn’t even irritated. We got in her car, and for the six hours driving back to her home and my car in Ithaca her car rang with our excited chatter. The traffic was probably terrible, but it was the quickest six hours ever heading back home. Even though he had declined the invitation to come to Seneca Falls to open the park, his enthusiasm and encouragement were an enormous boost to our spirits.
Two weeks later, in mid-June, I was in the Park Service office in Boston, as usual trying to expedite projects and pleading for additional support. Staff began running all over the building looking for me to tell me that Alan Alda was on the phone in the regional director’s office. They found me as I happened to be walking downstairs to my next meeting. Our Park Service offices occupied what once had been a very grand building, and I frequently used the gorgeous turn-of-the-century enclosed marble staircase with its elaborate black iron railings. The elevators were cruelly slow, so I would walk down the staircase that made so many sharp turns it was almost circular. Needless to say, I raced to Herb’s office to take the call. Alda spoke briefly and said he would come. He offered to give a speech, as long as we wrote the speech. Of course I said yes. I had invited him for a ribbon cutting, and now he wanted to speak, even though in the first moment I sat down in his New York office he had said that he would not come to Seneca Falls and that he did not do public appearances! I was ecstatic.
Everybody in the Park Service building was excited except for Herb Cables. Herb insisted that Alda would not show up for the event. It was disappointing and frustrating. I could only guess that during his time as superintendent of the Gateway National Recreation Area various celebrities said they would show up but then did not. The regional director remained skeptical right up to the week before the ribbon cutting, which left the park in dire straits: no additional staff, no money, no support for an event that now had become dramatically more complicated. I had earlier appealed to the finance officer for the region to add to the $60,000 budget. His answer: “You won’t have time to spend more than that.”
Holly Bundock did come out to the park from the public affairs office. Holly and I had both joined the regional office in 1975, adding to a very small number of professional women. It was a huge relief to have an old friend there with me who knew exactly what needed to be done for an event with a famous speaker coming to town, plus the needs of all the other VIPs arriving because Alan Alda was coming. Her help for a few days was invaluable, especially since I had come down with a bad cold and for two days completely lost my voice. Holly returned to Boston, and I believe she was responsible for getting Herb to finally send help. Just the week before the ribbon cutting, Herb sent five regional office staff out to Seneca Falls to assist. They were invaluable for hauling equipment and setting up a temporary stage in the middle of Fall Street, and many folding chairs for VIPs in the street in front of the stage. They also built a handsome stand for the huge hand-carved, wooden National Park Service arrowhead that another park had donated to us. I felt proud to see it, just inside the front door of the new visitor center—the iconic arrowhead that meant so much to those of us who worked for the National Park Service. The arrowhead made me feel like we were a real park.
The day before the Saturday, July 17, ribbon cutting many were recruited, including the radio station staff, to finish painting the walls of the new visitor center. The paint had to be dry before the rangers and historians could hang the new exhibits. To add to the turmoil, all our office furniture and files and equipment and supplies were moved out of the Cline barn and onto the second floor above our new visitor center that Friday. The rangers alternated between hanging exhibits as soon as the paint was dry and hemming their Park Service uniform skirts, which also arrived that Friday. And the history conference had begun the day before out at Eisenhower College; I had spent the morning there giving a welcoming address to the attendees. It was a harried twenty-four hours before the Saturday opening.
Alan Alda agreed to spend much of the day in Seneca Falls, including an early afternoon reception organized by George Souhan in the Gould Hotel next door. George arranged to pick up Alda at the nearby county airport where his private plane landed. The plan was for Alda to leave the hotel by the back door and come in the back door of our new visitor center for a greeting with the park staff and to meet a professional photographer hired for his visit. Then he would walk out the front door for the ceremony. That Saturday morning, rain drenched Seneca Falls. We couldn’t move the event inside, as there were no large empty buildings in the downtown. Fortunately, the rain stopped shortly before the ceremony. There was a mad scramble to wipe dry the VIP seats in front of the stage once the deluge ended. We were all going to suffer in the rain or the sun—there was no money to even think of renting a tent for the speaker’s platform.
Well before the 6:30 p.m. ceremony, about five thousand people had arrived, filling the street and the sidewalks of Fall Street, all three blocks. Even the rooftop of the radio station across the street was populated with observers, mostly the brave and inventive press. The local press corps of five reporters assigned to cover Seneca Falls had been writing updates on progress for days. The day of the ceremony they were joined by television crews from the Rochester and Syracuse stations, which also fed the national networks.
The transfer of the ownership of the Stanton home from the Stanton Foundation to the Park Service was symbolized by the foundation’s president Lucille Povero handing over a blank piece of paper. The lawyers had taken care of the title transfer a couple of weeks before, but it was crucial to recognize all the players, and their generosity, especially the Stanton Foundation. The dignitaries seated on the temporary stage included Alda, Seneca Falls Mayor Robert Freeland, and Lucille Povero. Herb Cables attended from Boston and was beaming proudly on the stage. We never discussed his skepticism about Alda showing up. Also, the deputy director of the National Park Service in Washington, Mary Lou Grier, traveled to Seneca Falls to represent the Park Service director and the Interior Department. Grier was a political appointee from the Reagan White House who had been a pioneer in Texas politics as the Republican candidate for a statewide office in 1974. All on the stage gave remarks, brief but for Alan Alda.
Alan Alda had informed us that he would write his own speech, which included a reference to the ghosts of powerful and resourceful women who haunted the margins of our history books. Because Seneca Falls would keep alive the spirit of these women who went before us, the speech went, this place would be a source of energy for all of America. It would be a power station and a beacon. He concluded with encouragement to fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. There was a roar of approval from the crowd when he finished.
Alan Alda did detour from women’s history to passionately denounce the policies of the new administration and specifically Interior Secretary James Watt. I was anxious that Deputy Director Grier would take offense, but if she did, she did not show it, and there were no known consequences. I was unnerved by a few folks standing at the back of the crowd, holding high their large posters opposing abortion. But they did not interrupt the speakers. Standing next to them were individuals holding large posters supporting passage of the ERA, also quiet. I thought Elizabeth Cady Stanton would have approved.
After the program the speakers climbed down from the stage and lined up in front of the visitor center. Together they cut the ribbon with their gold-painted scissors. A few pictures were taken of the ribbon cutting, and then Alda and I ducked back into the visitor center. The crowd surged forward to follow him, and the local police force and the rangers were challenged to keep the press of people from crushing the plate-glass windows in the front of the visitor center. Holly Bundock had made it back for the event and was complimented by Herb Cables for her prowess in directing crowd management. Holly said the most challenging individual to control was the irrepressible reporter Doug Auer. While the job of others was now crowd control, my job was to get Alda safely over to see the Stanton house, as he had requested.
Alda and I ran out the back door, jumped in my car, and raced over back streets for a quick visit to the Stanton house. After a tour through the home with ranger Janice Friebaum, we drove down Washington Street. Without thinking, I pointed out what we then believed was the home of Amelia Bloomer, publisher of the Lily newspaper. Alda wanted to see it. I stopped the car, and we walked up to the front porch for a quick look. As we were leaving a young woman raced up the sidewalk and jumped onto Alda, wrapping her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. Fortunately she did not knock him over, and soon unleashed her grip on him. I was terrified, angry, and mortified all at the same time. Well-meaning but ignorant of the perils for celebrities, I had driven Alan Alda around without the police to protect him. This incident made me even more grateful to him for taking the chances that he took that day: he had risked limb if not life to come to Seneca Falls that day. As we got back in my car and drove away from the Bloomer house, a fleet of cars was coming down Bayard Street looking for him, but I was able to drive him back to the safety of a rendezvous with George Souhan. Alda escaped in a private airplane from the nearby county airport.
My mother and father had driven up from Richmond, Virginia, for the weekend. I had dinner with them Saturday night, after the ribbon cutting. My father had been quicker to correct than to compliment. When he said, “I don’t know how you did that. I could not have done it,” it meant a lot. In the photograph taken by reporter and photographer Martin Toombs that showed the stage and the crowd, it was easy to see my father in his “worry stance,” with one arm across his chest and that hand holding his other elbow, with the other hand raised to press fingers against cheek. My mother was effusively proud of me and the ceremony.
The weekend had included the Friday night Firemen’s Parade. Saturday morning was a 5K race. The National Women’s Hall of Fame held an induction ceremony for its two new honorees, Frances Perkins and Carrie Chapman Catt, also that Saturday. The Stanton Foundation staged a reenactment of the 1848 convention. Saturday night the village shut down the main street, and folks came from miles around for a live band and dancing in the street after fireworks on the canal. On Sunday the Historical Society hosted a Victorian lawn party on the grounds of their historic mansion, with period costumes encouraged. The park hosted two full days of boat tours, bicycle tours, walking tours, and tours of the Stanton house.
During that first 1982 summer Pat Haines organized the Second Seneca Falls Women’s History Conference, titled “Women and Community.” Over four hundred people gathered at Eisenhower College from across the country and Canada for the first conference on women’s history in Seneca Falls after the new park opened. They included teachers and students and established leaders, historians, and community members of all ages. The conference began Thursday evening, July 15, and ran through Saturday afternoon, July 17. It was sponsored by a consortium including the Women’s Hall of Fame, the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Foundation, the Seneca Falls Historical Society and Museum, the Upstate New York Women’s History Conference, the women’s studies program of Eisenhower College, and the Women’s Rights National Historical Park.
I spoke at the conference not as a historian but to demonstrate the support of the leadership of the National Park Service in bridging the gap between academic and public history. There were thirty-six panels and work groups and 152 speakers. Among the speakers were Corinne Guntzel from Wells College in nearby Aurora; Polly Kaufman from the University of Massachusetts in Boston; Susan Ware from Harvard University; Eleanor Leacock from the City University of New York; and Ann Firor Scott from Duke University.
Gerda Lerner, the Robinson-Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, gave the convocation:
We celebrate this opening not only with oratory and companionship, but with past and ongoing work represented by the Women’s History conference on the theme Women and Community. Here the major strands of women’s activities are integrally united in the strong fabric of the nation’s past: women’s work, inside and out of the home, always within the context of community; women’s community and institution building always with an awareness of human needs, women’s organizing efforts tending to blur the distinctions between paid and voluntary work and to bridge the gap between ideas and practical application; and the struggle of women for their own emancipation and citizenship always expressed in terms of community needs and interests… .
In addition to the many unfair burdens women have had to bear throughout historical time, the ignorance of their own history has been among the most severe depravations. This ignorance has led to political and organizational error, for it has deprived us of many of the most valuable lessons of the past… . Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Sojourner Truth and all your other founding mothers of our women’s heritage—we honor you today and feel the touch of your spirit. We have taken up the fabric of your weaving as our mantle, as our flag. What you have begun, continues. The majority has reclaimed its past. The nation has, at long last, found a place of honor for its women’s right pioneers. It remains for us and our children to fulfill your dream. We shall prevail.1
Pat Haines summarized the opportunities: “The Women’s Rights Park has a powerful potential for reaching a part of the American public that might not have access to women’s studies programs, women’s history scholarship, or formal educational introductions to women’s concerns, as a mainstream part of the American dream of an equitable society.” Good historian that she was, Pat provided me her personal collection of documents from the convention. She stressed that volunteers, who included Anita Rapone, Susan Gore, Bonnie Beck, Patty Kaiser, Grey Osterus, Kathy Kearns, and Alice Hemenway, were crucial for organizing the conference in just a few weeks.
The Monday after the opening weekend I took the day off to spend more time with my parents. Someone on my staff called Herb Cables and complained about me and, it seemed, demanded I be removed from the park. I got a phone call at home saying I should report to Herb’s office in Boston the next day and plan to spend the rest of the week in Boston. This was a classic Park Service reaction to protect the employee until the facts were established: bring the employee into the regional office to work alongside the regional director. I made the plane reservations and packed to travel the next morning while dazed, frightened, furious, and above all exhausted from weeks of chaos getting ready for the opening.
When I met with Herb, he told me he had made two phone calls about the complaint. He said he went down to the mail room to ask the chief there what I was like to work with; the chief was a buddy who would have given a very good review. He also called his boss, Deputy Director Mary Lou Grier in Washington, who had attended the opening in Seneca Falls; she told Herb in no way whatsoever would Judy be removed from the park unless she wanted to leave.
Herb and I decided I would spend my time in Boston planning the location for the upcoming superintendents’ conference; I suggested to him that I find an uplifting and restorative meeting place for the annual fall gathering. Fresh on my mind was a five-day meeting in the windowless basement of a downtown hotel in western Massachusetts. We had two groups also sharing the hotel: a conference of clowns (really), who spent all their days and especially their nights playing pranks on each other and running around the halls shrieking with laughter; the other group had arrived in many eighteen-wheel trucks, which were parked in the hotel lot with the engines running all night long. Sleep was precious that week, and I did not want a repeat. After days of phone calls, I secured a week at the Saratoga Springs State Park, in Saratoga, New York. We could hold our meetings in their beautiful historic solarium with floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides of the room. We could have access to the park grounds for strolling and relaxing. Herb was impressed with my work and my find. After that week working with him he said, “Go back to your park. There is nothing wrong with you except you are exhausted.” He never told me more about the complaint.
It was restorative for me that I spent the week sleeping on the sofa of Fay Henderson, a friend going back to our dorm days at Cornell. We spent every evening talking through a totally chaotic time of my life all in just four months after leaving Boston. Virtually overnight I had transitioned from a senior staff position to that of a manager responsible for making quick decisions requiring strong actions. I had been accustomed to my personal style of starting slow and ramping up, leaning heavily on articulation and persuasion. For those first few months I had been flying on my instincts and moving much faster than was comfortable for me and others as well.
I returned to Seneca Falls and walked into my office in our new visitor center building Monday morning just a week later. For eight hours the staff filed into my office one by one to share their grievances. I listened and apologized. The rangers told me they were particularly frustrated that a few of the historians of women attending the conference had come to my house Friday afternoon for tea, but the rangers were not invited; they were downtown till late hours hanging the exhibits and hemming their uniform skirts. They also had been unable to attend any of the sessions at the history conference, which again meant they missed the chance to meet many distinguished historians of women; the rangers were all busy giving tours on Saturday and Sunday. Both missteps were most unfortunate and not really necessary. The historians might have gathered next door at the Gould Hotel, and the rangers could have walked next door to meet them. And on Saturday their tour schedules could have been staggered so that each one could have attended part of the history conference. We were universes apart: their academic future careers versus my focus on park programming and logistics.
Their actual duties also reached far from any vision of interpreting history to the public. Ranger Debbie Wolfe remembered being sent to the Stanton home to clean it out before the opening ceremony. The Park Service had acquired title just a couple of weeks before the ribbon cutting, and the house would be open for Alan Alda, and the public, to tour for just that weekend. Debbie pulled out yards of carpet that smelled of cats, and cleared unwashed dishes out of the sink. She also hauled abandoned furniture and loaded it into the dumpster in the front yard. It was not the usual assignment for an academic historian. But it was a normal assignment for Park Service rangers who have broad position descriptions, with an emphasis on “other duties as assigned.” Their job descriptions are written with purpose so they can be asked to do anything legal. And, of course, we had no funds for maintenance staff.
The rangers were also working without traditional Park Service support, including decent office space. They were cold, then hot, then pestered by flies, and had to walk the block to the hospital to use a bathroom once we moved to the Cline barn. They did not have equipment standard to the agency. Ranger Janice Friebaum, who developed the bicycle tours, inked a small piece of wood to make it look like a walkie-talkie radio and put a nail in the top for the antenna. She would be leading the park-sponsored bicycle tours, and if something happened to a visitor, she had no way of communication back to the park.
There were issues with their uniforms. They complained when I required them to wear the Park Service uniform skirts; some of them wanted to wear slacks, which had been approved for women rangers. However, I directed them to wear skirts. I believed this might help dispel the often-heard comment to the effect that “we hate the feds here.” One result of this decision was the rangers having to hem their too-long uniform skirts the night before the park opening. The rangers had additional issues with their uniforms. Debbie Wolfe commented that she detested the Park Service uniform. It was, she said, “uncomfortable, unstylish, unattractive, and would have looked more appropriate out in the forest.” But the rangers were required to wear their uniforms every day, despite the fact they were uncomfortable and unflattering, and unforgivingly hot. Career employees of the Park Service revere the uniform, or at least the image and myth of the uniform, and wear it with pride, but that had not been the experience of this group of dedicated students of women’s history. I felt the uniform sacrosanct, but I probably added to their frustration as I only wore my uniform for public events. Having heard so many times “We hate the feds here,” I believed that being out and about town in conventional clothes for meetings might be less off-putting to the residents of Seneca Falls.
I made many mistakes that summer, big and small. Despite my mistakes, the rangers and historians came together to work as a team for the rest of the summer until they all had to return to their colleges for the fall semester. We had several discussions about the tension between the ideal world we all wanted to help create where women would have equal rights, and where all rules would be reasonable and fair, versus the rigorous requirements of working for the federal government. The rules, regulations, and laws of the federal government and the National Park Service could not be dismissed or changed, no matter how intensely we wanted that.
I also organized a new group in the community who served visitors to Seneca Falls: I suggested that the downtown organizations meet at least monthly to check in and keep our plans and events coordinated. I hoped also to form a support group that would bring us closer together, more like friends, so that when bumps came along, our friendships would hold us together. It was one of my better ideas. I named the group the Trinkets Alliance, and it endured through my stay in the park. We also had some very fun parties.