Sometimes, just when you’ve forgotten it, you realize that you live right next door, metaphorically speaking, to some of the most splendid and remarkable people in the world. And sometimes you sit, amazed, as things you’ve known about your whole life become much larger than life – immense and historic – right in front of your eyes.
The Neighborhood House honored Marge Brady, Stella Hart Grayson, Blair Schleicher Bravo, and “Grow It Green” founders Carolle Huber, Myra Bowie McCready and Samantha Rothman Thursday night as “Phenomenal Women,” for the work they’ve done to make life better for everybody in Morris County, and for everybody in the larger world, too.
Listen: The Neighborhood House is historic. In the venerable tradition of Hull House in Chicago (where Benny Goodman learned to play the clarinet), the Neighborhood House was founded in 1898 as a settlement house to help Italian immigrants become acclimated to a new culture.
Sheila Oliver, the Speaker of the General Assembly of New Jersey, paid a warm and lovely tribute to “The Nabe,” as it’s called affectionately, in her wide-ranging keynote address on Thursday in front of about 150 people.
Oliver gratefully acknowledged the work the Neighborhood House has done, and thanked it for “hanging in there for over 100 years.”
“I refer to Morristown as ‘historic Morristown,’” she told the gathering. “But then, I’m a history buff.” And that’s true. She joined the New York archeological society at the age of 12 (“I was a weird kid – yes, I was!”), and eagerly absorbed what she read about ancient civilizations in Egypt, Rome, and Greece.
Later, she read the letters that America’s John and Abigail Adams exchanged between them – hundreds of letters across decades of time, including the years of John’s Presidency. Oliver reminded the appreciative crowd that Abigail always charged her husband, at the end of each missive, to “remember the ladies.”
Slide show by Bill Lescohier. Please click icon below for captions.
And here’s the really amazing thing: Women still “suffered the degradation of disenfranchisement” – – in the words of the National Woman Suffrage Association’s 1876 “Declaration of the Rights of Women of the United States” — when the Neighborhood House and settlement houses all over the country were founded.
Because it often was women — themselves unequal under the law — who founded and worked in the settlement houses; Hull House, for instance, was established in 1889 by Jane Addams with her friend Ellen Starrit.
And thus we came to the heart of the evening: honoring women in the tradition of Abigail Adams, Jane Addams, and the suffragettes of the 19th Century– women who saw that things needed to change, and went about making it happen.
Morristown Mayor Tim Dougherty had offered words of appreciation to the honorees at the start of the program, and now Jane Kurek and Sibi Saenz-Williams stepped forward to the podium to present each woman with her award.
To Marge Brady: For “her support for the preservation of historic buildings, the maintenance and sustainability of Morristown’s neighborhoods, and her fighting spirit [that] have served this community extraordinarily well, for many, many years.” Marge helped save Willow Hall from destruction, for instance, and served on the Morristown town council from 1978 to 1985.
To Stella Hart Grayson: Marrow Donor Project Chair, co-ordinator of the Peer Support and Counseling Program for the nonprofit Marrow Power, and hard-working volunteer for community service projects of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), West Morris Section. Stella has also volunteered with the New Jersey Council on Crime Victims and has bolstered, via her own public relations firm, the work of literally dozens local nonprofit organizations, including the Special Olympics and the Salvation Army.
To Blair Schleicher Bravo, since 2003 the executive director of Morris Habitat for Humanity. Blair was also program director at the Housing Partnership of Morris County and co-founder of the Housing Alliance of Morris County-United Way.
And to Carolle Huber, Myra Bowie McCready, and Samantha Rothman of Grow It Green Morristown. They founded Morristown’s Early Street Garden, and this month opened the Urban Farm at Lafayette, in their continuing efforts to “bring the community together through gardening.”
And just as the “Phenomenal Women” Nominating Committee promised, these women, “through their commitment and contributions” are role models for all women — and for all men, too, while we’re at it. “Creative, tenacious, unique,” yes. Amazing women; spirited women. Well, well done, indeed.
It took a village to put the evening on, too. The Neighborhood House tap dancers strutted their stuff — in black toppers and silver pants — to Michael Jackson’s I Want You Back.
The Community Theater Performing Arts School ensemble — six girls and four boys — sang an absolutely terrific Heal the World. (If anybody has audio/video of this, we’d love to post it.)
And Michelle Joseph Redhead offered a wonderfully warm read of Maya Angelou’s Phenomenal Woman (from which, of course, this evening took its name).
On receiving her award, Marge Brady offered encouragement out of her own experience: “Small efforts, with a lot of help from your friends, do work.”
And then she explained, in a vivid way, where some of her motivation comes from. She said that she’d coached her German immigrant parents for their citizenship exams when she was only 12 years old, around the time of the Second World War. She held up the very same little book she had used to tutor them, those many years ago, and then quoted from it, a small bit of verse from Oliver Wendell Holmes:
One flag, one land
One heart, one hand
One nation, evermore.
Stella Hart Grayson said, simply: “I’m very proud to be here.” And so were we all.
