| Although her first child wasn't born yet - the due date still six weeks away - Kate was very involved locally with the town and the school because she planned to raise her children there and she didn't want to wait to change things she considered wrong or dangerous. From the worried complaints of friends, she knew about the crosswalk in front of the middle school which had no school zone signs approaching it to slow traffic travelling through the small country village on its way into the city. Calls and visits to the school board, and then the town council, resulted in no change whatsoever to the situation. I can't remember now what reasons she said they gave, but knowing how they responded to other dangerous situations I worked on later myself, I'd say their resistance was more toward the interference of outsiders, city folk who had moved in, than any genuine disinterest in safety for schoolchildren. Anyway, Kate's response was to organize an event of the times. It was around 1970, and it seemed a very good idea to her to have a large group of parents picket the crosswalk during morning rush hour, and of course to notify the TV stations in the city as to when this would happen. Too good to ignore, the whole event was well-covered, with a photographer from the local newspaper, and two television cameras with reporters. Her husband didn't really approve apparently, but he didn't try very hard to stop her from organizing the thing. The morning of the pickets, he didn't go to work as early as usual, and she saw him at one point, after the protest had already started, walking away from the gathered crowd toward the town center where the hardware store and the grocery were. |
