THERE’S AN OLD BIBLICAL SAYING…

I thought of several times in recent days. First, when I went to a memorial service for a long time friend in Frankfort. Mary Lou Martin had retired from state government years ago. She had worked there trying to make Kentucky “green” long before that was a popular cause. After her husband died she moved to her daughter’s home in another state and died there in April. A service was held so her many local friends could pay tribute.

In the remembrance pamphlet handed out there was this story about Lou…"One story of (her) advocacy occurred in the late 1950s, while Lou and her family were living in Frankfort. Lou’s two young sons were Cub Scouts, and she was a den mother. After another den mother, who was black, expressed her frustration at being unable to take her little boy to the Capitol Theater because of its 'whites only' policy, she and Lou took action. Together the two women organized a five-person picket line outside the theater.  Their appearance on the sidewalk holding signs while the Saturday morning children’s movies played inside, and the prospect of bad publicity quickly gave the manager a change of heart and he let everyone in. That was the end of segregation at the Capitol Theater."

Another was a newspaper article about a man I wish I had known. Bob Fletcher died recently at 101. In the early days of World War Two, after the US had committed the crime of forcibly evicting native Japanese-American citizens from their lands around Sacramento, Mr. Fletcher went into action. Those families faced losing their homes to thieves or foreclosure.   As the story recounted…"In the face of deep anti-Japanese sentiment…Fletcher…(quit his job and used his savings)..to work the farms of several Japanese families. He paid the mortgages and taxes and took half the profits. He turned over the rest---along with the farms---to those Japanese families when they returned (from their internment camps) in 1945.

The third was the PBS documentary about Gutzon  Borglum - the man who, all but singlehandedly, gave us our Mount Rushmore  national monument..proving Emerson’s saying.."An institution is but the lengthened shadow of one man.”

And that Biblical thought Lou and Mr. Fletcher and that wild sculptor reminded me of…”One with God is a majority.”

I'm just sayin'...