Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection Honoring a Leader

Jack Owicki
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

Today we’re honoring the story of Olympia Brown. Before you hear about her from Darcey, I have a story of my own to share.

I invite you to imagine that you’re viewing the opening scene of a film. It’s the summer of 1982 in a small city in Michigan. A group of people are gathered in a botanic garden on a hot, muggy afternoon for a memorial service. The camera zooms in on the chief mourner, a woman in her early sixties who is tall, heavy, and imposing. She’s impassive, too, as though trying to emulate Jackie Kennedy’s stoic demeanor at JFK’s funeral.

The woman is Lois Owicki, my mother, and we’re seeing her at a watershed moment in her life, the time of my father’s death.

The memorial service ends. Back at home, after family and friends depart, Lois installs deadbolts on her doors, and she grieves. She contemplates life without her husband, who has been not only her lover, but also the one who set the direction of most of their activities.

Still at home, but now two years later. There’s a knock at the door, and a tall, slightly stooped, elderly man enters. It’s Ed Ossman, for many years an elected representative to the county government. He’s calling to tell Lois that he’s going to retire from politics and would like to endorse her to run for his seat on the County Board of Supervisors. She’s astonished.

Flashback to the early 1960s, to a school-board election in the same town. Lois is the first woman in living memory to run for the school board. She is bright, articulate, and has held nearly every office in school-related organizations. But she loses the election to much less qualified opponents. They are all men.

Back in her kitchen in 1984, Lois reflects on the school-board election and on the fact that, as a homemaker and mother, she hasn’t held a paying job since she ran a milling machine during World War II. On the other hand, she has a solid record of leadership in important community groups. And she was in many ways the intellectual power behind her husband’s local prominence as an early environmental advocate. She tells Ed that she’ll run for the County Board of Supervisors.

Wonder of wonders, she does receive the Republican nomination and is elected with a solid majority. And then she’s re-elected. What’s more, she’s chosen to chair the Board of Supervisors. Scenes in the movie show how she achieves her political success by hard work understanding the issues, by building consensus, and by cultivating personal relationships with her colleagues and subordinates.

So that’s the dramatic arc of the movie: Life as a relatively traditional American woman prior to widowhood, followed by a rapid and unexpected rise to the highest elected office in the County.

A good movie tells a story, but it doesn’t explicitly spell out the meaning of the story. That it leaves to the individual viewer.

And different viewers have different takes on this movie. Some are heartened by Lois’s success and see her story as a sign of progress in the status of women.

Others emphasize the oppression of a patriarchal system that prevented a talent like Lois’s from being given full sway until she was freed by widowhood at an age at which many people are contemplating retirement. The more thoughtful among these people wish that the movie had filled in more of the backstory of her relationship with her husband, which was reportedly rich and satisfying, though in many ways very traditional.

Still other viewers don’t view the movie through the lens of gender politics. They see it as a personal triumph over grief, and the unexpected discovery of renewed meaning and joy in life.

You take your pick. As you contemplate your own stories, I think you’ll agree that reality too complex to capture fully in any narrative.