to pregnant women from the 1950s through the ‘70s to presumably ensure that miscarriage would not take place—until its withdrawal due to medically proven health consequences like breast, testicular, and vaginal cancers, infertility, ectopic pregnancies, and premature births. In the meantime eight million mothers, daughters, and sons had been affected.
When the first studies came to light in 1971, Pat read about them in a San Francisco Chronicle article entitled “Drug Passes Rare Cancer to Daughters.” At first she ignored this new information, even tried to forget about it. But she could not get around the fact that she had been prescribed DES when she was pregnant with her first child, Martha. In her typical can-do style, she left behind the helplessness one feels about irreversible mistakes of the past and founded the advocacy group DES Action. Starting with little information, she located other exposed mothers to raise consciousness, did research, and collaborated on the first-ever information leaflet about DES. She helped launch a two-year consumer education program and develop a slide show for clinics to show to patients that was called “Ask Your Mother: Finding the DES-Exposed.” In time she also served as the organization’s program director, newsletter editor, and international liaison.
In the beginning the people in the first kitchen-table group had to learn to read medical journals in order to educate themselves. Then they turned to educate those who had been affected, but soon enough they learned that doctors, medical researchers, and policymakers also knew little about the dangers and needed to be informed. DES Action grew to include chapters in thirty U.S. states, with sister groups around the world; it also became a model for other health advocacy organizations seeking to make an impact.
Once I was writing about DES, I sought Pat out. She was as informed, outspoken, and velvet articulate as ever. “Technological hubris!” she bellowed. “What a price we pay for all the so-called scientific advances!” Needless to say, her interview provided a strong example for my chapter on taking action as a healthy response. “If you get a lemon, make lemonade,” she affirmed. How strange it felt to realize that she had been going through the pain of realization and doing the work of organizing at the same time that I had been working at Cody’s. When Technology Wounds came out in 1990, and I had the honor to return to the bookstore to do a presentation not as an employee, but as an author.
How true that Cody’s was “more than a bookstore”! New owner Andy Ross with Fred Cody. Photo credit: James Pease. Gratitude to the now-defunct Berkeley Gazette, July 10, 1981. Courtesy of Andy Ross.
In 1977 Pat and Fred sold Cody’s Books to fellow book vendor Andy Ross, who kept the store thriving for another thirty-plus years. Pat returned to her writing desk, where she penned a marvelously soulful history called Cody’s Books: The Life and Times of a Berkeley Bookstore. She also wrote DES Voices: From Anger to Action about the political power of effective research, education, and informed action. When Fred died in 1983, her anguish was excruciating—and unbearable. Support for such sorrow and disorientation was hard to find, so she launched the Grief Support Project. It developed a model where groups of the bereaved were led by a trained professional and a lay person who had coped with similar loss.
Her own memorial at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church in October of 2010 drew a grief-stricken throng of family members, including her four children, Martha, Anthony, Nora, and Celia; former Cody’s workers; authors; literature enthusiasts; professors; colleagues from the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association; political allies; Telegraph Avenue denizens; and other admirers from all over the world. Nora spoke, saying that in approaching death, the dignity and courage her mother had demonstrated matched that which she had mustered in life.
II. EYES ON THE PRIZE IN CLEVELAND
The rest of the country is perversely wont to misunderstand Cleveland.
—MARK WINEGARDNER, CROOKED RIVER BURNING, 2001
BUT DEAR READER: BEFORE we jump headlong into the notorious political uprisings of the 1960s anti-war movement, let’s back up in time a couple of decades and focus on my place of origin … Cleveland, Ohio.
Some people call it the “Mistake on the Lake,” a term that dates back to 1969 when the chemically polluted Cuyahoga River that slices the city into east and west sides burst into flame. I would guess too that the observation that Cleveland is not worth mentioning on the national news springs from superiority complexes beleaguering both East and West Coasts. As an industrial city situated on the shores of Lake Erie, though, it grew to be a vital port for shipping along the Great Lakes passageway to the Atlantic, as well as becoming the Midwestern residence of J.D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and others of their ilk—thus making it home to a world-class art museum, symphony, and park system.
Such aspects of Cleveland’s economic ascent led to its vibrant radical history. After the freeing of African slaves following the Civil War, Blacks left the South to escape the barefaced racism there, and to find work in the industrializing North—for many, in the steel mills along Lake Erie. Then, concurrent with the arrival of thousands of immigrants through Ellis Island came the move west by those who could not make a living along the eastern seaboard. By the 1910s Cleveland featured neighborhoods of Italians, Poles, Russians, Irish, and Welsh, plus a vigorous Jewish community and the Glenville and Hough neighborhoods where African Americans lived. No surprise then: when in the 1930s uprisings of workers were erupting all over the United States, in Cleveland the workforce marched under Communist banners bearing slogans like “Fight, Don’t Starve,” 2000 hungry men stormed City Hall, and the first national meeting of the Unemployed Leagues took place in nearby Columbus.
March of the Young Communist League, March 7, 1930. Courtesy of Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland Memory Project.
Protest against Cleveland Sesquicentennial, July 22, 1971. “Settlers” had hoped to celebrate until the American Indian Movement showed up. Russell Means is on the left. Photo credit: Tom Prusha. Courtesy of Cleveland Press Collection/Cleveland Memory Project.
The ‘50s and ‘60s saw the emergence of the civil rights movement—with Clevelanders, both Black and white, joining Freedom Rides in the South; eruptions of riots; and the formation of the United Freedom Movement to desegregate schools. In 1957 the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs established the Employment Assistance Program to relocate Native Americans from the West to northern cities. When they were scheduled to begin their migration, the Cleveland Press ran an article, in racist reference to the Cleveland Indians baseball team, “Real Indians Soon to Call Cleveland Home.” Members of Pueblos and of Plains tribes streamed in, and in 1970 militant activist Russell Means (Dakota/Pine Ridge) founded the American Indian Movement in the city.
It was in this crucible that my first and most formative remarkable meeting took place—with my mother. It was from her that, starting in the second grade, I was given an education in love of beauty and the fight for social justice.
HOOKER GLENDINNING: DOING WHAT THERE IS TO DO
(1920–1985)
This is history!
—H.G.,
