[inaudible conversations] on the moderator. I dont mind you not listening to me. I used to be city editor of the Los Angeles Times and no one listened to me then, so i got used to it. After retiring from the times i wrote began writing for a number of web based evocations. I write mostly for one called truth dig, edited by the famous journalist Robert Scheer and depending on your political views, you will really love or hate this very progressive website. I also write for the Jewish Journal of los angeles and la observed a couple of others. Our subject is women behind the power and our panelists have written about how these famous men, three of them, how they were shaped or influenced by women. One of the women was one of the most famous people in the world intraday, Eleanor Roosevelt. Another was joan kroc, wife of the mcdonald mogul. She was as famous, but also dominant figure. In the third was was influenced by not one person, but by a movement of women and influenced him. He was the great abolitionist and former slave, Frederick Douglas our panelists have two jobs and as an author i wanted to point out the most important is the first. For them to talk about the book in such a compelling manner that you will all wind up afterward buying copies and have them sign it and that goes on right out here. The second is to shed some light on the changing ways women influence men and things have changed. You know, from the days when busey tricked ricky into doing something he didnt want to do or from the days of madmen where Sexual Harassment exploitation and a glass of bullying and Glass Ceiling were part of every workplace. Just to show how far we have come, monday at 5 00 p. M. , no more bill oreilly. [applause]. Our four panelists have chronicled this history, leigh fought goes back the farthest to the life of douglas, the former slave who became a powerful leader in the abolitionist movement. Assistant professor of history in syracuse telling the story of douglas wife and a mother of their three large family mother of their large family, but beyond that she explores the fascinating story of how you need to talk into the microphone. How douglas career was a shaped by the other powerful social movement of the time, womens suffrage. Blanche wiesen cook when the Los Angeles Times book award in 1992, for the first of her three volumes on the life of Eleanor Roosevelt. Shes here today to talk to us about the third, a fascinating book, how eleanor labored so hard to persuade her husband to live up to the ideals of the new deal and she had been more successful in the early years, but became too much of a it became too much of a strain. She didnt win her battle. She had to compromise on political policy, just as she did in her marriage. Susan quinn offers another look at the relationship between fdr and his wife in her fascinating book eleanor and him the love affair that shaped a first lady. Lorraine hickox was a writer who covered eleanor and became they became lovers and more than that she helped shape and guide eleanor. Finally, trying to trend to, shes a journalist and while on assignment here los angeles she happened upon a great statue by paul conrad, the famous cartoonist and a Chain Reaction. Big tall statue in a park in santa monica right across the street and it was going to be torn down and it was saved largely from a huge contribution from a anonymous source. She tracked down the source and it was joan kroc, the wife of ray, so she tells the story of a marriage. I wrote this out because this wasnt really the woman as i said behind the man. It was like a whole bunch of women. How i phrase it he had a long and seemingly happy marriage. [no audio] unfortunately, we are experiencing some technical difficulties in our live coverage of the Los Angeles Times festival of books. Stay with us and we will return to our Live Programming as soon as possible. I want to know, in reading your book i got the idea that he was also influenced greatly by association with the leaders of the Womens Suffrage Movement as influenced by the leaders of the Womens Suffrage Movement who are largely white middleclass and upperclass people. Could you tell us about how that influence worked . Okay, which park, and or the Suffrage Movement on very interested in the Suffrage Movement because it was such a powerful Movement JustGetting Started at the time. How did his association with the leaders of this movement influenced him . Okay, that actually was the hardest part of the book to write because what most people will tell you about progress Frederick Douglass and women actually its two ways, Frederick Douglass and women and then the other thing will be oh, he was a womens suffrage man and he was very much professed himself to be a womans rights man and he called himself that and when i started to get into its, i found there was really not a lot they are there when i started to get into it and i had two chapters on that and then i had to rewrite them and rewrite them and it was really the last thing i could write because it was so hard because like i said there was not a lot of their their, so i had to go back and look at okay, what did he do and thats kind of how i approached everything, not just what you say, but what you did and even what did he say, which was usually like gay, women. So, what did he do and what i found is all of this started begin in the 1850s, which is a very exciting time in American History with abolition movement, the Antislavery Movement which is becoming very transformative. You have how do you end slavery from a lot of Different Directions and if youre interested in that come at there was a book just written last year called the slave cause thats been up for a lot of prices. Than you have the womens Rights Movement and it wasnt just suffrage. It was a whole lot of things and they didnt want to form organizations because of the fighting going on in abolitionist movement, so they meet annually, but they also meet locally and talk about what our womens rights and what should we do about it and you also have the black conventions which is almost exclusively male, but black civil rights, which is separate from these other two which is talking about discrimination against African Americans and so when i started looking at these three different movements theres this overlap like a diagram and douglas was right in that overlap, so when i started looking at all of the conventions especially the womens rights and the black Convention Movement because they were the most black Convention Movements were maledominated because with we had to be men, so our manhood in a. Of time in which black manhood was being very much demeaned and then the womens Rights Movement, which was predominantly white and middleclass and so every black Convention Movement when they talked about women and should women participate and speak, he was they are saying women should be part of this. Womens rights should be part of this and then when the civil where people tend to focus on a split is when the 15th amendment comes up. When the 15th amendment comes up there had been effort to make the 15th amendment that everyone can vote and what happened was it said just men could vote for a lot of people womens suffrage is which was not their finest moment with Susan B Anthony they said its all or nothing and we oppose this amendment and they said a lot of really like oh, no, no, please dont and others had to say look, take what you can get. Its politics. We didnt write this and we cannot risk everything. What weve got we cannot risk, so douglas said we have to take black Voting Rights and so this created a clash. So, there was a so there was a need for compromise, political compromise. I just interrupted you because it occurred to me that our next author, Blanche Wiesen Cook wrote very much about compromise. Of this is really an unfair question to ask someone who has completed three volumes on eleanor, but what was the essential quality that made her so great . I have a friend who is 90 years old and she still talks with wonder about reading Eleanor Roosevelts column, my day in the los angeles paper. What was that quality that made her so great . Thanks, bill. Before i answer any question i just want to say how grateful and happy i am to be here at the la times book festival and its a place where i had a lot of business in the old days. I want to do a shout out to tom crouch who is head of the la times book festival for decades and to bob scheer who you work with, bill, and a whole lotta folks. Here we are the 21st century needing this festival in this harmonic convergence more than ever, so thank you for coming and thank you for supporting this a great book festival. J, la times. [applause]. So, what makes Eleanor Roosevelt so special and i have to say when i finished my eisenhower book declassified eisenhower i wrote in my journal i have now spent most of my vital youth with one dead gentlemen. [laughter] now i have spent most of my life with Eleanor Roosevelt. Its been a very long time and im so happy i did it because Eleanor Roosevelt never stop growing and changing and what makes her so great is that her friend, lady steller readying, this wonderful woman who ran the wartime emergency help brigade in england during world war ii said Eleanor Roosevelts first love was the people and that really, i think, is the essence of Eleanor Roosevelt. She loves people and she wanted to make life better for everyone in want, in need in trouble. She went around the country and around the world and she said tell me what do you want, what do you need and everyone is always asking how did she get that way and the answer seems to me at this point simple. Her father who she loved very much was alcoholic who died at the age of 34 and so we need to pause and say how much do you have to drink to die at the age of 34 i mean, we are still here. [laughter] and her mother died when Eleanor Roosevelt was eight. She essentially turned her face to the wall and her father died when she was 10 and Eleanor Roosevelt spent the rest of her life growing and changing wanting to make the world better for people in want, in need, in trouble, people just like her own family. It didnt matter that she was privileged or that her uncle is beautiful roosevelt. She really had empathy for humanity and she really did cs as all connected, which i can talk about later as i want to talk about wendell wilkie. Everything that happens anywhere affects everyone everywhere. We are all connected and he wrote that in 1942 and that became Eleanor Roosevelts wartime postwar vision, which he articulated even before that and so for me her work against bigotry and discrimination and segregation, her work for human rights and dignity for all people and she always said what we need above all is education, even before learning Eleanor Roosevelt said we need free, Public Higher Education for everyone,. [applause]. She said that in 1932. In 1934 the first time the educators of the america had a resolution to condemn segregation Eleanor Roosevelt was on the stage and give a brilliant speech and this is in volume two in volume three in which she concludes by saying, why dont we understand . We all go ahead together or we all go down together and thats where we are today and her legacy is immediate and because she had hoped and she said courage can be a as contagious. I hope we have hope and we come back to a relationship with her husband. She was his conscience and he was her barometer i wanted to ask susan about that. It was very interesting. By the way i was taken with your with lorena hickok. Who is the star reporter of the Associated Press in the 20s and 30s and i had worked for the Associated Press for 10 years in the 60s and at that, 30 years later, it was sexist like all news organizations at the time. It was a sexist men only pretty much organization with a Glass Ceiling that no woman could penetrate and yet, he was this female reporter who moved ahead and didnt do the little feature stories that they made women do about sick kids or things like that, but who covered political campaigns, i mean, who is out there with the guys and rose to the top of her profession. She came from a very poor background. What were the qualities that pushed her head and what the qualities that made her the woman behind the woman that endeared her to a litter roosevelt because she mustve been like no one roosevelt avenue. Well, actually not because Eleanor Roosevelt actually like to sort of workingclass people. She had had a relationship even before the arena with fdrs bodyguard and she was attracted to kind of rough edged people and she was one of those people and it was remarkable. Im glad to hear you affirm how sexist the ap was because it was definitely that in the 1930s and i quote her in my book talking about how angry she was about getting assigned to triplea trivial stories and she said sometimes it makes me savage. Hick was full of indignation, full of feeling, full of empathy , but she did fight to cover the big stories and at first she didnt even want to cover eleanor. She wanted to cover fdr, but then she began to perceive the Eleanor Roosevelt was not an ordinary first lady and she wasnt going to have to just right for the womens page about Eleanor Roosevelt because eleanor had a much more serious message and was a much more serious person and that was the beginning of the relationship and she had been at the top of ap and had written about the lindbergh kidnapping, for instance, kind of the big stories, the front page of stories and in 1932 she met eleanor. She knew eleanor little bit from the years of her being the governors wife in new york, but she really really got to know her when she was covering the fdr campaigned in 1932 and they began to confide in each other and as blanche has said, despite her privileged childhood, eleanor had a very lonely and sad childhood in many ways and so did lorena hickok, but a very different kind. She came from a very poor family, violent abusive father who could not keep a job and they traveled from one Little Railroad town to the next in the dakotas and he will everyone called her hit hick, but he beat and killed her pets and he beat her, also. Finally, her mother died when she was 12 and she was pretty much kicked out of her house at 13 and lived life as a girl, working as a girl in other peoples houses , barely making it through high school, so its quite remarkable that she became so successful. There was a determination, a deep kind of fight in her and that one out in the end and she was also tough. She was very tough and in fact the beginning of that relationship with eleanor was when she got another reporter got to go on a private trip with the roosevelt and she didnt and she was very angry about it and she spoke up and thats when eleanor had noticed her for the first time. She was a fighter, but she was also very very empathic person. Her stories always when she was at the Minneapolis Tribune and also as it ap reporter with these empathic stories often about people going through hard times. There was another reporter on the train he said that hick would go out when they made these whistle stops and talk with people who were coming to the whistle stops year after and she would come back on the train was tears are streaming down her face because she heard these stories of hardship and she like eleanor had tremendous empathy for peoples struggles. Then, of course, she gave it all up for love in a way, but also its important to say that the title it was like the women behind the men , but she was actually the women behind the woman and hicks really did help eleanor to shave her first lady hood if that is the word and to help her to become the unique first lady that she was and you mention in that kind of grew out of the correspondence between hicks and eleanor and eleanor sort of doing a kind of diary for hick of her day out of that came the idea, it may been hick or both of theirs to do this call him, which she continued to do her entire life, almost to the end 60s and week and introduced her to the American People and to the world and that was one of the ways and there were a number and we can talk about the others in which hick was the woman behind the woman and had a really important fact on Eleanor Roosevelt role in leadership is the first lady of the world. Can you imagine a better way of getting a message through to your husband president when he wouldnt talk to you and he had to pick up the paper in the morning [laughter] how many of you have seen paul conrads greatest sculpture in santa monica called Chain Reaction . Its really something and of course the location of it across from land, the think tank that conceived our Nuclear Policy is perfect and must please conrad. Well, anyway, in a city of santa monica whose greatness, political greatness is greatly overrated, was going to tear it down or move it to some i dont know someplace out and made pico where no one could see it and a group of people raised the money to save it and lisa, lisa napoli a journalist went out there to see about that and jerry rubin who was kind of putting all of this together told her that the big generous person was named joan kroc and she was the widow of ray kroc and from that lisa napoli began a search for who was this woman, what was she like and at the same time began to discover her husband who was bombastic, egotistical, totally selfcentered, conservative, unconsidered of other people does this sound familiar . She wrote this excellent book that i really enjoy being a fan of that statue. Alisa, went to ask you ray was such a obsessive , pushing the widow as i said, how could joan stick with him . Was it love . Was it money . What was it can make good question. I had to clarify something, though. Joan didnt pay to restore the sculpture. Joan paid for the sculpture in the first place and what i wondered as i stood in a neat. Dot cloud sculpture and im glad you enjoyed my book, thank you. I asked jerry rubin who is a local peace activists and unfortunately he could not be here today, i asked him who paid for it the first place when it was built in 1991 and thats when he whispered to me because he knew someone in public radio would know joan krocs name as you all know if you listen to public radio her name is repeated every day in 2003 when she died she gave an enormous bequest to the network, so he had said to me that she anonymously had funded the sculpture in the first place in 91 and there we were in 2014 standing underneath it with paul conrads son, dave, and they were wringing their hands about how to raise the money to convince the city to tear it down. It wasnt supposed to be there in the first place initially it was going to be in Beverly Hills, but thats another story. Beverly hills did not when a sculpture of a Nuclear Mushroom cloud in Beverly Hills and santa monica didnt want to be there, but i would rather talk about joan since thats why you are here and in hearing these other esteemed authors talk about women, the roots of women who were great forces in our great country, joan kroc was underrecognized in my estimation because she really was a great philanthropist, the likes of gates and buffett, but never got her do because she was associated with mcdonalds, which is a polarizing force and b because she really didnt want any recognition and to answer your question, why did she stick with ray, its important to point out that she did not marry ray for 12 years until after they met. They were married to other people. He divorced wife one, married life to while waiting for joan who is 26 years younger to agree to marry him and i believe that she had trepidation once she finally married him in 1969 and a couple of years later she filed for divorce because in addition to the other qualities you listed about ray, he was also an abusive alcoholic and joan couldnt take it anymore, but she decided to stay in the marriage and one might deduce cynically that she stayed because of money. He was 26 years older and when he died in 1984 , by the time he died in 84 joan had created herself and he had a deep craving for a whiskey called early times and i was telling lisa beforehand having consumed some of it i objected to her calling it rot got. And joan, what made me fall in love with joan as i was trying to understand why she had funded this peace sculpture in santa monica nowhere near her last home in san diego with paul conrad, how did she meet him. What made me fall in love with her first, in the face of an alcoholism, she had gone to al alanon, and instead of getting ray help, she got herself help and so in love with alanon took a chunk of rays funds and started operation cork, kroc spelled backwards and proceed today use the mcdonalds pr machine which as we know with as enormous, to get these commissioned at the highest levels, she got the best and brightest, and then disseminate them all around the country. Movies on tv, books through selfaddressed stamped envelopes, through dear abby, et cetera, et cetera, Public Service announcements that aired on television stations and basically stuck it to him and the mcdonalds machine was very concerned that she was going to out this man, seen if you may remember, in the 70s, especially, as this Horatio Alger boy scout, fabulous guy. Joan knew the secret and she never outed him while he was alive, but started this Massive Organization that was seminal in the Alcohol Movement burgeoning in the 70s. Thats why she stuck with him. She saw the money he had was an avenue for her to tap into her deep and abiding empathy and compassion, as had grown up uneducated. You know, as i was reading these books, i was trying to think of a theme, thats what moderators at the festival of books always have this problem of having a unified theme kind of hold it altogether. And i was thinking that all of the women, including the several women you wrote about, elinore, joan, they had the ability and i want you to comment on this after i ask the question and then maybe discuss it back and forth they had the ability to see beyond themselves, to see the great world outside themselves. None of them were content with the traditional role of women at the time. Instead, as i said, they saw a troubled world and were going to fix it. We kind of live in a different generation here. What can this generation of women learn from the women you wrote about . Ill start with you. Okay. And please, please just feel free to, you know, if you have some thoughts, you dont have to disagree, but if you have some thoughts, just interrupt, its okay. [laughter] you mean like and this is the festival of books. When i worked at it, it was pandemonium on a lot of days. Lets have that. Okay. Tell me, what can women learn from the many women who helped Frederick Douglas become Frederick Douglas . What can they learn. Well, i mean, they were living in quite a different time. I mean, they were living in a time in which they had to, i guess the one they think is you use the tools that you have at your disposal, and what i found was most of the women that i was writing about, because they theyre mostly living in the 19th century, roles for women and each, they had their agenda, and what they saw with douglas was the way to pursue that agenda, and the ones that he most admired that were the most influential to him were the ones who were willing to push those boundaries, that they didnt stay within necessarily the prescribed roles, so they were willing to break those roles. Im not i never thought of them in terms of having lessens to teach this generation of women, because, again, theyre they were just living in a wholly different world. Well, elinore roosevelt lived in a wholly different world and she had things to teach. Let me just say that elinore roosevelt believed in building movements and she didnt live in a world totally different, she lived in a world of fascism and tyranny, a world familiar to us. Fascism, tyranny, bigotry and hope and one of the things about two things you said, one, you said lets look at how women are more like today. She made say to Hillary Rodham clinton, dont you remember, men hate women with power. And elinore roosevelt was asked many times to run for office and she said she would rather be chloroformed rather than run for office. Women werent united hadnt gone doortodoor, block by block, community to community, to build a womens movement, a justice movement. We have to build movements thats what she did. She influenced clair booth hwhose husband was an editor and she was behind the movement to get and said she was among the best loved women because no woman has comforted the distressed or distressed the comfortable. You want to say something, leigh, i can tell. Now that you said that, it takes me out of my box. Thats kind of a shame that shes saying that women arent ready for it, because 100 they had to learn the lesson. You had the women breaking prohibition on them and pulling together,s pulling together. I didnt want to steal your. Okay, ill and pulling together, doortodoor, getting women to sign petitions and presenting them to state legislatures, having fund raising events, they called them sewing circles, they were ladies Antislavery Society sewing circles, i know they sound so again genteel, but they were sewing crafts and things and they would sell at fairs and they were useful items for women like aprons and baby bonnets which raided money to buy a ticket to send a fugitive slave on an actual railroad to canada or to pay for legal defense. So their Fund Raisings and they kept the movement going during the lulls. So, this kind of organization, you do have these moments within womens history where it gets lost and its sad that eleanors greatgrandmother was doing this or her generation and then well, she wanted to continue doing it. She called it trooping for democracy. Trooping for democracy. And i dont want to hog the time, but i do want to you said you didnt want to steal my line and my line is, i never go anywhere without my gang and im very greatful for my gang here, clair is here, and you know, we need each other and eleanor and i want to talk a little when i come back about Eleanor Roosevelts gang who really did introduce the changes. Theres something about Eleanor Roosevelt that bothered me. Okay. And about roosevelt, too, but im sorry to interrupt, but i really wanted to talk about it. Compromise, compromise. Yes, well that now, she compromised, she compromised with her marriage, with lucy mercer rutherford, and she compromised lucy mercer and her deepest principles. She stood by while roosevelt, during the war so intent was he on the war that he collaborated with the fascist admiral and he was less than enthusiastic about saving the european jews. Absolutely. And he and eleanor pushed him hard to support antilynching legislation and he would not because he didnt want to alienate needed his southern senators for his agenda. He was a tactician, she was the moral force and theres no doubt that that team was really important. I was also going to point out that eleanor was a wonderful listener to people and i think all of her politics in a way, even though she believed in organizations, she was actual very personal in the way that she learned about the world and the way that she responded to peoples needs and there was a kind of a tolerance, a tolerance of a huge range of opinions. You know, even after Martha Gelhorn tried to only a riot the wpa out in the field and eleanor invited her to the white house to stay there and write her next novel. You know, she and hick in the same way, in a way that we could learn from now, hick went out into the countryside and listened to people and heard their stories and heard their struggles and were so dwig divided now, wer not listening well to each other and hick, who wrote wonderfully about this, also taught that lesson in a really important way. You have something to say about this . Well, i dont want to interrupt. No, please go ahead, interrupt. And i know were supposed to, he told us we should. Cnn style. Joan was incredibly political without and refused to run for office in the 80s at the height of her Nuclear Disarmament campaign. She was buying newspaper ads across the country and funding her Daughters Group to fund marches and giving to Walter Mondale and working very closely with Norman Cousins and et cetera, et cetera, and she refused to run for office because she recognized that she had this power with this money, but what we can learn from her, because most of us dont have the 3 billion that she gave away at the end of her life, and many, many hundreds of millions of dollars through her life, is that she never saw something and ignored it. She went when a man went into an mcdonalds and committed the worst mass murder at the time in history in 1984, six months after her husband died, she didnt wait till mcdonalds came forward. She came forward and plunked down 100,000 and went to where the mcdonalds was and met with the bereaved families and Community Members for months and months afterward. And time and time again, she acted when she saw something. When her husband and her father had died in hospice, again, the Early Movement of hospice in this country, she was so taken by what hospice offered that she, behind the scenes, worked with the hospice in san diego to help them secure land for the First Freestanding hospice in san diego. So she, you know, she did what many of us wished we could do. She saw a flood on tv, she flew Maureen Oconnor, the former mayor of san diego, and part of the troika with the newspaper in san diego, she flew her friend in with a check for 15 million. What we can learn about these and other women, were writing books about them. They didnt sit back and wait for someone else to do something or let a man allow them to do something, they just acted and, you know, dealt with the consequences later if there were any. I think thats a remarkably important thing for us all to know and hear and why i spent five years working on this book. Thats important message. I just, you know, compromise, Eleanor Roosevelt compromised, but never gave up her vision so that let me just give one example, health care. Were talking about single payer. And nobody has yet written a biographer of lape, lape, eleanor eleanors, she and elizabeth reed, and envisioned Single Payer Health care it was supposed to be in the 1930s Social Security act and fdr wobbled and didnt want to get into a fight with the physicians of america. Over the years 1940, refused to meet with esther lape. They continued to fight for single payer when eisenhower was president. Eisenhower wanted to have what was going to be single payer, very simple, like the military, everybody covered. Is that okay with you, he said to the first woman head of hew and a lot of people thought she was from texas and therefore a racist, but she was life long member of the naacp they brought in Eleanor Roosevelt and esther lape to fight for single payer, and Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a firebrand and loved young people, but when she came to visit the young people in the 1960s, go south for freedom, the students are sitting in and encouraged all of us who took bus us to north carolina, she never gave up, always fought and i think, you know. Fdr was her barometer. She did compromise on some things. Im not sure she compromised and lucy mercer, but she did on missy lahand she rather liked having in the white house, called her the second wife, and it freed her. I dont think that compromise is the right word to describe Eleanor Roosevelt. She actually never gave up on anything and fdr said to hick at one point, he said, he called eleanor the mrs. Never argue with the mrs. , because you think youve got her beaten here and she pops up over there. You think youve got her beaten here and she pops up over there. Thats true, she did not give up on her causes and thats one of the things at that actually drove fdr crazy and, you know, there were times when it just infuriated him because she would keep coming back and back and back to her issues and her causes, so i dont think she as much compromised, i think she just saw the goal, you know, and kept working at it and nibbling away and with a lot of success. Also, to get back to the question of what you can learn, what young people can learn today, and i see young people actually Getting Better about this, but one of the you can learn from their mistakes, too. And one of the things that i thought that these when i was describing this free movement, Establishment Movement was better at this than the other two movements, but especially in the womens movement, cutting across, you know, what we call today intersectionalty, intersections, whenever black women, they were more welcoming of black women in some ways in the womens Rights Movements in the 1850s than they were of welcoming women in the black Convention Movement, but only to a certain level. Its like, we welcome you, just not in leadership role, and whenever the black women would say, well, lets talk about how black women are affected in these ways, as black women. And they said, oh, no, no, this isnt an Antislavery Movement, this isnt an anticivil rights meeting. Thats interesting, those same currents persisted through the civil Rights Movement. Were going to open this up for questions from the audience, but before we do, if you remember, what is the great quote from Adly Stevenson in his eulogy of Eleanor Roosevelt about the candle. Shed rather light a candle than curse the darkness. In addition to that, i just wanted one line, every woman in political life needs to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide, hearts open. [applause] lets see, we have microphones out there. Ill call on somebody for a question. Well, i have a question. How was joan kroc received by the very maledominated Sports Society . She owned the San Diego Padres baseball team, and by and also by the maledominated san diego political world . I know the mayor, Maureen Oconnor was a woman and helen copley owned the newspaper, but as i remember san diego, it was pretty much a republican old boys place. How was joan kroc received . Well, also by the mcdonalds executives because you can imagine when a beautiful 40yearold woman married the chairman, 26 years older, and asserted her ambition and intellect in a world where she was basically expected to be a watch fob or a patsy, they werent too thrilled. They were worried when ray died that she might assert her authority in mcdonalds, which they never did. The San Diego Padres were a fun and i wish someone would write a book all about that, but she inherited the team when ray died in 1984, so she went from, in 1974 when ray bought the team, saying, why would you want to buy a monastery, when he told her that he bought the San Diego Padres. [laughter] to sitting the then manager of the team, the exalted fabulous man in baseball and asking where first base was and i could go on and on with stories like that, to actually having to run the team and at the end of her tenure as the team owner, wanting recognizing how powerful baseball was, wanting to give the team to san diego as a gift and set up a trust to maintain it, but in answer to your question, the San Diego Padres, most notably goose gossage, the star pitcher at the time said that joan when she tried to ban beer from the clubhouse because of her antialcohol campaign, was poisoning the world with her hamburgers and trying to do this to the team. It was fascinating and to learn about old baseball executives about for sure. Yes. Get the microphone. In writing biography one usually comes upon some surprises in the people youre writing about. Could any of you comment on what surprise you most sometimes the surprises are disappointing. You know, inot always positive but what in your writing surprised you about the characters about which the people about whom you were writing . Oh, well, there were several things come to mind. One thing which was surprising was that eleanors circle really was a circle of women who loved other women, women who were in lifetime partnerships with other women. In those early political women who were in Suffrage Movement and then continued to be part of the Democratic Party and to be a part of eleanors life, the two women with whom she built and designed, esther lape and her partner were important to her, so these women, women in life partnerships provided her education. One of the reasons i think its not so surprising that when hick came along, this could naturally become, for a number of years, a love affair, because she was surrounded by these with i am couples. That was one thing. Another more negative thing was various antisemitism of two kind, eleanors in her earlier life a kind of genteel cultural antisemitism which was widely shared. There is a letter later where hick is railing and someone isnt doing what she wants and called that person a k and heff her descriptions of black people was degrading and seemingly not entirely human and so that, particularly that racism, eleanor helped her with a lot, i think. And let me just say i asked joe lash once why he never had hick in any of his books and he said, i hated her, and as a matter of fact, it was the first hick book and im so grateful to susan quinns book which everybody has to read, because you really humanize hick and give us the big picture, but joe said he was the one who encouraged me to write Eleanor Roosevelt. He hated her because she was a bigot. For me the big surprise was joes wife, Eleanor Roosevelt is a serial romantic, she goes from earl, to hick, to younger people, like joe, and truda, read my book, its really weird. The bottom line, she gets very involved in the relationship, truda to me is a surprise, and somebody needs to write a back about gertrude lash who was a member of the german underground and she and the german american friends for german freedom are responsible for a rescue operation. Before she died, she never wanted anybody to know this and never wanted joe to write about it and he didnt, but before she died i said to her on her desk, we were good friends, whats up with nobody giving you credit for the rescue of the jews, for the bavarian rescue operation, that tiny little moment of haven, only a thousand people let in to the united states, and she banged her fist on her table in Marthas Vineyard and said dont write that. And i said im going to write it. Before she died she wrote me a letter, she said yes, its true, i should write it and her children gave me a lot of papers theyre going to the fdr library, but the hero of this story, somebody who really encouraged Eleanor Roosevelt and eleanor rez roosevelt made it possible toment help save the jews that were saved was truda lash and that was a big surprise. I want to say about joe lash hating hick, all hick haters and it went both ways and i also want to say about hick, that she grew up, you know, in these impoverished parts of the south dakota and so on, you know, where she was not exposed at all to race issues in the way that she was when she went to the south and that i do feel that like eleanor, hick was grew a lot, and i also think that on the basic a human onetoone level, that hick was a very compassionate person herself had such poverty and struggle that she understood it in others so just a little defense of hick here. Well, id like to thank you all for a very enlightening and entertainment segment. [applause] blanche cook is going to is heading up to San Francisco for the wedding of a godchild and so she will not be able to make the book signing session. But that books going to be on sale and you can find it easily enough. I cant promise you that shell come over to your house. But ill si