I spent the afternoon at Ellen
Fletcher's memorial service. It was nice. The event was in the
Jewish Community Center at the back of a gated community that's
now where Ford Aerospace was when I worked there. The room
probably held a few hundred comfortable guests as a nice theater.
Some were dressed as bicyclists, some wore casual clothes, and
some wore funeral suits. There was no body or anything like that;
this was just a public memorial service. The newspaper had
invitations to it in her obituary and stuff like that. Everybody
who wanted to be there was welcome.
The event was started by a Rabbi.
She talked about meeting Ellen Fletcher, already an old woman on a
bicycle whom she asked for directions one time. Ellen had added
something like "you can get there quicker on a bike" to the
directions. Late in her life she had been a regular at the
teacher's Tuesday weekly culture study group. She quit that a
short while before she died, when it became too hard to do
physically because of her advancing lung cancer.
Then they played a picture collage
from her life. Ellen as a kid with a couple of lion (tiger?) cubs.
Ellen as a young woman in front of the Empire State Building.
Ellen with her husband and a baby. Ellen running for City Council
as a youngish mature woman on a bicycle. Ellen getting some award
surrounded by big names. Ellen with a grandbaby and the parents.
Ellen on her bike as an old lady with a BICYCLING AGAINST OIL WARS
placard on the side of the basket. It was all quite touching.
Then her son read to us from an
autobiographical essay she had written. She talked about being a
young Jewish girl in Berlin, and experiencing persecution and
terrorism through a child's eyes. Her parents put her on a train
bound for Holland, and from there she got to England, still a
young girl. She had foster parents for the duration of the war,
but they put as little into her as they could. After her parents
escaped the Nazis she joined them in New York. After college she
came to CA with her husband, and they set up in Palo Alto, where
she got involved with local politics.
You
can read the whole thing by clicking here.
Ellen's daughter talked about how
her mother had a car, but she got only one tank of gas a year for
it. She described her arguments with her mother about trying to
use it. Ellen would tell her "money we spend on gas goes to Arab
sheiks and they use it to throw bombs at Israel." She enjoyed
helping her mother with political campaigns.
Former Councilwoman Emily Renzel,
who served on the Palo Alto City Council with Ellen Fletcher,
described those years. She had many glowing things to say about
Ellen's work on behalf of the residents of Palo Alto. The "other
team" was the one funded by developers who just wanted to make
money. She mentioned that Ellen was very much in favor of having
shops in all the ground level rooms on streets like California and
University Avenues because they add many interesting sights to
being a pedestrian there. That was a radical position when it got
her elected to City Council.
Paul Goldstone described knowing
Ellen Fletcher as a bicycling activist. He'd wanted to list all
the committees she'd been on and all the awards she'd gotten, but
he had only five minutes so he'd decided to be more episodic and
descriptive about it. She had an awesome grasp of both the big
picture and the minute details of getting progress on bicycling
issues. They had entered the political system in the '70s, when
the Arab oil boycotts had made energy efficiency a widely shared
goal, and there was much opportunity for progress.
Before introducing the next speaker the Rabbi asked us how many
had ridden their bikes to the event. A lot of hands went up, maybe
as many as half of us. She said "yet another tribute to Ellen
Fletcher's legacy."
An official employee of the City of
Palo Alto came up and read a proclamation that he assured us the
city would pass at Tuesday's session. It had lots of whereases
like "Ellen Fletcher invented the concept of a bicycle boulevard,
the first one of which now bears her name" and "Ellen Fletcher
made it possible for bicyclists to ride transit, including the
buses, Caltrain, and VTA Light Rail." I forget the exact wording
of the "therefore be it resolved that" part, but it was something
like "we honor her memory in Palo Alto." Then her children came up
and accepted the award. Everybody else gave them a round of
applause.
There was an open mike after that.
Another guy talked about knowing Ellen as a regional rep on the
American Bicyclists Association. Her son-in-law described finding
the envelope that had the accounting for the car on it. If
anything, the "one tank of gas a year" comment had been an
understatement of the situation. He found years that she hadn't
bought any gas at all. Peter Drekmeier talked about seeing a
picture of Ellen running a stop sign on a bicycle in the paper
early in his life. He found out years later that it was staged. I
talked about knowing her through TASC and being surprised when
they named Ellen Fletcher Bicycle Boulevard after her. I mentioned
that since then I've seen Ellen Fletcher riding her bike on her
street. Too bad the days of that happening are behind us. The guy
after me started ranting about how antisemitism is still alive in
this country, and we all need to fight it. Maybe he was right, but
that was so unpleasant I left the room.
Outside they had cucumber
sandwiches and coffee and butter cookies and that sort of stuff.
Plenty of other people were already out there. It wasn't really a
mixing crowd, but I talked to a few people. I met a guy who said
he worked with Ellen Fletcher on a bike path that ends at
Arastradero. I talked to a woman who worked with Ellen Fletcher on
bike parking at Stanford games. Turns out that was the big project
of Ellen's later years, making it easier to ride bicycles to
events by getting volunteers to organize and guard bike parking at
large events.
There was a display of honors that she had been given on a table.
I'm thinking the ink has faded on
the autographs of this one because Ellen hung it in a place she
liked to be with lots of light.
