10 Extraordinary Women, Part II Lives to Inspire Us All

August 2006 By Denny Hatch

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Miss DeLay was as well known for her easygoing, direct manner and her homey advice as she was for the demanding five-hour practice regimen she recommended in which full hours were devoted to technical basics, etudes, repertory pieces, concertos and works by Bach but also in which 10-minute breaks between hours were allowed. Instead of imposing her views about the great violin repertory on her pupils, she encouraged them to discuss their own interpretive ideas. If they appeared to be on the wrong path, she would gently steer them right. Some of her former students described her work in Zen-like terms.

DeLay’s alumni are a legion of the world’s greatest string players including Itzhak Perlman, Midori, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Shlomo Mintz as well as violinists in such world renowned string quartets as the Tokyo, Vermeer and Cleveland and concertmasters of the great orchestras of Berlin, Philadelphia, Amsterdam and Chicago. Fourteen of Delay’s students are on the Juilliard faculty. So often we focus on the stars and celebrities and ignore the equally brilliant and talented people in the background who make their consummate artistry possible.

7. Amelia Edwards (1831-1892)
The National Portrait Gallery exhibition, “Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers,” also featured the indomitable Amelia Edwards—English novelist, journalist, artist and renowned Egyptologist. Home-schooled by her mother, she showed great aptitude for writing, and at age 7 one of her poems was published. Her first story appeared when she was 12. Over the years she wrote stories, poems and novels, and then hit the big time in 1864 with a novel about bigamy titled, “Barbara’s History.” By age 30 she was financially independent and started traveling with a female companion. The two women developed a love of overcoming hardships and finding their way to little-known areas of the world. Among Edwards’ books were “ Sights and Stories: A Holiday Tour Through Northern Belgium (1862) and “Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys” (1873) that described a trek through the rugged Dolomites in northwestern Italy.

Edwards’ sketches are as compelling as her prose. Her life was changed when in 1870 she chartered a Nile yacht—a dahabiyeh—complete with captain and crew and sailed from Cairo to Nubia where she marveled at the massive the rock-cut temple at Abu Simbal with its four Brobdingnagian statues of Rameses II half-buried by the desert sands. A sampling of Edwards’ magnificent prose from her epic “A Thousand Miles up the Nile” (1891):

Meanwhile, it was wonderful to wake every morning close under the steep bank, and, without lifting one’s head from the pillow, to see that row of giant faces so close against the sky. They showed unearthly enough by moonlight; but not half so unearthly as in the grey of dawn. At that hour, the most solemn of the twenty-four, they wore a fixed and fatal look that was little less than appalling. As the sky warmed, this awful look was succeeded by a flush that mounted and deepened like the rising flush of life. For a moment they seemed to glow—to smile—to be transfigured. Then came a flash, as of thought itself. It was the first instantaneous flash of the risen sun. It lasted less than a second. It was gone almost before one could say that it was there. The next moment, mountain, river, and sky were distinct in the steady light of day; and the colossi—–mere colossi now—sat serene and stony in the open sunshine.

My wife, Peggy, and I took a Nile steamer from Aswan to Cairo in 1980, seeing the same sights as Edwards. But the modern guidebooks don’t begin to capture the excitement of discovery and the brilliant imagery conjured up by this magnificent, gutsy writer and artist who dazzled the world with knowledge and insights—not only into the history and archaeology of Egypt, but the everyday life on the Nile. Edwards’ account is as vivid and alive today as it was over a hundred years ago. Incidentally, this masterpiece is available for free on the Internet; a hyperlink can be found below.

8. Laura Hillenbrand (b. 1967)
My very favorite nonfiction book of all time—”Seabiscuit: An American Legend”—is the rip-roaring story of a small horse that captured the hearts of America during the great depression.

Hillenbrand’s knowledge of horses, of history and her ability to recreate the era and the aura of magic that Seabiscuit exuded is likely unmatched in literature. Her account of the lead-up to the Seabiscuit-War Admiral match race—and the race itself is simply thrilling beyond description.

Equal in power to Hillenbrand’s literary masterpiece is her personal struggle with a ghastly, little known and misdiagnosed illness, chronic fatigue syndrome, believed to be viral in origin and incurable. Virtually left an invalid by the disease, Hillenbrand could sometimes only write an hour a day, sometimes not for weeks on end. In a heartbreaking New Yorker account of her illness (see hyperlink below), she wrote:

What began as an article for American Heritage became an obsession, and in the next two years the obsession became a book. Borden and I moved to a cheap rental house farther downtown, and I arranged my life around the project. At the local library, I pored over documents and microfilm I requisitioned from the Library of Congress. If I looked down at my work, the room spun, so I perched my laptop on a stack of books in my office, and Borden jerry-rigged a device that held documents vertically. When I was too tired to sit at my desk, I set the laptop up on my bed. When I was too dizzy to read, I lay down and wrote with my eyes closed. Living in my subjects’ bodies, I forgot about my own.

“Seabiscuit: An American Legend,” which became a raging best-seller and a wonderful film is itself an inspiration, but no less so than the incredible struggle of the courageous young woman who created it.

9. Lara Logan (b. 1971)
The chief foreign correspondent for CBS, Lara Logan, is a 35-year-old blonde who bristles when she’s described in the media as a “former swimsuit model.” “For God’s sake,” she snaps, “modeling was something I did when I was a student to earn extra money. I had a beaten-up old car which was my pride and joy because I managed to buy that with my modeling money.” A 2002 profile about Logan in The Guardian describes her irritation at being passed over or not taken seriously at press conferences, even though she had covered conflicts and been in the thick of action in Africa and the Middle East for Britain’s GMTV. When she was named a news correspondent and contributor to 60 Minutes in 2002 by CBS, she flatly refused all overtures by the network make-up department. “They don’t want someone who is encumbered by all that crap,” she snarled.

South African by birth and a graduate of the University of Natal in Durban with a diploma in French language, culture and history from the Universite de L’Alliance Francaise in Paris, Logan is fluent in French and Afrikaans, and knows Portuguese.

This past June 5, I wrote in these pages that one night on the CBS Evening News, Bob Schieffer introduced Lara Logan as the CBS chief foreign correspondent:

My wife, Peggy, and I blinked. On screen came an exquisitely elegant young woman whose sultry looks belied her overpowering intelligence, her grasp of the issues and her rapid-fire delivery. The idea of a woman in her 30s as chief foreign correspondent took some getting used to. After all, this was the network of such hard-driving news legends as Edward R. Murrow, Eric Severeid, William L. Shirer, Charles Collingwood, Alexander Kendrick, Howard K. Smith and Walter Cronkite, to name a few. Then one evening last month, Logan—in body armor and helmet, and microphone in hand—was on camera in Ramadi when her patrol was ambushed and the marine just ahead of her was shot. With all hell breaking loose and surrounded by gunfire, she kept on narrating without missing a beat. Her coverage was at once electric, riveting and made the viewer’s blood run cold.

Logan’s peripatetic life takes her all over the globe, Afghanistan, Baghdad, Israel, and Lebanon, as well as occasional stops in London and New York. Married to basketball player Jason Siemon since 1999, Logan told television columnist Gail Shister that she guessed she spent two days in her London apartment this past June and basically has no life, no pets and no plants. “Her lilting South African voice is tinged with a fervor that a more polished reporter might try to hide,” wrote Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post. “But the 35-year-old Logan has no interest in tamping down the passions that drove her into journalism and fueled her rapid rise to the post of CBS’s chief foreign correspondent.”

On the news that her CBS colleague Kimberley Dozier was grievously wounded in Iraq and that her camera crew were killed, Logan told the Associated Press that, “If you really want to cover the story, if you believe in what you’re doing, you have absolutely no choice. If you want to be safe, don’t go to Iraq.”

Logan gets a lot of heat in the media—particularly the British tabloids—for her good looks combined with her intensity. Quite frankly, she inspires jealousy in people who are uncomfortable with attractive, capable, articulate women. Quite frankly, she inspires me to excel.

10. Rosa Parks (1913-2005)
In 1949 my father and mother divorced. It was the era before the easy divorce, and my father went to Las Vegas for a six-week residency. I went along. Two magical evenings are etched in memory—performances by Ella Fitzgerald at the Thunderbird and by Lena Horne at the Flamingo. At age 14 I didn’t think about segregation and had no idea that these two consummate artists weren’t allowed to stay in the hotel where they were on stage, but rather relegated to “colored only” accommodations. Looking back nearly 50 years I’m horrified. And angry.

In the years that followed the war, a few courageous people began to right the wrongs being done to African-Americans. One high-profile act was in 1947 when Branch Rickey, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, demolished the Jim Crow policies of baseball and hired Jackie Robinson, who became one of the towering figures of the sport. I had the rare privilege of seeing him one night at Ebbets Field as a boy—a game that I remember well.

But the single act that served as the catalyst for the turnaround of white inhumanity to black was not something done by a president, nor politician, nor a preacher, nor vocal activist. It was accomplished by a quiet, unassuming, infallibly polite African-American seamstress, Rosa Parks, who single-handedly took on the nastiness of the Montgomery, Ala., transportation system and brought it to its knees and brought the rest of the country with it.

On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks, 42 years old, was heading home from work on a bus when driver James Blake ordered four African-American passengers sitting in the “colored only” section of the bus to give up their seats to a white male. Parks refused. “Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats,” Blake said. She refused, and Blake called the cops.

“It was not pre-arranged,” she said later. “It just happened that the driver made a demand and I just didn’t feel like obeying his demand ... I was quite tired after spending a full day working.” In her words:

He pointed at me and said, ‘that one won’t stand up.’ The two policemen came near me and only one spoke to me. He asked me if the driver had asked me to stand up? I said, ‘yes.’ He asked me why I didn’t stand up, ... I told him I didn’t think I should have to stand up. So I asked him: ‘Why do you push us around?’ And he told me, ‘I don’t know, but the law is the law and you are under arrest.’”

Her trial lasted 30 minutes, and Parks was convicted for violating segregation laws and fined $10 plus $4 in court costs. “At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this. It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in.” Masses of people did indeed join in. The next day, the Women’s Political Council distributed 35,000 handbills with the following message:

We are asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 382 days, galvanized the country and propelled the eloquent Martin Luther King iinto the public’s consciousness. The rest is history. At her passing in October 2005, Parks was one of only 30 Americans honored by a public viewing and ceremonies in the Capitol Rotunda, taking her place with such giants as Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.

Incidentally, Parks was the only woman so honored, and in my opinion, the most influential woman of the 20th century.