Dagmar Wilson. RIP.
My grandson, Joey, celebrated his third birthday yesterday. His mom claims that in the obstinate tradition of our family he insisted that he was still two.
I think he gets that stubborn DNA, in part, from his great-grandmother, Helen.
She was a very stubborn woman.
It would be hard for anyone to imagine that a major immediate health threat to Joey would be poisonous fallout from an atomic bomb.
In 1960, strontium 90, atomic particles that caused cancer, were in every child’s milk.
Atomic clouds hung over the Los Angeles basin from the above-ground atomic testing that was taking place a couple of hundred miles away in southern Nevada.
All this was a part of the US and Soviet arms race and looming threat of nuclear war that could destroy the physical planet Earth.
It was this that caused thousands of woman across the US to form Women’s Strike for Peace. And in November of 1961 50,000 women did go on strike. Mostly in Washington D.C.
My stubborn mom and her stubborn women friends like Millie, Ruth and Aunt Bea walked the picket line in LA too.
Dagmar Wilson, a children’s book author and activist, came up with the idea of a strike by women for peace.
Dagmar Wilson died on January 6 at the age of 94.
If Joey knew, I think he would thank her.
