In reading The Bernardsville News, I stumbled upon the story of an award presented to a friend, Charles Lind of Basking Ridge. Mr. Lind was honored with the Millicent Fenwick Memorial Civic Award for his work with senior housing and the VNA of Somerset Hills.
Millicent Fenwick could not have been a better model for people such as Charles, who volunteer their time in the public square, or who serve as elected officials. Seeing her name in print jogged my memory back to the time when my family and I moved to Bridgewater in mid-1970, shortly after Mrs. Fenwick was first elected to the U.S. Congress at the age of 64.
Tom Kean, who wrote the foreword to her 2003 biography, Millicent Fenwick: Her Way, observed that, “You couldn't invent Millicent Fenwick. She was unique. The best writers of fiction might have struggled to make her believable, but they would have failed.” Gary Trudeau, author of the comic strip Doonesbury recognized her inimitability and cast her in the role of his famous pipe-smoking character, Lacey Davenport.
For me, though, Kean’s best and most accurate description of Fenwick is that, “Above all things, she hated hypocrisy and those who abused the public trust.”
A wealthy New Jersey patrician, Mrs. Fenwick was, nonetheless, a tireless worker and a pioneer in advancements on a broad spectrum of civil rights. I think that we still have a few people of Fenwick’s caliber around today, but it’s getting harder for them to make an impact and to maintain their integrity in the way that she was able to. Mrs. Fenwick served four terms in Congress and, in 1982, narrowly lost a bid for the U.S. Senate to Frank Lautenberg.
No comments:
Post a Comment