“I was engaged, mind you, back in Texas, but in a way I dropped everything. She fell in love with Washington on her first visit in 1966. Schwartz grew up hard, working in Oak Ridge, Tennessee Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and finally in Midland, Texas, where, raised in the Jewish faith, she got a taste of anti-Semitism. We talked by phone this time, but I’ve seen her at work - in her office at the Wilson Building when she was on the Council, out on the street carrying election signs, dancing on election night as results streamed across a television screen the night George W. The result has been major league and hefty, 744 pages of memoir, stories, anecdotes (plus notes), pictures and musings. She told one writer it could have been 1,500 pages, and it’s hard to argue with that. Schwartz has been working on the book in the aftermath of her defeat in the 2014 election, won by Bowser, who is up for reelection next year. And if there are people that don’t know her, that omission has been taken care of with the coming of her book “Quite a Life! From Defeat to Defeat … and Back.” The book’s subtitle is “The story of a Republican (now an Independent) gal from Texas who tried hard to become Democratic Washington, D.C.’s Mayor.” This process repeated itself later when we took the 42 bus to Adams Morgan, during which a woman introduced her to the rest of the passengers as a candidate for mayor. People gave her a cheerful round of applause. She seems a person of moving parts, hopscotching through topics and moods like a cast member of “Singing in the Rain.” Sitting there talking, you got a sense of who she was and even what she meant to the city. People kept saying hello. “I’m voting for you,” a middle-aged black woman said, coming up for a greeting. It was one of those casual, midweek afternoons in Washington, tourists jostling with regulars, young and not-so-young professionals making their way through the book stacks, having a late lunch. Schwartz was running as an independent against fellow independent David Catania and Democrat Muriel Bowser, the odds-on favorite at the time, having vanquished her main rival, incumbent Vincent Gray (also a Democrat). We talked about the campaign, which featured some unique things.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |