During the past few years, all sorts of things have happened that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime.
Here's another: a middle school named after a bike advocate.
Really. That school was commemorated yesterday at the ninth annual Bike Palo Alto.
The school's namesake, Ellen Fletcher, served for many years as a councilwoman in the San Francisco Bay Area city. Her advocacy is widely credited for making Palo Alto one of the most "welcoming" American cities for cyclists: She campaigned, successfully, for safer bike paths and bridges in a community where over 40 percent of middle schoolers choose to pedal to school.
With a role model like her, how could they not? She owned a car--a 1964 Plymouth Valiant--but almost never used it. In fact, she continued riding, both for transportation and recreation,until a year before she succumbed to lung cancer at age 83 in 2012.
Born in Berlin, she lived in a series of Jewish orphanages after her parents divorced. When the Nazis came to power, she and her father were deported because he was a Polish citizen. They were slated to go to his native land, but was able to get to London through the Kindertransport program.
A year before she died, she recalled seeing "everyone" biking in England. She shared the enthusiasm the Brits had for cycling at that time and brought it with her to New York, where she emigrated--at age 17-- in 1946 and enrolled in Hunter College. There, she said, she was "the only one who had a bike on campus" and rode it year-round.
Shortly after graduating, she moved to the Bay Area and continued riding in one of the few areas of the US with a measurable number of adult cyclists. Almost from the beginning, she was determined to put the bicycle on the radar of policy makers who, as she aptly noted, "were almost exclusively focused on cars."
One of the early fruits of her labor came in 1982, when Bryant Street opened as the "Bike Boulevard." It was renamed in her honor two decades later.
Palo Alto Bike, fittingly, followed Ellen Fletcher Bicycle Boulevard. I don't know which Bryant was honored with the street, but the school renamed for her originally bore the name of Lewis Terman. While his studies on giftedness and how intelligence influences health outcomes and other kinds of success made real contributions to psychology, his legacy is tainted for his advocacy of eugenics.
Although there can be no justice for the Holocaust, I think there is some small measure of cosmic recompense in seeing a school named for him renamed for someone who might have fallen victim to beliefs he advocated.
Here's another: a middle school named after a bike advocate.
Really. That school was commemorated yesterday at the ninth annual Bike Palo Alto.
The school's namesake, Ellen Fletcher, served for many years as a councilwoman in the San Francisco Bay Area city. Her advocacy is widely credited for making Palo Alto one of the most "welcoming" American cities for cyclists: She campaigned, successfully, for safer bike paths and bridges in a community where over 40 percent of middle schoolers choose to pedal to school.
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| Ellen Fletcher, at the dedication of the bike boulevard bearing her name, in 2002. |
With a role model like her, how could they not? She owned a car--a 1964 Plymouth Valiant--but almost never used it. In fact, she continued riding, both for transportation and recreation,until a year before she succumbed to lung cancer at age 83 in 2012.
Born in Berlin, she lived in a series of Jewish orphanages after her parents divorced. When the Nazis came to power, she and her father were deported because he was a Polish citizen. They were slated to go to his native land, but was able to get to London through the Kindertransport program.
A year before she died, she recalled seeing "everyone" biking in England. She shared the enthusiasm the Brits had for cycling at that time and brought it with her to New York, where she emigrated--at age 17-- in 1946 and enrolled in Hunter College. There, she said, she was "the only one who had a bike on campus" and rode it year-round.
Shortly after graduating, she moved to the Bay Area and continued riding in one of the few areas of the US with a measurable number of adult cyclists. Almost from the beginning, she was determined to put the bicycle on the radar of policy makers who, as she aptly noted, "were almost exclusively focused on cars."
One of the early fruits of her labor came in 1982, when Bryant Street opened as the "Bike Boulevard." It was renamed in her honor two decades later.
Palo Alto Bike, fittingly, followed Ellen Fletcher Bicycle Boulevard. I don't know which Bryant was honored with the street, but the school renamed for her originally bore the name of Lewis Terman. While his studies on giftedness and how intelligence influences health outcomes and other kinds of success made real contributions to psychology, his legacy is tainted for his advocacy of eugenics.
Although there can be no justice for the Holocaust, I think there is some small measure of cosmic recompense in seeing a school named for him renamed for someone who might have fallen victim to beliefs he advocated.
