Nun Better
Hey, you all know by now that I don’t have the fondest memories of my Catholic school days dealing with the nuns. They used to whack me with a 36-inch ruler and put me in a corner with a dunce cap. I’ve also been known to shoot my mouth off about a serious lack of people willing to stand up for a change in the good ol’ U S of A. Funny enough, one of the most courageous leaders I can think of is a nun.
Sister Patricia Daly was a gutsy Dominican nun who was not afraid to take on the corporate big boys. She stood up to the likes of Ford, Mobil, and especially General Electric. Sister Pat would show up at GE’s annual meeting and propose resolutions to publicize the dangers of eating fish from the Hudson River—because GE polluted the river to the high heavens dumping toxic PCBs from their factories. She had no problem duking it out with GE’s famous president Jack Welch. Until she hit the bye-bye a few weeks ago at the too-young age of 66, Sister Pat never backed down from a fight. “She lived in hope,” a friend said. It’s sad to lose somebody with that kind of get-up-and-go. Especially these days.
We also worked on the Hudson and Housatonic Rivers clean-up campaigns with New York-based environmental group Riverkeeper, teaming up with Hudson Riverkeeper John Cronin. John believed you change the world by starting in your own backyard. He started his career on the river working with folk legend and activist Pete Seeger on his sloop The Clearwater. Our other partner in the fight was environmental lawyer Bobby Kennedy, Jr. We ran this ad in a bunch of New York publications:
On the Housatonic fight we teamed up with the Federal EPA chief and old friend John DeVillars. GE had a huge plant in Pittsfield which is where “Neutron Jack” Welch started his career and, same deal, dumped PCBs into the Housatonic. So we followed the ad with a grassroots sticker campaign and plastered these stickers over New York and the Berkshires:
The best thing we did going guerilla was to fly a plane over one of Jack Welch’s favorite places in the world, the very exclusive Nantucket Golf Club. We knew when Jack was playing golf that day with his hotshot buddies. So we flew a plane towing a giant BLAME GE banner over the course, circling back again and again. When Jack kept seeing the plane coming back for another swoop, he went off like a neutron bomb and lived up to his nickname. After a long hard fight, GE was finally forced to start cleaning up those rivers.
Keep your dukes up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfxgGx2xkw8
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