From Greg Palast Website
Look at the photo, her last one, taken a couple weeks ago. A few days before she died.
There's a message for you there. And it's way bigger than the IMPEACH TRUMP T-shirt she's wearing.
What message? It begins in Chicago. 1920s. Her dad, Grandpa Alex, was a milkman, schlepping milk cans by horse-drawn cart.
At the time, a kid could get into the movies for 10 cents; and her mother gave her the dime to go every week. For 10 weeks straight, my mother went to the movies, but didn't go in. For 10 weeks she saved the ten cents, and looked for a warm place in the Chicago snow to wait for her brothers and sisters to come out of the theater.
Until she had a dollar to get her mom a birthday present.
In 1943, during World War II, Gladys Palast was the first woman to enlist in the US Coast Guard.
I wish I could say Mom signed up to lick Hitler. But, truth is, she did it to get out of a wedding engagement to Lou Wishman -- because she was really in love with my father.
That year they got married before he was shipped to the Philippines.
But don't get me wrong: My mother was a super-patriot. Mom liked to wear goofy red, white and blue outfits for public events.
In the military, my mother became a fashion model, showing off their new Chanel dress suit uniforms -- then a Chorus line girl for Sid Caesar's USO show.
She loved showbiz. But she didn't want to be in movies or in theaters. She thought life gives you plenty of opportunities to make you a star, a star in the lives of the people you know.
Not that she didn't have her 15 minutes of fame now and again.
In 1988, Mom was a delegate to the Democratic Party Convention in Atlanta. But the maids and janitors at the Atlanta Marriott were on strike. My mother donned her red-white-and-blue outfit, added a mop and bucket -- dressed union pickets with the same outfits -- and challenged the Democrats not to cross the picket line. It put her and her mop on the cover of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
This wasn't noblesse oblige for the poor little janitors and maids. These people were Mom's people. Her mother, was a maid her entire life.
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