“A mission is what does it for you; you must have a mission.” Thus Doris Haddock, a.k.a. Granny D, explains her motivation as a 93-year old, five-foot-tall woman out to change the world.
She strikes the same theme in the subtitle of her 2003 paperback memoir: “You’re never too old to raise a little hell.”
Granny D is the woman who, when she was 89, walked across the whole of the USA. Starting in Pasadena, she ended up 3200 miles later in Washington, D.C. where she climaxed the effort to get campaign finance reform made law.
After initial opposition from her son, she managed to get his approval for the great walk. This she did by engaging in a training program of walks, near her Dublin, New Hampshire home, for most of a year previous to the big trek. She took her son’s interference with a measure of irritation and tolerance, telling me about adult children: “They become our parents when we get to be 80.”
An unexpected personal benefit from this great escapade came in an improvement in both of her main ailments: high blood pressure and emphysema.
On her arrival at the nation’s capital, she was met by 2200 people, with several dozen members of Congress walking the final miles with her. During the final three days of debate on senate floor, she walked around the Capitol building 24 hours a day, some of it in subzero winds and rain, stopping only to rest and to eat.
On the 14-month hike, she adopted as her guide the motto: “walking till given shelter, fasting till given food.” Presumably she brought extra shoes with her because she wore out four pairs.
In a conversation with Granny D last week, I was surprised to discover how late in life she has turned to political action. Most of her working years she spent in a Manchester, New Hampshire shoe factory until her retirement in 1972. Earlier she had studied at Emerson College in Boston, an institution that gave her an honorary degree in 2000.
I found it a pleasure to converse with this dynamic woman. With the help of two hearing aids she responded articulately to everything I asked. Like so many other people in her age bracket, she expresses amazement at having arrived there. “I can’t believe I’m that old,” she says. At the same time, age has brought her a sense of vulnerability: “I may die tomorrow,” she tells me.
But her mission drives her ahead. Now she is campaigning for public financing of elections on a trip that will take her on a 15,000 mile trek across some of America. This time, however, she is not going to walk the whole route but instead only in cities where she stops.
“The only thing that will save our democracy is public financing,” she believes. Her message aims especially at working women in the effort to make sure they vote. She says that this group is underrepresented among voters because they are overworked and stressed for time.
To begin her new voter registration campaign, she spoke at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. There she made a ringing condemnation of what big money has done to this country. Referring to the people she met on her walk, Granny D spoke of those “who came to actual tears when they described their frustration at the loss of their America.”
She made a reference to “senior moments” that especially pleased me because of my one-man campaign to get people to use it positively. For Granny D, “it is when I talk to the senior class in high schools along my way, for they are our newest voters and I am going to sign them up, four million of them if I can.”
Getting people to vote is her current passion. “On the road, I will not suggest how people should vote,” she says, “only that they should vote. They should study the issues and the candidates for themselves, and we will be all right if they get enough good information.”
In not a few ways, Granny D reminds me of another woman I knew whose political consciousness drove her on to strenuous action in later life. That was Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers (whom Granny D seems never to have heard of.) Both physically small, the two women were to display a personal dynamism that made them different from most other people. Like Maggie, Granny D cares passionately about the larger community and resists the temptation felt by most of their age peers to focus in upon herself.
Like Maggie, Granny D wants to share this spirit with others. In the words she inscribed for me on the title page of her memoir, she wrote: “One step in front of the next will get you Anywhere!”
Richard Griffin