She sat down with a kind of a gasp of relief. Her seat was close to the
platform, and I could see her bright excited eyes as she listened to
what she had started here. For the crowd, as though it had only been
waiting for this girl to speak its thought, now seized upon her
question. Sharp voices were heard all over the hall. Some said they
could get doctors, others knew of empty stores that could be had for
nothing and used as free food stations. An assistant cook from an ocean
liner told where his chief bought wholesale supplies. And the girl who
had roused this discussion, her nervousness forgotten now, rose up again
and again with so many quick, eager suggestions, that when the first
relief station was opened that evening she was one of those placed in
charge.
I saw her grow amazingly, for now I came to know her well. Her name was
Nora Ganey. At home that night when Eleanore said, "Remember, dear, I
want something to do that will let me see the strike for myself"--I
thought at once of this work of relief. Eleanore would be good at this,
she had trained herself in just such work. And it appealed to her at
once. She went down with me the next morning, and she and Nora Ganey,
though their lives had been so different, yet proved at once to be
kindred souls. Eleanore gave half her time to the work, and these two
became fast friends.
Before the strike Nora had sat all day in an office pounding a
typewriter, several nights a week she had gone to dances in public
halls, and that had made her entire life. In the strike she was at her
food station all day, and each evening till late she visited homes,
looking into appeals for aid and if need be issuing tickets for food.
She heard the bitterest stories from wives of harbor victims, and she
began telling these stories in speeches. Soon she was sent out over the
city to speak at meetings and ask for aid. With Eleanore I went one
night to hear this young stenographer speak to twenty thousand in
Madison Square Garden. And the strike leader who made that speech was
not the girl of two weeks before. Her life had been as utterly changed
as though she had jumped to another world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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