Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [39]
Gabby was no pushover. She came from the Wild West, remember, and walked the campus in cowboy boots. Behind her sweet smile was a tough broad, especially if someone messed with her. She’d speak her mind.
She once took a course about minority women in literature. She was the only white student in the class, and the African-American instructor wasn’t very welcoming to her. “This course is for women of color,” she said to Gabby.
Gabby answered, “I am a woman of color. I’m just a lighter color.”
Gabby was also more fearless than the average student at Scripps. When she wasn’t riding Buckstretcher, the horse she’d brought to college, she’d tool around campus on her Vespa. Then it was stolen, and the thief had the audacity to advertise it for sale. Gabby found out where the scooter was being stored, used a chain-cutter to free it, and stole it back. If the thief had come by to confront her, she’d have just kept cutting. She understood a thing or two about frontier justice.
After graduating from Scripps in 1993, Gabby drove off in her Ford pickup with one of her motorcycles, a German model from 1946, strapped into the bed. As soon as she reached Tucson, she enrolled in summer school at the University of Arizona, studying economics.
I once asked her why she did that. “I thought that maybe I could become a really smart farmer and solve world hunger,” she said. “I was thinking big.”
That overly ambitious urge passed, and she instead applied for a Fulbright scholarship to study the eighty thousand “Old Colony” Mennonites in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. She was accepted and received a grant for a one-year academic adventure.
Gabby immersed herself in the Mennonite community, living with them in their homes, without electricity or indoor plumbing, and asking countless questions about their conservative views and their commitment to nonviolence. She compiled data on their fertility and mortality rates, and took a special interest in those who strayed from the faith, which she jokingly referred to as “Mennonites gone bad.” When she was with them, Gabby wore their traditional clothing. In her long-sleeved Mennonite dress, with a brimmed hat and a tight scarf, she looked like someone from the 1800s.
Gabby later ended up at Cornell University, earning a master’s degree in regional planning. Her interest in the field was rooted in her love of Tucson. She had watched the surge in the city’s population and commercial development over the years, and saw the dangers of mismanaged growth. In 1996, that master’s degree helped her land a well-paying job in New York at Price Waterhouse, the top-tier accounting firm, where she consulted on the demographic impact of regional development. She was excited that her responsibilities included traveling to eleven Latin American countries.
Not long after she started that job, Gabby was called into her boss’s office. She’d been dressing in appropriate attire: mid-1990s power suits. Colleagues, however, were taking exception to her footwear. “This is Price Waterhouse and this is New York City,” the boss said. “You’ve got to stop wearing cowboy boots to work.” Fearing she’d lose the job, Gabby left the boots in her closet and tried to embrace East Coast urban life.
A part of her was hugely excited to be in New York. She’d later reminisce about her arrival there by saying: “It seemed like the beginning of a grand and glittering adventure in the big city: posh apartments, pointy-toed shoes, and maybe even my first martini.”
She wrote those words in 2009, during her second term in Congress, when she was asked to give the commencement speech at the Scripps College graduation. Gabby gave a lot of thought to that speech. She wanted the young graduates