Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [55]
The process was tedious and slow. Some people weren’t home and some closed their doors after ten seconds of conversation. There were a lot of barking dogs. Some remembered her from the last time she came by (or from her old El Campo commercials), and told her they admired her efforts. But if they weren’t registered voters, they couldn’t sign her petition.
Gabby figured out that she was collecting just seven usable signatures per hour of canvassing; she’d have to log about sixty hours in the streets to get the four hundred names she’d need. She wondered if the Jehovah’s Witnesses had a better sign-up ratio.
A highlight for her was coming to the home of four retired nuns. They were Democrats, they knew who she was, and they were happy to sign. She left their front porch feeling giddy. As she later described it, four signatures in one swoop was “the mother lode!”
After three weeks, she got her four hundred signatures and ran on a platform opposing trims to state social service agencies, advocating for better funding for public education, and supporting continued Native American gaming agreements. On the stump, she’d tell constituents about her experiences at El Campo. “More than half of the people applying for jobs at my family tire business were so poorly educated that they couldn’t fill out our application,” she’d say. “We have to find ways to help our public schools do a better job. It’s outrageous that they’re graduating so many young people from high schools who can’t read or write.”
Gabby spoke with passion, and from her own experiences. She won that election easily, too.
Once she joined the thirty-member senate, Gabby immersed herself in the issues, including some that many people didn’t pay attention to. For instance, she introduced a bill to minimize light pollution, asking that government buildings and parking lots in major Arizona cities be required to put shields over outdoor lights. The reason: Arizona is home to a large number of astronomers, and a growing optics industry. Though they’re drawn by the clear desert sky, astronomers are handicapped by the light in inhabited areas. “Darkness,” Gabby liked to say, “is one of our greatest natural resources.”
Opponents of Gabby’s bill called it “frivolous,” but it passed and she continued to advocate for the “dark sky” movement throughout her career. It’s meaningful to me that Gabby believed in the importance of studying the stars even before we met.
Gabby had an easy smile with people, but she was tough, too, and took more than a few unpopular positions. She wanted police to be able to stop motorists for not wearing seat belts. Arizona state law prohibits police from citing drivers for seat-belt infractions unless they have committed another infraction first. Gabby thought seat-belt use would increase if people feared getting ticketed. “We as consumers end up paying for people who do not wear seat belts,” she said. “It costs either in increased insurance premiums or costs taxpayers for emergency services.”
Observing the government at work could be disheartening for Gabby. While legislators should have been diligently crafting a state budget, she couldn’t believe the inane issues they chose to focus on. She complained publicly: “We’re bogged down in debates about whether businesses should allow armed patrons to bring their guns into bars—but only if they don’t order a drink!—or whether people can bring bottled water into baseball games. These are the kinds of debates that give the legislature a bad reputation.”
When the senate was in session in Phoenix, Gabby shared an apartment with another legislator, Linda Lopez. Gabby was a night owl, staying up late reading legislation. She’d Rollerblade