Women Of The Pen

Parade visit 47 years in the making for pen pal

RACINE - Val Doggrell has only seen and read of the city's Independence Day parade through the pictures and letters sent to her by her pen pal of 47 years.

On Monday, that all changed.

Doggrell, 64, of Queensland, Australia, was one of thousands of parade goers who lined the two-mile route of Main Street. With her was Racine-native Marietta Foster, 65, a woman she struck a friendship with in 1964 with a letter.

"We had a lovely time," Doggrell said of the parade. "I thought it was very wonderful and very American."

Foster, who now lives in Denver, Colo., said Doggrell has visited the United States a couple of times before, including for her wedding.

"But she's always wanted to come on the Fourth of July," Foster said. "That's one of the reasons why she wanted to come to my hometown."

Doggrell arrived on June 14. The two women, accompanied by friends and family, have visited Yellowstone National Park and St. Louis. Their stay in Racine - filled with tours of bakeries, museums and Foster's old schools, including St. Catherine's High School - will end on Wednesday. Then it's on to Chicago, back to Denver and then Australia.

"Racine is beautiful with its lovely heritage houses," said Doggrell, who grew up near the Pacific Ocean. "I was surprised to see (Racine's) beautiful sand beaches along the lakefront." Although their friendship is nearing five decades, what started Foster and Doggrell's correspondence remains a mystery.

When both women were 18 years old, Doggrell found Foster's name in a column of would-be pen pals in a local Australian newspaper. She sent Foster a letter and the two have been friends since.

How Foster's name ended up in the newspaper, however, she doesn't know.

"We're still trying to figure that out," Foster said laughing.

Foster left Racine in 1984, and has last seen the parade - dubbed the largest in the Midwest - about 15 years ago.

The floats, the music and the family experience of watching marchers near the Racine lakefront, however, had already been well shared through the letters.

"Every year, I'd send her pictures," Foster said. "To me it was so much a part of my childhood ... a part of Racine.

PEN.org » Blog Archive » Grace Paley, Margaret Atwood & Norman ...

GRACE PALEY: This conference opened on Sunday. By Wednesday, many women had begun to talk to each other, in absolute amazement and perplexity, about the fact that in almost every panel, in many panels, there were only men speaking. So that’s what we heard, day after day, or panel after panel, with an occasional female voice. And we really were so shocked by it. So by Wednesday, people came together. It’s been said that I organized this, but that’s because people always like to say a person did it, you know; there was no “a person” in this, there were maybe twenty-five persons speaking to each other at almost the same time who did it. And a meeting was called for yesterday.

At this meeting, in about an hour and a half, and with considerable pressure from the outside to get out of this room—at almost every fifteen minutes we were pressed to do so—with all of that pressure, about one hundred and twenty-five, one hundred and fifty women created a statement. With a lot of noise and a lot of hollering, Meredith Tax and several other women sat there and wrote out one sentence after another. We voted on each sentence, then wrote the next sentence. I think it’s kind of miraculous—and it speaks to the gifts of our gender. People who listened kept saying, “You people are so disorganized, you sound so noisy and crazy”—you know the way they talk to us. But with all that noise and so forth, we came out with a statement that nearly all of us agreed on, and which seemed somewhat decent to me. And I’m going to read it:

We are outraged at PEN’s failure to invite more women writers from all parts of the world to be panelists and readers and moderators at this conference discussing the imagination of the state. There are many women writers of international stature both in the US and abroad who could have spoken to the issues addressed by the panels. PEN must be an organization which works to eradicate inequities, and should not perpetuate them within its own structure. We demand, from Norman Mailer, president of the American Center of PEN, and from the officers of PEN, a public explanation to the members of this congress for this failure. We expect that PEN will take immediate steps to remedy this situation in the ongoing structure of American and International PEN. We are forming a committee of inquiry to investigate the structure of PEN itself and its failure to include enough women writers.